Women's Prayers in Bar, Ukraine

Klara (Khayke) Vaynman was born in Vinnitsa in 1939, but her family moved to Lvov when she was only a few months old. She spent World War II in evacuation with her mother in the Ural mountains. After the war, she moved to Bar, Ukraine. In this video, Klara talks about her mother, who was a learned and religious woman from Lubenets, northern Ukraine.

Whereas in previous clips we have heard about men gathering to pray together and women's personal prayers in Yiddish, here we have an interesting story about women gathering to pray together under one woman's leadership. Note that all of these prayer meetings take place after World War II, during a period in which prayer was very taboo and dangerous, but the idea of gathering together as Jews in the aftermath of the war was an important means of asserting community.

--Asya Vaisman