The bran sieve is from a fragment of a Torah scroll. It comes from the vicinity of the village of Borek in the Hajnów district, thee Podlaskie Voivodeship. The owner of the item came across the bran sieve in 2016 while cleaning a house she had bought. Despite the passage of years, the sieves were very well preserved. The donor realised that Torah scrolls were used to construct the sieves. In a letter sent to the POLIN Museum, she expressed her emotional attitude towards the discovery: "When I took a closer look, I thought my heart would burst. (...) I don't know how to read it, I don't know what it is, but I know that it cannot stay like this. (...) I know from my grandmother's stories that there were many Jews here, but unfortunately, nothing is left of them. The donor's grandmother's story concerns the Jews of Orla who shared the fate of the exterminated Jewish community in Poland.
The cylindrical sieve for flour and grain has a membrane made of parchment from a Torah scroll. Fragments of the Hebrew text (the letters are worn out) can be seen on the outside of the membrane. The holes in the membrane are spaced at different distances from each other and are of different sizes, suggesting handmade workmanship. The sieve has uneven edges. The membrane is reinforced with strips glued to its bottom layer. The parchment was joined to the wood in the form of a roundabout, additionally fixed with glue. The inner side of the beige parchment is well preserved, with few traces of gluing.
After the Second World War, due to the enormous pauperisation throughout the country, Poles made use of things described as "pożydowskich", giving them a different purpose than their original one. It is worth paying attention to the expression "pożydowskie" ("borrowed"), which suggests the property "after" the Jews. As Jan Tomasz Gross rightly remarks: 'But since murdering or expelling a person does not give anyone the title to ownership of anything, including the work accumulated for generations in accumulated objects, only a façon de parler [figuratively] and not any property can be "borrowed"'. (J.T. Gross, Złote żniwa. Rzecz o tym, co się dzieje na obrzeżach Zagłady Żydów (The Golden Harvest. The Thing About What Is Happening on the Outskirts of the Holocaust), in: Sąsiedzi i inni. Prace zebrane na temat Zagłady (Neighbors and Others. Collected Works on the Holocaust), Kraków 2018, p. 857.)
The Torah fragment used as a sieve for sifting flour and grain is an example not only of post-war poverty, but also of an unreflective attitude towards the Jewish community, which just before the tragedy of the Holocaust lived alongside the Polish one, using parchments such as this one for different, religious purposes.
Orla, as told by the donor's grandmother, is a small village where in 1941 the number of Jewish inhabitants oscillated around 2,000 (see about Orla in: Encyklopedia obozów i gett 1939-1945 (Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1939-1945), Vol. II, Getta w okupowanej przez Niemców Europie Wschodniej (Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe), Part A, ed. P. Megargee, M. Dean, Bloomington 2012, p. 929). Jews usually lived by the market square or around the synagogue. A century later, Krzysztof Radziwiłł granted the village the privilege of free settlement regardless of religion, and therefore, exceptionally in Orla, synagogues were allowed to be higher than churches or Orthodox churches.
Regulations concerning the height and decorations of synagogues were strictly controlled by the municipal authorities and the church. Synagogues were not to be located in the close vicinity of Catholic churches and could not be higher than them - hence the flat roofs of most Polish synagogues (for more on the architecture of synagogues see: https://culture.pl/pl/artykul/krajobraz-z-synagoga-zagubiona-tradycja-polskiej-architektury, accessed 17 November 2021).
The culmination of the actions against the Jews of Orla occurred in November 1942. (Jews had been imprisoned in the ghetto since March 1942). According to Gregory Strelchuk's account: "The Jews of Orla were already locked in the ghetto at that time. Two or three days a week they had to work to build the road in Orla. The tombstones from the old Jewish cemetery were smashed and the road was paved with them. Farmers took fodder for horses in sacks, and Moszko hid meat, groats and whatever else he could in sacks and smuggled them to the ghetto" (M. Mincewicz, Żydzi w Orli we wspomnieniach sąsiadów (Jews in Orla in the Memories of Their Neighbours), Czasopis 2009). As a result of the liquidation of the Orla ghetto, which began on 2 November 1942, most of the Jews were sent to the extermination camp in Treblinka. About 200 craftsmen were transferred to the Pietrashy labour camp, then sent to other concentration camps, their fate remains unknown. No one has come forward as a Survivor from the 2,000-strong community of Orla Jews.
Natalia Różańska
