Every family carries documents nobody quite knows what to do with — a naturalization paper, a certificate in a language most of the household can no longer read, a story repeated so many times it has been sanded smooth. In our family, those documents belong to my maternal grandfather, Solomon Pinchas Swyer. Piecing them together, alongside family memory and the historical record of the region he came from, tells the story of a man who never stopped being curious about the world he’d left behind — or the one he found in its place.
A CHILDHOOD MARKED BY VIOLENCE
Solomon Swyer was born on December 25, 1874, in Vileyka, then a small town in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire — territory that today lies in Belarus. According to family tradition, he became partially deaf after a Cossack threw an explosive device during a pogrom. Whether every detail of that story has survived intact after more than a century of retelling is impossible to know for certain, but its effect on him was not in doubt: for the rest of his life, he regarded the Russian authorities as deeply antisemitic — a judgment he pointedly did not extend to the Poles and Belarusians among whom he had also lived.
After a period in Minsk, in the Nemiga neighborhood that was then the commercial heart of the city’s Jewish community, Solomon Swyer left for the United States, arriving in Boston aboard the RMS Saxonia on December 6, 1906. He eventually settled with my grandmother, Ray Rothstein, on South Pearl Street in Albany, New York — at the time the center of the city’s Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, lined with kosher butchers, Hebrew schools, and Orthodox synagogues. The two of them ran a dry-goods store there; family memory has it that Ray did most of the actual running, while Solomon mostly sat and read.
THE WORLD HE CAME FROM
The Vileyka and Minsk that Solomon Swyer left behind were, by any measure, remarkable places. In the 1897 imperial census, Jews made up roughly 37 percent of Vileyka and, by some estimates, over half of Minsk — Nemiga itself was one of the most densely Jewish streets in the empire, dotted with synagogues and small workshops dating back to the sixteenth century. That world did not survive the twentieth century. World War I brought expulsions and upheaval that had already reshaped Vileyka’s population by the time Poland regained the territory after 1918. And in the summer of 1941, within weeks of the German occupation, several hundred of Vileyka’s remaining Jewish residents were murdered in two mass actions; the Minsk Jewish community met a similar fate in the ghetto established that same year, memorialized today at the Pit (Yama). As far as the family knows, no relatives who remained in either town survived the Holocaust.
AN IMMIGRANT’S POLITICS
Solomon Swyer left the Russian Empire less than five years before the Bolshevik Revolution and never lived under Soviet rule. But he remained convinced of its dangers for the rest of his life, a conviction formed less by direct experience than by decades spent reading the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and the Jewish Daily Forward — and later, by the reports of Stalinist repression and the Gulag that confirmed what he had already suspected. Poland occupied a different place in his affections. Despite everything he came to learn about the Holocaust, he thought of Poles as fellow victims of both German and Russian power, and he kept close Polish and Catholic friendships throughout his life. A favorite family story has a friend from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany joining the Swyers for Passover and teasing that if Jesus ever came back to Albany, he’d keep Passover with the Swyer family, since they were the ones who kept kosher.
Solomon Swyer attended Congregation B’nai Abraham, one of Albany’s principal Orthodox congregations, founded in 1883 at 69 South Pearl Street before moving to larger facilities as the city’s Jewish community grew.
FAITH AS INHERITANCE, NOT DOCTRINE
That story captures something real about him: a man who observed Jewish law faithfully without much conventional piety. He was fascinated by Hebrew, by Jewish history, and by the Bible — approached, in his case, as literature and history rather than settled truth. He liked to say, with a mischievous edge, that the Bible read more like a storybook written by scholars for people who didn’t know better. He also believed that keeping kosher in America was a way of preserving Jewish identity in the Diaspora — and that he would have felt no need to do so in Israel, where that identity would simply be the air one breathed. Late in life, in his seventies, he sat for and passed a formal Hebrew-language examination administered by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem — a striking achievement for a man whose formal schooling had ended decades earlier, in another country, in another language.
WHY THIS BELONGS ALONGSIDE KARSKI
Solomon Swyer almost certainly followed news of the destruction of European Jewry as closely as any American immigrant reader of the Jewish press could, and it is easy to imagine that the story of Jan Karski — the Polish courier who risked his life to carry an eyewitness account of the Holocaust to Roosevelt and the Allies, and the subject of my previous post — would have resonated with him, even though there’s no direct evidence he followed Karski’s mission specifically. Both men, in their very different ways, belonged to a generation shaped by the same collapsing world: one who left it just in time, and one who stayed to bear witness to its end.
That is the pairing behind the Karski-Swyer Initiative, which I’ve been developing at Georgetown to support contemporary scholarship and human rights work on Belarus. It honors a Holocaust rescuer who spent forty years teaching at Georgetown, and a Jewish immigrant from the same corner of the old Russian Empire who never stopped caring about the place he’d left. I’ll write more about the Initiative itself, and its award tracks, in a future post.
SOURCES
Belarus SIG — jewishgen.org — JewishGen’s community and district research resources, including Vileyka (Vilna Gubernia).
“Vileyka” — Wikipedia — The town’s population history and the destruction of its Jewish community in 1941.
“Niamiha Street” — Wikipedia — On Nemiga as one of Minsk’s oldest and most historically Jewish streets.
“The Pit (memorial)” — Wikipedia — On the Yama Holocaust memorial in Minsk.
“Minsk Governorate” — Dolgin Research Center, U. of Haifa Library — 1897 census data on Minsk’s Jewish population.
“Albany, New York” — Jewish Virtual Library — On South Pearl Street and the development of Albany’s Jewish community.
History of Congregation B’nai Abraham — Congregation Beth Abraham-Jacob — The congregation’s origins on South Pearl Street in Albany.
Holocaust Encyclopedia entry on Jan Karski — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — Biographical background on Jan Karski.
Righteous Among the Nations profile of Jan Karski — Yad Vashem — Institutional record of Karski’s wartime activity and recognition.