Interview with Hirsh Orenshtein, Recorded at the Hotel Marseille, New York(1949)

In the late 1940's YIVO conducted Yiddish dialect projects. They carried out interviews with Holocaut survivors in New York who had survived the war and had immigratd to the United States. The interviews will held in various locations: the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society building, Refugee Hotels on the Upper West Side; the Bronx.

One of the objectives of including this interview at this website is provide the listener with the opportunity to listen to a range of authentic Yiddish pronunciations and also, whenever possible, to listen to the interviewees talk about the prewar life in Poland.

Beatrice (BIna) Silverman Weinreich conducted the interviews in this collection.

Interviewee: Hirsh Orenshtein

Country and City of Origin:  Opatow (Yiddish: Apt), Poland

Yiddish accent: Central Poland    Experience: Was in Vilna at the outbreak of World War II and travelled to Japan

[partial transcription from the recording] All the refugees in Vilna tried to escape  ........  Soviet Russia occupied Lithuania inJuly 1940.  Jews tried to escape from the Soviet regime. One of the rabbis went to the Japanese consul asking him to make it possible for the Jews to leave. None of the consulates except for the Japanese consulate considered this request or agreed to give visas ……..  The Japanese consul started issuing temporary, transit visas. When a Jew came to the consul and said he needed a visa,and paid a token amount, he received a visa. He also needed an exit visa, only available from the Soviet government......The Jews wrote that they had relatives in America and they were planning to help their relatives in America, and they wrote that they were religious and had no place in Soviet Russia…………………………