Lilith’s Midwives: Jewish

Newborn Child Murder in

Nineteenth-Century Vilna

ChaeRan Y. Freeze

A bstr act
This article examines a court case of newborn child murder in nineteenth-century
Vilna. In 1890, the state indicted a group of Jewish women for running a lucrative
baby-farming business in which they hired out unwed mothers as wet nurses and ex-
torted their salaries in exchange for the care of their illegitimate offspring—most of
whom died from neglect or abuse. I argue that this illegal network on the outskirts of
town threatened the legitimate, respectable Jewish world at the center but was indis-
pensable to it. It provided families with wet nurses, domestic servants, and even in-
fants for childless wives to “adopt.” It also allowed a “legitimate” way for unwed
mothers to abandon their unwanted offspring. Scrutiny of this lower-class “women’s
space” sheds light not only on the lives of unwed mothers but also on the complicity of
Jewish society in the fate of their illegitimate children.
Key words: illegitimacy, wet nursing, baby farming, newborn child murder

I
n 1940, amid all the exhilarating news about the third Five-Year
Plan, Soviet Jewish readers could not have been anything but
horrified when they read Rochel Broches’s short story “Avre-
melekh” (Little Abrahams).1 It recounted the tale of an old, childless
woman who eked out a meager existence by caring for illegitimate
Jewish infants in a prerevolutionary shtetl. The nameless girls per-
ished even before they reached her dilapidated hovel. The boys—all
named “Avremeleh” by the synagogue sexton at their bris—barely
clung to life as they lay in a huge pile of rags, “feet and hands moving,
heads with contorted faces, gaping mouths.” Occasionally, Brayne the
bobe (Yid. “grandmother”) arranged for them to nurse to relieve the
ChaeRan Y. Freeze, “Lilith’s Midwives: Jewish Newborn Child Murder in
Nineteenth-Century Vilna,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s.
16, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 1–27
 infected or engorged breasts of a “legitimate” mother. Most of the
time, however, she shoved soothers (made of chewed bread wrapped
[2] in soiled rags) into the “open mouths of the screaming creatures.”
Inevitably, she carted them off to the cemetery or fed their corpses to
Jewish the hungry dog outside her window. If a child survived past infancy,
Social unable to nurse because of his new teeth, he faced abandonment be-
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cause he was only “garbage . . . truly garbage.” 2
• The tale was not just a figment of the author’s imagination. On
Vol. 16
No. 2 July 25, 1889, a group of Jewish children who had gone mushroom
picking in a forest near Volch’i Lapy, on the outskirts of Vilna, found
an abandoned baby “wrapped in rags.”3 This discovery coincided with
a three-year police investigation into routine discoveries of newborn
infant corpses on Vilna’s Novgorodskaia Street and its environs, bet-
ter known as Novyi Gorod. In just one area of Novyi Gorod alone,
where the most impoverished Jews resided, the police had found 25
dead infants during a 15-month period (January 1, 1889–May 18,
1890). According to autopsy reports, the newborns (who were sus-
pected of being Jewish because the males were circumcised) had died
of strangulation, a blow to the head, neglect, exposure to the ele-
ments, or some other “unknown cause.” The police immediately or-
dered the strict surveillance of all Jewish midwives, new mothers, wet
nurses, and other female caretakers, reflecting the widespread as-
sumption in Europe that newborn child murder was a woman’s
crime.4 Authorities encouraged society to observe and denounce (“in
person or in writing, through anonymous means or for a reward”)
any suspicious activities.5 The investigation led to the indictment of
nine women and one man for the exploitation of single mothers in a
lucrative “baby farming” business.6 According to the state, these
women had organized employment for unwed mothers as wet nurses,
extorted their salaries for the alleged care of their illegitimate chil-
dren, and left the infants in the care of a blind woman named Feiga
Tyrska Noskin for a meager sum. Only when neighbors began to re-
port the gruesome discovery of infant corpses near Noskin’s court-
yard did the tragic fate of these children come to light.
Behind these sensational events were 49 stories of illicit sexual re-
lations or rape that had led to unwanted pregnancies, loss of occupa-
tions, and social stigma. These narratives intersected with tales of a
well-organized network of “baby farmers” whose livelihoods de-
pended on such unwanted pregnancies and births. Based on the
court transcript, this study will offer three arguments. First, this ille-
gal organization (Heb. hevrah, as it was called by some witnesses), lo-
cated on the outskirts of Vilna, threatened the legitimate, respectable
world at the center yet was indispensable to it. Indeed, the court in-
vestigator’s report, which reads like a grotesque novel in the Wolf-
gang Kayser tradition—replete with “deformed” female characters [3]
(that is, the blind, hunchbacks, divorcees, prostitutes, and those de-
serted by their husbands)—revealed that these women provided criti- Lilith’s
Midwives
cal social services that were absent in the official community. For
unwed mothers, the hevrah promised to turn their stigmatized fe- •
ChaeRan Y.
male bodies into valuable commodities. They could reenter norma-
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tive society to perform the sanctioned role of an ersatz mother by
providing milk for a “kosher” baby. Promising to take care of their
own infants in return for a large fee, the hevrah provided a “legiti-
mate” way to abandon their unwanted offspring and “make them free
again.” 7 It likewise serviced families that needed wet nurses as well as
childless women who sought newborn infants to present as their own.
Second, women were forced to resort to this illegal hevrah because of
the limited options for unwed mothers. Indeed, the absence of Jewish
foundling homes in Vilna reflected the failure of Jewish society to ad-
dress a growing “female” social problem, which it was content to rele-
gate to the margins. Third and finally, this network could not have
succeeded without the tacit support of Jewish society and communal
leaders who issued burial permits for the illegitimate infants, pro-
vided references to families in need of wet nurses, and even placed
abandoned babies in the care of the accused women. I will address
these issues in three categories: the nature of the sources and meth-
odology; the narratives of the single mothers; and the activities of the
illegal hevrah as a bridge between the mutually dependent worlds of
legitimate and illegitimate births.

The Court Case: Sources and Methods

In contrast to the rich literature on illicit sexuality and illegitimacy in

European historiography, there is very little comparable research on
the Jewish population in Imperial Russia. This microhistory of new-
born child murder in Vilna is based on a sensational court case in
1890 that involved more than a hundred witnesses representing a
broad segment of the population—from the state police and physi-
cians to domestic servants and ordinary neighbors. Like most court
cases, the file includes the formal indictment. It also contains a 277-
page summary of the evidence, which the court investigator had col-
lected from depositions of the accused and other witnesses.
Unfortunately, the archival file does not include the original deposi-
 tions (known as the protokoly), only the court investigator’s summary
with page references to them. Although the text includes direct quo-
[4] tations to indicate verbatim statements of witnesses and the page
numbers of the original testimonies, the available summary was
Jewish clearly mediated by the court investigator’s interpretation of events.
Social The lost depositions, which could not be located by the archival staff
Studies
at the State Historical Archive of Lithuania in Vilnius, might have in-
• cluded additional materials that the investigator left out. Although
Vol. 16
No. 2
we might assume that “the minute a learned agent of the state puts
his hand on another’s words, they are so remade and reshuffled that
their original form is effaced,” 8 this was not always the case. As Nata-
lie Zemon Davis has observed in her work on pardon narratives, the
written version had to conform in some way to the personal nature of
the oral testimonies in order to be credible. In general, a court inves-
tigator’s report closely resembled the depositions, which presented
the testimonies in meticulous detail.
Like other archival documents, this case poses special problems
because the “facts” presented by the witnesses are not only selective
but often elusive and outright contradictory. The “fictive” elements of
the testimonies are particularly striking because the court investiga-
tor had, it seems, an obvious flair for drama and theatrics. Beyond
this, however, common patterns and narratives seem to reflect the
real-life experiences or, at the very least, the perceptions of single
mothers and baby farmers about their world. To help verify dates,
legal agreements, and medical treatments, the court case includes
documentary evidence such as notarized documents, apartment reg-
isters, and hospital records. To place this court case in historical per-
spective, I will also cite other archival sources that shed light on
assumptions about Jewish women’s sexuality and social attitudes to-
ward illegitimacy.

Illegitimacy in Russian-Jewish Society

Until the early twentieth century, the autocratic Russian state treated
illicit sexual acts as crimes against society because they represented
the fulfillment of personal desire in “defiance of collective norms.”
As one assistant procurator in Odessa wrote: “The role of criminal
law . . . is to sanction the existing order by protecting it from arbitrary
incursions of the individual will.” 9 Hence, the law code described il-
licit sex as “the illegal satisfaction of carnal desires” (Rus. protivoza-
konnoe udovletvorenie plotskikh strastei).10 But it was the woman who bore
the fruits of these illicit unions, the brunt of official sanction, and so-
cial ostracism. Anxieties about the breach of public morality and
order also pervaded Jewish society, which viewed wayward women as [5]
exceptional and deviant. The narratives of the 49 women who be-
came pregnant out of wedlock in this case reveal the severe social Lilith’s
Midwives
stigma they experienced and their limited options in a society that
refused to acknowledge their plight. After all, illegitimacy was almost •
ChaeRan Y.
invisible in the communal birth records, which registered no more
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than a small number each year.
Indeed, according to official records, Jews had one of the lowest
rates of illegitimate births among all religious confessions in tsarist
Russia. The empire-wide census of 1897, for instance, reported that
the rate of illegitimate births among Jews was 0.3 percent compared
with the national rate of 2.4 percent.11 In 1896, the Jewish communi-
ties of Vilna province (including the town of Vilna)12 reported only 7
illegitimate to 4,653 legitimate births (a rate of 0.2 percent). In con-
trast, the Russian Orthodox population in the same region reported
948 illegitimate to 17,916 legitimate births (5.3 percent), and the
Catholics registered 1,370 illegitimate to 38,193 legitimate births (3.6
percent).13 Although illegitimacy rates for 1889–90 are not available,
it is highly unlikely that the 49 mothers in this case registered their
children, which suggests that the official statistics were far from ac-
curate. As elsewhere in Imperial Russia, starting in the mid-nine-
teenth century, traditional norms had begun to lose their force with
premarital sex (especially after a promise of marriage) among Jews
becoming more common though not widespread.14 This was particu-
larly true when nuptials had to be postponed for economic and legal
reasons.15 What is important here was not necessarily a great increase
in frequency but the perception of and preoccupation with what ap-
peared to be a qualitatively new phenomenon. As one witness de-
clared in a Vilna court case as early as 1852: “At the present time,
Jewish girls shamelessly go out to the town for walks in the summer
with groups of young people, where . . . they are easily led into licen-
tiousness.”16 Notably, the discovery of the infant corpses in Vilna came
as no surprise to many witnesses, who led the court investigator to the
“usual suspects”—namely, domestic servants, factory workers, and
wet nurses who had recently given birth.
Testimonies of the 49 accused women provide a composite portrait
of Jewish mothers who gave birth out of wedlock: their age, socioeco-
nomic background, and relationship to their families and birth fa-
thers. The majority were between the ages of 17 and 28, with the
exception of one 40-year-old who had given birth to three illegitimate
 children. In other words, these women were of marriageable age and
may have engaged in premarital sex with the promise of marriage.
[6] Twenty-three-year-old Pesia Leia Stolts, for example, told the court
investigator that she had just given up her illegitimate child to a care-
Jewish taker when she received a letter from her lover who had immigrated
Social to America inquiring about their child. Perhaps with renewed hopes
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of marriage, Stolts sought to find her infant only to be told that he
• had been placed with a family in a far-away village; in fact, the baby
Vol. 16
No. 2
had already died.17 Another young woman, Khaia Leiba Okmianskaia
from Ponovezh, also sought to maintain ties with her lover who re-
sided in Mogilev. At the end of her last trimester, she was on her way
to visit him when she decided to give birth in Vilna, after receiving
assurances from a broker (Rus. faktorka) about numerous possibilities
for work and child care. Other cases reveal, too, that the promise of
marriage could lead to premarital sexual relations. In 1869, for in-
stance, Leia Vaismanova testified before a Volhynia criminal court
that she had met a Jewish soldier whom her employer had invited as a
guest for Passover. “He promised to marry me, and by mutual agree-
ment I lost my virginity and had sexual relations with him once.”18 But
not all men fulfilled their promises, as 20-year-old Khana Feiga Var-
shavchik of Kovno discovered. She admitted to the court investigator
that she became pregnant by a man who abandoned her and immi-
grated to America; to hide her shame from her relatives, she fled to
Vilna for the remainder of her pregnancy.19
The testimonies reveal that employment of single women outside
the home in printing presses, artisan shops, factories, or private
homes led to the loss of parental supervision, to sexual harassment,
and to increased interaction with men. The loss of parental supervi-
sion over working daughters was most evident in the case of 19-year-
old Khaia Lipova Baran of Oshmiany. Her father, Lipman Baran,
testified that he did not even know about her pregnancy because “she
worked all day at the Syrkin Press and only came home to sleep.” Ten-
sions with her stepmother clearly contributed to her avoidance of
home. As the court investigator noted: “Baran’s stepmother, Khasia,
testified that Khaia Baran’s pregnancy was completely unnoticeable
to her and that she hid it from everyone. . . . She [Khaia] does not
give an account of her wages and even eats separately from the family
on her own budget; as a result, her father is poor.” Khasia added that,
before Passover in 1890, her stepdaughter told them that “there was
urgent work at the press and [she] did not return home for a few
days”; Khaia had explained that, when she was working at the press,
she spent the nights with a girl friend. When the court investigator
asked the stepmother whether she knew anything about the money
that Khaia had paid to the baby farmers, she replied that she “did not
feed her so she did not ask about money [matters].” 20 [7]
Similarly, Etel Meerova Mebel testified that her daughter Feiga had
failed to return home from the hosiery factory for several nights; the Lilith’s
Midwives
latter justified her absence by citing the heavy demands at work that
forced her to spend nights at the factory.21 Given the long working •
ChaeRan Y.
hours in the shops and factories (16 to 18 hours a day in the north- Freeze
western towns), such explanations were highly credible, especially
during the busy seasons.22 Interestingly, another 20-year-old worker
who was employed at the same hosiery factory on Mostovaia Street
testified that, when she became pregnant in October 1889, Feiga
Mebel allegedly gave her the name of a place where she could deliver
and give up the child for good. Other witnesses reported that they
had worked at a hat maker’s shop, bakery, and matzah factory.23 The
belated process of industrialization in Russia, which was character-
ized by long working hours, meager wages, and seasonal employment,
left many workers in dire poverty.24 As a result, deferred marriages
and the decline of parental supervision in the workplace may have
contributed to the rise in premarital sexual activities as described in
these depositions.
As in general European society, the majority of unwed Jewish
mothers were domestic servants.25 Living under the same roof as their
employers entailed certain temptations and danger. Two witnesses
frankly admitted that they had sexual relations with the masters of
the household. Twenty-eight-year-old Rokha Itskova Baranovskaia
(born Gilinskaia) testified that she had served in the home of Berka
Shendels (who was a teacher) and his wife Mirka in Sventsian and had
relocated with them to Vilna in 1887. Baranovskaia claimed that she
was already pregnant with her employer’s child at the time of the
move and that “he gave her 80 rubles to give up the child.” After she
gave birth, she returned shortly to her former employer but then left
for new work in Dinaburg, although she did not elaborate on the
break with Shendels.26
Not all employers felt obliged to give their pregnant lovers a sum of
money to alleviate their plight. For instance, Sora Davidova Germaize
testified that she worked for a certain Abram the tavern keeper: “He
had relations with her once in the absence of his wife, after which her
monthly period ceased.” She attempted to have an abortion but did
not have any money to pay for the procedure; it was unclear whether
her employer was ignorant of the pregnancy or if he simply refused to
assist her.27 Domestic servants were vulnerable not only to seduction
 but also to rape. For instance, Mikhlia Gersheva Baryshnika reported
that, while she was working for Leib Svirskii on Saf’ianiki Street in
[8] December 1886, he raped her, causing her menstruation to cease.
The investigator noted that “after a month, Svirskii fired her without
Jewish even paying her salary.” 28 Unlike some Jewish women whose parents
Social sued the rapists for compensation,29 Baryshnika opted for the high
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expense of an abortion. Indeed, given the onerous court process, dis-
• mal prospects of success, and social ostracism, few women filed suits
Vol. 16
No. 2
against their rapists.
In short, women who engaged in premarital sex did so at great
risk, because neither the community nor Russian law was likely to
punish a man who made them pregnant. Even in cases of rape, women
had little recourse because it was almost impossible to prove that sex-
ual relations had taken place under duress. Although it is premature
to conclude that illegitimate pregnancies occurred more frequently
among working-class women based on this case alone, it was rare to
find references to privileged unwed mothers. To be sure, one witness
(Khana Sharfman) referred to a “Liba from a wealthy family” who
gave birth to a stillborn baby at the same time as herself at the Jewish
hospital. It may be that the court investigator’s assumptions about the
social status of unwed mothers led him to pursue certain witnesses
and to ignore others such as Liba, whose deposition is notably absent;
however, her case seemed to be exceptional.
Not surprisingly, family responses to illegitimate pregnancies re-
flected Jewish society’s ostracism of wayward daughters. So severe was
the social stigma that many families forced their daughters to leave
town and give birth elsewhere. In this sense, parents and relatives
were often complicit in the fate of the illegitimate children. Of the 49
witnesses, only 13 were from Vilna, 35 were from out of town,30 and
one was of unknown origin. According to Zelda Shtein of Rossien,
who became pregnant with her uncle’s child, her mother insisted that
she travel to Vilna with one Taube Krasnostav, who promised to ar-
range for the birth and care of the illegitimate child for 40 rubles.
The latter confirmed that she had met Zelda’s mother in 1890 when
she traveled to Rossien to claim an inheritance. Krasnostav observed
that Zelda “was ashamed to live in Rossien as a pregnant, unmarried
girl, so she traveled to Vilna” with her.31 Just before Passover, she sent
Zelda back to her hometown to obtain a passport for fear that she
might be arrested without her documents. Not only did Zelda’s
mother send back her daughter immediately without a passport (leav-
ing her vulnerable to arrest for vagrancy), but she also put her on a
train during the last week of her pregnancy; the day after she arrived
in Vilna, Zelda gave birth to a baby girl. Despite the young mother’s
ordeal, she was able to secure a more comfortable place to stay dur-
ing her pregnancy because of the financial support provided by her [9]
parents and uncle, who promised to pay for the child. Others, like
Khana Varshavchik, chose to leave home partway through their preg- Lilith’s
Midwives
nancies. As Khana explained to the court investigator, she had con-
ceived out of wedlock with a man who had since immigrated to •
ChaeRan Y.
America. She had decided to leave her hometown “because she
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wanted to hide her situation from her relatives with whom she lived.”
In other words, it was a self-imposed exile.
Significantly, only three parents traveled with their daughters to
ensure their welfare. Mirka Druseviatskaia of Drissen testified that
she had traveled to Vilna with her 20-year-old daughter Pesia because
she had heard of a secret shelter for illegitimate children. She stayed
with her daughter throughout her ordeal until they gave up the in-
fant to a Jewish woman “who was about 30 years old, coarse, dark, and
poorly dressed.” Mirka then returned home with her daughter, never
to inquire about the child again. Leia Pitel’s mother also traveled
with her pregnant daughter, who was her only child. Although she
stayed in the city, the mother always came to visit Leia at the midwife
Freida Laudon’s apartment. Only after Leia had given birth and
found employment as a wet nurse did her mother return home; she
may have stayed longer but for her husband’s letters urging her to
hasten home.32 Only one father accompanied his daughter, 26-year-
old Fruma Rubin, to Vilna, but he refused to stay at the broker’s apart-
ment because it was “too crowded with many tenants.”33 Perhaps
because of the father’s presence, the agent Kun’ka Voinarovich per-
formed her routine with greater (if perhaps feigned) obsequiousness.
She inquired whether Fruma wished to place the child with the “ka-
hal’s caretaker” or with a foster mother; the broker also reassured
Fruma that she would take care of the midwife’s payment.34
Single Jewish mothers had limited options to deal with their un-
wanted pregnancies. Abortion was one choice, but it was expensive
and extremely dangerous. Mikhlia Baryshnika, who had been raped
by her employer, turned to the barber Leizer Lindenblit and his wife
Basia to help rid herself of her unwanted child. She claimed that the
“treatment” lasted for eight to ten days as Basia Lindenblit tried to
“dig out” the fetus with “a white, bent, metal rod with the thickness of
a pencil, and then a white bone rod, which was slightly curved.” Al-
though the domestic servant claimed that the treatment was “not too
painful” and that there was “ just a little blood,” her mother testified
that her daughter had changed completely. Such harrowing experi-
 ences reinforced demands from the Russian medical community to
decriminalize abortions and to allow professional physicians to per-
[10] form the procedures, saving young, desperate women from the or-
deals of amateur surgery.35 As the Omsk Medical Society urged: “Let
Jewish the physician’s high calling be society’s best guarantee that such op-
Social erations not be undertaken lightly, for indeed society and the state
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entrust him with the life and health of all their members.”36
• Another option that was far less common among Jews than Russians
Vol. 16
No. 2 was infanticide, which the 1845 law code defined as an “unpremedi-
tated form of murder” because the mother was “presumed to have
acted impulsively, under the pressure of overpowering emotion, in an
abnormal physical and mental state.”37 Female defendants often ex-
plained their actions by referring to their feelings of “shame and fear”—
the very language used to describe their motivation for murder in the
law code.38 In one case, Khanka Mogil’nik, from a small village in
Kovno province, was accused of infanticide; she openly confessed that
she gave birth but denied that she murdered her baby: “I plead guilty
[to the charges] that this summer, after the festival of Peter and Paul [a
reference to Christian time] . . . I gave birth to a stillborn infant, and,
out of shame and fear, I hid his body and buried him in the ground. I
explained that I was going to gather mushrooms in the forest.”39 In an-
other case, Leia Vaismanova explained that in “shock and panic” she
took her illegitimate baby to the bridge near the Jewish bathhouse and
threw him into the river because “I desired to hide the infant from peo-
ple and my fiancé.”40 Although such cases were not common and con-
victions rare, they reveal the intense pressure on women to conceal
their loss of virginity and their pregnancy. Predictably, the social stigma
and legal responsibility lay with the female, not the male, even in cases
where the relationship was plainly consensual.
Unlike the unwed Jewish mothers who chose to give birth and then
abandon their children to “nature,” all 49 women in this case deliber-
ately sought medical assistance in childbirth and “gave up” their infants
to individuals who promised to provide a caretaker for a monetary fee.
Moreover, in contrast to the customary practice of giving birth at home
surrounded by family members, the vast majority of the unwed Jewish
women gave birth either at the Jewish hospital in Vilna or at the home
of an illegal midwife. Of the 49 witnesses, 19 gave birth in a hospital, 23
at the home of an illegal midwife, and 2 at home, as in the case of Dvera
Tamarskaia. Her family allowed a home birth but forced her to give up
the baby because they were “working people” and could ill afford to
support another child.41 Of the remaining 5 women, 2 had abortions,
and 2 did not indicate where they had given birth; one of them claimed
that her pregnancy had been a false alarm.
The Jewish hospital was a desirable place to give birth because of [11]
the availability of medical staff and the promise of a secure place to
remain during postpartum recovery. Almost all the women remained Lilith’s
Midwives
at the hospital for a week after they gave birth, and some stayed lon-
ger due to medical complications. Khaia Lipova Baran of Oshmiany •
ChaeRan Y.
testified that a Dr. Zalkin had admitted her for 14 days, a week longer
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than the usual hospital stay, because of health problems. The Jewish
hospital apparently accepted those without the means to pay since
the most impoverished women in this case chose to deliver there.42
Resorting to the Jewish hospital allowed for a certain degree of ano-
nymity; as the court investigator discovered, there were many false
names in the hospital registry. Khaia Baran, for example, confirmed
that she had checked herself in under a different name (Khaia Aes)
“out of pain and fear.”43 Despite these advantages, it was clearly an
isolating and lonely experience. Seventeen-year-old Sora Kadysheva
Stoklian of Zhizhmor informed the court investigator that, two weeks
before Purim, she lay in the Vilna hospital “by myself without any ad-
vice” (Rus. sama po sebe, bez vsiakoi rekomendatsiia).44 Also notable was
the absence of traditional rituals that normally accompanied births
at home. Although some mothers named their children at the hospi-
tal, others did not even recall seeing—let alone naming—them. Cir-
cumcision, usually a central family event, was performed by a doctor
rather than the mohel. The only “personal artifact” that the babies
possessed from their birth mothers was their unique swaddling
clothes that helped to identify their corpses later. Many of the moth-
ers described the color and pattern of the wool or cloth that they had
used to make these swaddling clothes.
Almost immediately after birth, the single mothers gave up their
children to the baby farmers based on mutual terms in order to com-
mence their work as wet nurses. Although the obligations differed
according to the individual, a single mother’s agreement to pay for
her child’s upbringing, whether through a one-time payment or
monthly fees, may have helped to “legitimize” the abandonment.
That several women referred to the underground network as a “secret
shelter” (Rus. sekretnyi priut) suggested that they wanted to view the
hevrah as an “organization”—something akin to a legitimate found-
ling home. In a few cases, the mothers insisted on a formal notarized
agreement that specified the terms accepted by the two parties. For
instance, when Dobe Gofman decided to give up her illegitimate
daughter so that she could get married in another town, she drew up
 a notarized agreement with Dveira Avidon (an assistant to the baby
farmer Kun’ka Voinarovich) to pay 40 rubles a year for the care of her
[12] child.45 In the absence of Jewish foundling homes in Vilna, perhaps
the idea of giving up children to fellow Jews along with a significant
Jewish monetary payment helped to alleviate the guilt of separation. Wit-
Social nesses rejected the option of abandoning their children for free at a
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Christian foundling home—an alternative that some Jewish mothers
• chose in the town of Zhitomir (Volhynia province).46 Applications to
Vol. 16
No. 2 Christian foundling homes in Zhitomir reveal that an infant’s bap-
tism was the precondition for acceptance—too high a price for the
single mothers who were interviewed in this case. The majority of
mothers admitted that, once they gave up their children, they never
asked about their welfare, let alone attempted to visit them. Only
when the brokers returned to collect more money did they demand
to know if their children were still alive to justify additional payments.
Some mothers like Feiga Rubin and Dvera Zhuk admitted that they
had paid the brokers to give up their children forever.47 However, oth-
ers described the trauma of separation from their babies. Twenty-
two-year-old Braina Gitel Kalakant of Kovno recalled the painful
experience: “When [she] left with [the brokers] Kun’ka Voinarovich
and Rokha Rabinovich from the apartment, the former said to Kala-
kant, ‘Squeeze the baby more firmly so that she does not cry. There
come the police; they will see you with the baby and denounce you.’”
Braina could not control her emotions and cried because “she felt
sorry for her [baby] girl.”48
Employment as a wet nurse may have initially seemed lucrative; in
reality, not only was it temporary but it entailed medical interventions
and risks. For some, it meant submitting to a physical examination by
a doctor to ensure that they were healthy and had milk in their
breasts. In Russian society, there were medical institutions that pro-
vided certificates for qualified wet nurses even in the early 1800s. The
“Bureau for the Inspection of Wet Nurses” at the Myasnitskaia Hospi-
tal in Moscow, for instance, “subjected women to a detailed medical
examination involving pretty well every part of the body, including
the genitals and rectum, as well as breasts, arms, shoulders, and
legs.”49 Employment also depended on continuous milk production.
As Khana Varshavskaia testified, the Lipets family in Kovno immedi-
ately fired her upon discovering that she could not produce milk, and
she was left penniless. For Khaika Gurvich and Khaia Okmianskaia,
the promise of a good salary vanished when their employers’ babies
died.50 Children were inevitably weaned, forcing wet nurses to search
for other work within a year or two. Dvera Zhuk nursed the Shapiro
family’s baby for 16 months before she left to work for a furniture arti-
san.51 And, of course, wet nurses were as vulnerable as domestic ser-
vants to sexual harassment. Leia Pitel, who had worked for the Kotkin [13]
family for 11 weeks, decided that she could no longer work there be-
cause her employer “began to push himself on her.” Perhaps fearful Lilith’s
Midwives
of another unwanted pregnancy, she fled the house without her pass-
port and was eventually arrested when her employer accused her of •
ChaeRan Y.
theft; she spent six and a half months in prison. Despite these chal-
Freeze
lenges, wet nursing represented a transition period from the experi-
ence of illegitimate birth to reintegration into the routine of everyday
life in the legitimate world.

Lilith’s Midwives: Members of the Secret Shelter

The hevrah that provided services for illegitimate births and infor-
mal adoptions in Vilna was apparently not unique. The court report
mentions the precedent of the “Skublinskaia trial in Warsaw and oth-
ers like it.”52 The Vilna hevrah included four overlapping circles: the
brokers who organized all the transactions; staff members of the Jew-
ish hospital in Vilna who worked closely with the brokers to provide
clients; illegal midwives and barbers; and caretakers of the illegiti-
mate children. According to Feiga Izraileva Rubin, who had given
birth to three illegitimate children, this network already existed in
1875 when she had her first baby.53 In many respects, the brokers re-
sembled the kommissionerki—that is, Russian women who delivered
unwanted babies from the villages and district towns to the foundling
homes in the metropolis for a fee. 54 The activities of the brokers, how-
ever, were far more complex and reflected the gray intersection be-
tween the licit and illicit, the legitimate and the illegitimate.
According to the depositions, brokers enjoyed a widespread repu-
tation for their ability to provide hard-to-find services. Like the baby-
farming systems in Europe and America, this hevrah depended on
women’s informal neighborhood networks. 55 One broker on trial was
62-year-old Kun’ka Voinarovich, a townswoman from Baltermansk,
who lived in the house of Burachevskii on Konn Lane. According to
her tenants, neighbors, and clients, she was resourceful, fearless, and
heartless. Her yardman’s wife told the investigator that she had
warned Voinarovich: “Eh, you’ll catch it. Don’t overdo it with these
pregnant [girls]. What do you have to do with them?” The latter would
often reply, “I’m not afraid.”56 The yardman’s wife also observed that
Voinarovich always had small infants in her home, whom she received
 from the Jewish kahal (or so she claimed). The courtyard register,
which included all the names of tenants and guests, confirmed the
[14] extended visits of many unmarried women to Voinarovich’s apart-
ment. The latter’s tenants also described their landlady’s business as
Jewish “brokerage” (Rus. faktorstvo). According to Rokha Leia Vainer: “Dif-
Social ferent people came to her home but she avoided these kinds of peo-
Studies
ple. She would stand on her own street and negotiate, or at the place
• where she conducted this business, on Dobe Toibe Lane [officially
Vol. 16
No. 2
Nikolaevskii Lane], near the home of Trubochista.”57 Another tenant,
Sosia Troits, claimed that she knew nothing about wet nurses but con-
firmed that Kun’ka Voinarovich’s trade was to place domestic ser-
vants. She also confessed that pregnant girls often came to their
apartment (about two a month), but never stayed long.58 Shprintse
Leia Levin, who also rented a corner of the apartment, claimed that
her landlady’s group included three other brokers, including Khaia
Klausner, at whose home Voinarovich spent most of her time conduct-
ing business.59 Perhaps Shlema Iosel Tsigel’nitskii, an acquaintance
of Voinarovich’s son Yankel, put it best: “Everyone knows her in Vilna
and other places by the name ‘Kun’ka the broker’; she organizes the
placement of domestic servants and wet nurses.”60
Indeed, almost all the witnesses claimed that, when they inquired
about a secret shelter for illegitimate Jewish children at the train sta-
tion, the porter or other bystanders invariably gave them Kun’ka
Voinarovich’s address. For instance, 18-year-old Rivka Gringut of
Dunaburg recalled that, when she arrived in Vilna, “some woman”
gave her the address of an individual named “Kunia” who was respon-
sible for her until she gave birth.61 It was no accident that “some
woman” directed her to the well-known broker. Voinarovich deliber-
ately placed her aides at the train station or spent time there herself
to identify unwed, pregnant women. Nineteen-year-old Sara Feiga
Kagan of Dobriansk testified that, when she arrived at the train sta-
tion in Vilna during the winter of 1888, “one old broker began to ask
her about the cause of her pregnancy.” When Kagan explained that
she was “unmarried and passportless,” the woman immediately took
her to Voinarovich’s apartment, where “there was a crowd of tenants
on the stove; below the stove were two pregnant girls from out of
town, Khaia and Iakha.”62 Leia Pitel of Dunaburg also confirmed
that, when she arrived at the train station, a Jewish woman aggres-
sively questioned her about her marital status and the cause of her
pregnancy.63
The depositions reveal that Kun’ka Voinarovich relied heavily on
the assistance of various women who served as couriers, temporary
child-care providers, and even impersonators who pretended to be
wet nurses for their clients’ illegitimate children. Significantly, the
life stories of these women suggest that they were as marginal in Jew- [15]
ish society as the unwed mothers they sought to exploit. During her
defense, Khaia Lam, who temporarily took in illegitimate babies for a Lilith’s
Midwives
pittance, tried to explain why her name was on a notarized agree-
ment to care for Liba Lipman’s daughter. Lam blamed her husband •
ChaeRan Y.
for using her name fraudulently and minced no words to describe the
Freeze
man who had deserted her to go to America: “What else can you say, a
good person [sarcastically]; [he] has a wife and children but only lives
with his lovers [such as] Iudes Katselenenbogen who has an apart-
ment at Feiga Noskin’s in the home of Burachevskii. [He also] keeps a
whore house, Rivka’s, on Antokolskaia Street.”64 Another assistant was
Feiga Noskin’s half sister, Entka Sher, whose husband had spent six
months in prison and then lived with her in Noskin’s apartment.
Shortly after Sher gave birth to a baby boy, who died immediately, her
husband abandoned her. According to rumors, the distraught wife
left town in search of her husband and perished on the road.65 An-
other assistant was 40-year-old Dveira Avidon, a poor divorcée who
rented a corner in Voinarovich’s apartment. There was also Iudes
Katselenenbogen, an unemployed woman who had given birth to an
illegitimate child and moved into Feiga Noskin’s home after the old
tenants, Iosel the tailor and his hunchback son, moved out. Sore Klaz
(whom witnesses described as dark, thin, and poorly dressed), Elka
Lupat, and the widow “Tsipka” were so impoverished that they ran er-
rands for a few measly kopecks. Clearly, the brokers could exploit
these desperate women with promises of housing and money.
Kun’ka Voinarovich and her associates also depended on the Jew-
ish hospital staff to provide clients for their network. Merka Nokhi-
mova Gofshtein testified that she had given up her baby to the care of
Feiga Noskin at the advice of a hospital nurse named “Sheina,” who
allegedly had since died.66 Several other witnesses claimed that Voin-
arovich and other brokers had hovered aggressively around the new
birth mothers, asking bold questions about their marital status and
plans for their infants.67 Twenty-one-year-old Khana Sharfman of
Budza recalled that Voinarovich came to the hospital frequently and
attempted to persuade her to give up her baby permanently for a one-
time payment of 20 rubles. When she refused, two nurses—Liza
Khatskelevich (who had also allegedly died) and Pesia Zhager—ad-
vised her to give up the baby and facilitated the transaction.68 In addi-
tion, the network consisted of a few illegal midwives who worked with
Voinarovich, including Freida Laudon, Khana Abramovich, and
 Basia Lindenblit. Although it is unclear why the brokers sent some
pregnant women to the Jewish hospital and others to the midwives, it
[16] is possible that the latter determined which deliveries they could han-
dle. An investigation of their apartments revealed the signs of their
Jewish profession: in Freida Laudon’s apartment on Sirotskaia Street (Or-
Social phan Street), the court investigator found mattresses stained with
Studies
blood, tubes of every size, a speculum and other gynecological instru-
• ments, devices for inverted nipples, and breast-pumping equipment
Vol. 16
No. 2
that the husband claimed they rented for 15 to 20 kopecks a day.69
The hevrah provided three types of hard-to-find social services.
First, it placed domestic servants in Jewish homes. Second, as Laudon
mentioned during her deposition, it facilitated the “adoption” of ille-
gitimate children by childless wives. In principle, legal adoption was
only possible with the permission of the emperor himself, making it
an onerous and expensive process.70 It was much easier to take a new-
born child from the hevrah to present as one’s own. One case in-
volved a soldier’s wife, Sorka Gidka, whose husband had completed
his military service and immigrated to America. She allegedly had
sought one of the newborn babies, “because she was childless and her
husband wanted to divorce her because of her infertility.” As Laudon
explained: “On the third day after Rokha Gilinskaia had given birth,
Gidka came and took the baby; she wanted to present her to her hus-
band as though she had given birth to her in his absence.” Shortly
thereafter, Gidka received a letter from America with money for a
ticket, and she immigrated to America to join her husband and par-
ents.71 The third service provided by the hevrah was the placement of
wet nurses, who were always in demand given the centrality of breast-
feeding in Russian-Jewish culture.
The memoir literature suggests that new mothers hired wet
nurses—whether Jewish or Russian—to care for their infants in order
to return to work. For instance, Fanni Schwartzman described a deep
fondness for her Russian wet nurse Marina, who raised her from in-
fancy while her mother ran her cotton textiles store in Vitebsk.72
Wealthier families may have also hired wet nurses to assist new moth-
ers as was customary among the Russian social elites.73 According to
witnesses, numerous clients sought out the brokers to arrange these
services. In contrast to the custom in medieval Ashkenaz in which
men drew up the formal agreement with the wet nurse,74 both sexes
in Russia negotiated the terms with the brokers. Mendel Plotnik, for
example, testified that, after the circumcision of his son, he visited
the Jewish hospital in search of a wet nurse. He eventually met a
woman on the street who advised him to make arrangements with
Kun’ka Voinarovich.75 In another case, Tsivia Minikes met with Voin-
arovich to arrange wet-nurse services for her son Ovsei’s child for 50
rubles a year.76 Clients came from both affluent and working-class [17]
families. For instance, Iudes Katselenenbogen asserted that one girl
who gave birth in August 1890 found employment as a wet nurse in Lilith’s
Midwives
the home of a shopkeeper on Zhmudskaia Street while another girl
worked for a butcher’s family in impoverished Novyi Gorod. •
ChaeRan Y.
With respect to wet nursing, Kun’ka Voinarovich and her circle
Freeze
provided life-sustaining services to legitimate infants and their fami-
lies. Yet they also served as “Lilith’s midwives”—the facilitators of
newborn child murder when it involved illegitimate offspring.77 Iudes
Katselenenbogen recoiled at Voinarovich’s name during her deposi-
tion: “I could not look at this Kun’ka. She was so repulsive to me be-
cause she fleeced the girls and brought the children [to Feiga Noskin]
to be murdered; with this haggled money, she bought herself a
house.” 78 Pesia Stolts, who was unaware that her child had died, de-
scribed the callous manner in which Voinarovich had responded to
her inquiries about her child’s whereabouts: “What is it to you—all
the more so since you paid money and the baby is illegitimate. What
do you need him for?” 79
At the heart of the investigation was the blind caretaker, 40-year-old
Feiga Tyrska Noskin, who resided in the basement of the Burachevskiis’
house, below Kun’ka Voinarovich’s apartment.80 The state accused
Noskin of direct involvement in the deaths of the infants whose corpses
were discovered near her home. In spite of the court investigator’s at-
tempts to portray her as a monster, what emerged from the depositions
was far more complex: she was at once the Jewish communal caretaker
of illegitimate children and Lilith’s accomplice in newborn child mur-
der. Neighbors and other witnesses were both intrigued and frightened
by this audacious woman. Rokha Vainer, who resided in Voinarovich’s
apartment, described feelings of dread when she went on an errand to
return a plate for her landlady: “[I] never went to the basement because
it was dark, and there were dead children there.”81 Iudes Katselenenbo-
gen confirmed this testimony with horror stories of her own: “[Feiga
Noskin’s] business was to take other people’s small children from bro-
kers, midwives, and feldshers [physicians’ assistants]82 in order to cast
them off” (Rus. chtoby zakinut ikh). She added that, for the past year,
“such children were brought to Noskin and were abandoned by her—
no fewer but perhaps more than fifty . . . about fifty children a week.”83
Katselenenbogen claimed that she witnessed the suffocation of babies
with pillows on several occasions: “[Noskin] placed two or three chil-
dren on top of each other on the bed and covered them with pillows.
 First, they began to cry and scream, then they became quiet, no longer
alive; [they] were wrapped in rags and hidden in treska [wood chips].”84
[18] Noskin also allegedly concocted a drug mixture by boiling the heads of
poppy plants “like tea,” wrapping it in rags, and giving it to the infants,
Jewish “until they gave their souls to God.”85 Katselenenbogen admitted that
Social the caretaker required her help to get rid of the corpses because she
Studies
was blind. During the former’s last trip to the forest, she was arrested
• on suspicion of abandoning a baby. Khaia Oshmianskaia also recalled
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No. 2
the day when she went down to Feiga Noskin’s apartment in search of
her daughter. When she saw the caretaker with a weak baby boy in a
filthy diaper and began to cry, an old man yelled at her: “Get out of
here [Rus. Von otsuda]! Did you come here to cry at a graveyard?”86
The court investigator, who obtained a search warrant to examine
Feiga Noskin’s apartment, wrote a detailed description:

The apartment is located in the basement, eight steps down from the
ground level; it consists of the first room or entrance hall (2 1/2 paces
wide and 5 paces in length), and a room (6 paces wide and 9 paces in
length) with a Russian stove that occupies one fourth of the [room]. The
floor in both rooms is brick, the small window consisting of four panes
under the ceiling is often open; there are two windows in the big room
and one in the small [room]; they allow in little light so that the apart-
ment is half dark. It has been neglected in terms of renovation, and be-
yond imaginably filthy [Rus. do nevozmozhnosti griaznoe]. . . . In the big
room, at the right of the door, stands the low bed of Noskin’s relative
Berko Bakharn and his hunchback son.

The investigator also found the signs of Noskin’s business: “(a) ten
infant shirts; (b) seventeen loose jackets [Rus. raspashonki] for in-
fants; (c) four infant jerseys; (d) three infant caps; (e) six infant swad-
dling clothes; and (f) six diapers. He stressed the complete “disorder”
and “extreme squalor” of the apartment.87
The testimonies of other witnesses reveal that Noskin undertook
the thankless task of “caring” for the Jewish community’s discarded
infants as a way to make a living. Her husband’s work at the kosher
meat tax office may have helped her to obtain the position; at the very
least, it is clear that the Vilna kahal supported her services. Khaia
Kravchinskaia, who visited the kahal regularly to receive her weekly
assistance of 30 kopecks, claimed that she knew Noskin well: “[She] is
devoted to the upbringing of small children and receives a stipend
from the kahal for them.” 88 Even the yardman, Fedor Bezprozvannyi,
testified that the infants in Noskin’s care allegedly came from the
“Jewish kahal,” a claim that Noskin confirmed.89 Moreover, both
Katselenenbogen and Noskin claimed that the latter procured milk
for the infants directly from the kahal.90 Interestingly, in her short
story Rochel Broches imagines the caretaker justifying her activities [19]
as a mitzvah to a hypocritical community that has turned a blind eye
to its illegitimate offspring: Lilith’s
Midwives

Well, she takes care of these unfortunate children—discarded, aban- •

doned; nobody wants them—little mamzerim [bastards], no fathers, no ChaeRan Y.
mothers—you understand these children never had a father. . . . They Freeze
throw these infants away wherever they can, under a fence, in a barn, at
her doorstep. She feels sorry for them, gives them a place, a bed. Please
understand she is paid for doing this; she has to live too. She takes care
of the child. She will certainly go to heaven, because who would take
these children in if she didn’t? They would be lying around on the street,
in a barn, in the alley, because they aren’t really children. They’re dust,
garbage.91

The kahal provided Noskin with not only abandoned infants and a
meager ration of milk but also burial permits for the local cemetery.
Seventy-year-old Ovsei Natanson told the court investigator that his
official responsibility was to bury small Jewish children. He claimed
that, in the past two years, he had visited Noskin’s apartment fre-
quently to remove at least 10 to 15 babies after Noskin’s husband in-
formed the synagogue board of their deaths. Natanson firmly
asserted that he only took dead children who had a proper police
burial ticket: “Without a ticket, he would not have taken the dead.”
During his absence, a certain Davidok and Iosel carried out his work
and allegedly removed many infant corpses from the home of Bu-
rachevskii (which Natanson described as a “den of thieves”). They
took them before the synagogue board located in the “Shklolnyi
courtyard” before they buried them. Natanson observed that, after
Noskin had been arrested, it “suddenly became quiet; there were no
more abandoned baby corpses.” 92
Other witnesses described the enormous effort that Noskin ex-
pended to secure food and clothing for the infants. Nineteen-year-
old Sora Kagan, who spent time in Noskin’s apartment before she
gave birth, claimed that there were at least three infants at a time in
the caretaker’s home during her stay. However, the number changed
daily because Noskin sent the infants to various homes to be nursed;
some women actually came to feed the babies at her apartment for a
fee: “Poor women received between 5 to 10 kopecks, and the wealthy,
20 to 50 kopecks per feeding.” Kagan added that Noskin alternated
feedings between breast and cow’s milk. Nineteen-year-old Ester Pet-
 kalishke, who crept down to the basement “out of curiosity,” witnessed
“an infant who was drinking milk from a bottle.” 93 Alte Sore Gir-
[20] shevaia Lange, a domestic servant, testified that she had also observed
a feeding session at Noskin’s apartment. In 1882, she accompanied a
Jewish wet nurse (who worked for her employer in Vilna) to Noskin’s house
Social to relieve the wet nurse’s engorged breasts. There, they found “two
Studies
small infants, one in a cradle and the other in a dresser drawer. Both
• were covered in scabs and very weak.” When the wet nurse attempted
Vol. 16
No. 2
to feed one of the infants (for five kopecks), he could barely latch
onto the breast.94
In another case, Zlata Chainik reported that, after her own baby
was weaned, her husband visited the “woman on Konn Lane about
whom everyone knew . . . who paid mothers 30 or 40 kopecks per
feeding.” One Friday evening, she went to pick up an infant girl (who
was three or four weeks old) and received 20 kopecks [on the Sab-
bath!] to feed her over the weekend. Chainik described the infant’s
non-Jewish beauty underneath the filthy rags: “[She] was such a pretty
thing with a round face, bleach-blond hair like a doll. Only the girl
was very emaciated and dirty with a weak, hoarse voice and swollen
eyes from crying. She was wrapped in such black, dirty rags that [I]
could not even imagine how one could keep a baby in such filth.”
Chainik gave the baby a bath, changed her diaper, and fed her until
Sunday, when two couriers came to take the child back to Noskin’s
apartment.95
The testimonies suggest that Noskin did not murder the infants
immediately. On the contrary, she kept them alive as long as possi-
ble—that is, until the money that the brokers left or the milk pro-
vided by the kahal ran out. Out of the 25 rubles that the brokers
extorted from the wet nurses to pay for a “foster mother,” they gave
Noskin just 3 to 5 rubles a month for each infant; this was certainly
not enough to sustain both caretaker and child. In fact, the autopsy
reports found that all the infants had empty stomachs. It is clear that
Noskin murdered the starving children as a last resort. Unable to
feed them any longer, she hastened their inevitable end with the help
of a drug. As midwife Khana Abramovich explained to the court in-
vestigator, she had sent a small, weak infant to Noskin through Kha-
sia (“the one with a hunchback sister named Sorka”). The caretaker
gave the infant a poppy mixture, and the baby did not wake up the
next morning.96 Broches also imagined the caretaker in her short
story as playing the role of the angel of death or mercy, deciding
which infant would receive sustenance and which would die. The
child protagonist Avremeleh manages to survive into toddlerhood
(not quite two years old) because Brayne the bobe—cruel though she
may be—provided opportunities for him to nurse. Yet she denies two
whimpering infants their soothers with a wave of the hand: “It’ll be [21]
the end of these two today.” Later, when Avremeleh points to the
empty spaces, “Nobody! No babies!” Brayne retorts angrily, “No ba- Lilith’s
Midwives
bies! They’re in the cemetery. You’ll soon be there too.” 97
The testimonies also reveal that Noskin was a charismatic woman •
ChaeRan Y.
who garnered the respect of residents in Novyi Gorod. For instance, Freeze
Shprintse Levin, one of Voinarovich’s tenants, declared that Noskin
always threw her challah dough into the fire before any other resi-
dents in the building—implying that the order in which women threw
the challah dough into the fire represented a kind of social hierarchy,
with the most “respected” residents at the front of the line. The yard-
man’s wife observed that “many tenants dropped by to [see Noskin]
as is common among Jews.” One single mother recalled how Noskin
advised her to become a wet nurse since a healthy woman like herself
could nurse up to three years. At the time of Noskin’s arrest, the po-
lice complained that a crowd of Jews tried to protect the caretaker as
she left the bathhouse. The court investigator needed no expert wit-
nesses to attest to Noskin’s resolute and fearless character. Through-
out the file, he expressed great frustration with her adamant denials
of involvement in the crimes. During a face-to-face confrontation be-
tween Noskin and one of the witnesses about swaddling bands, the
investigator could hardly contain his chagrin: “Feiga Noskin, who
had stubbornly insisted during the course of half a year that she abso-
lutely did not understand Russian, answered in completely fluent Rus-
sian that she considered the identification of the [swaddling] clothes
to be a lie.” 98 Still, the investigator’s contradictory portrayal of Noskin
reveals his inability to cast her in purely black or white terms. The
moral culpability of the community for the fate of its illegitimate off-
spring stands as the silent witness in his report.

Conclusion

“Because mothers of illegitimate children usually kill their children

upon birth or shortly thereafter out of shame and fear, the fact that
these corpses were two weeks old raises the possibility that the bodies
found in Novyi Gorod were not killed by the mothers but by the
named murderers.” 99 Thus concluded the court investigator’s report
about events that riveted the public’s imagination about the dark Jew-
ish underworld in Vilna. The conservative newspaper Kievlianin an-
 nounced “Mass Infant Murder Uncovered in Vilna in Recent Times”
with smug satisfaction.100 Another article in the same newspaper
[22] mocked the rabbinate for attempting to keep Jewish illegitimate
births a secret by failing to record them in the metrical books: “Did
Jewish the Jewish community really not know about the activities of Feiga
Social Noskin and company?”101 By the end of the trial, however, the newspa-
Studies
pers—perhaps suffering from trial fatigue—failed to report the final
• verdict, which was also missing from the archival file. It is highly prob-
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No. 2
able that the majority of the accused women received prison sen-
tences, given the outcome of similar cases involving infanticide and
child murder.102 Moreover, the court investigator’s own judgment in
the indictment statement that the accused were probably guilty may
have sealed their fate.
The scrutiny of this uniquely lower-class “women’s space” through
a public trial was revealing. For a minority society that boasted one of
the lowest official illegitimate rates and whose women enjoyed the
reputation of being model mothers, the single wet nurse was a silent
reminder that the parallel world of the illicit was but a stone’s throw
away. Moreover, the absence of legal communal institutions such as
Jewish foundling homes (like those in Russian society) reflected not
so much the low illegitimacy rates among Jews as it did the conscious
ignorance and relegation of a “woman’s social problem” to the mar-
gins of society. That respectable members of Jewish society had to re-
sort to the illegal hevrah for various services suggests the mutual
dependence of these two worlds despite the pretense that the latter
did not exist. Like the court investigator in the case of Feiga Noskin,
the narrator in Broches’s story “Avremelekh” delivered a scathing in-
dictment of pre-revolutionary Jewish society, which was content to
turn a blind eye to social inequalities and injustice, especially the
plight of its illegitimate offspring. The tale ends with the second
abandonment of Avremeleh, a blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler who
threatens the livelihood of his caretaker because he is old enough to
steal the breadcrumbs from the other Avremelekh’s soothers. Brayne
the bobe leads the unsuspecting child to an unfamiliar part of town,
sits him down on the porch with a bagel, and leaves him to die on the
street. He panics, “dust fills his open screaming mouth as he
falls. . . . The shutters of the house open. ‘What’s happening? A child
is crying! A child has been abandoned! Oy, a child.’ . . . People are in
a rush; they have no time. . . . People shake their heads. ‘Too bad, too
bad. What a shame.’”103
Notes

I am grateful to the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University and the [23]
Harry Starr fellows (2007–08) as well as to Naomi Seidman and participants
of the “Sex and the Shtetl” conference at the University of California, Berke- Lilith’s
ley. Special thanks to Steven J. Zipperstein and Derek Penslar for their sug- Midwives
gestions, and to Sylvia Fuks Fried as always for her wisdom. Unless otherwise •
indicated, all translations from foreign-language sources are mine. ChaeRan Y.
Freeze
1 Rochel Broches, “Little Abrahams,” in Arguing with the Storm: Stories by
Yiddish Women Writers, ed. Rhea Tregebov (New York, 2008), 95. For the
original, see Rochel Broches, “Avremelekh” in Shpinen (Minsk, 1940),
14–31. I thank Kathryn Hellerstein for bringing this story to my attention
and Yeshaya Metal for sending me the Yiddish original from YIVO.
2 Broches, “Little Abrahams,” 92–93.
3 Lietuvos Valstybes Istorijos Archyvas (Lithuanian State Historical Ar-
chive; hereafter LVIA), fond 448, op. 1, d. 5228, ll. 3 ob.–4. When the
children told a Jewish girl named Iuliia Muchul’skaia about their discov-
ery, she went to retrieve the baby. After she fed the infant, the police or-
dered the girl to take the baby to a Christian foundling home, Iisus
Mladenets (Jesus the Infant). The woman who had attempted to aban-
don the infant, Iudes Katselenenbogen, told police officers that she had
come to town to sue her husband. The police subjected her to a medical
examination, which showed that she had given birth about six months
earlier. The child at the foundling home, who was only one month old,
was not her child; the infant died shortly thereafter from consumption.
On Russian foundling homes, see David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child
Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988).
4 See Dana Rabin, “Beyond ‘Lewd Women’ and ‘Wanton Wenches’: Infan-
ticide and Child Murder in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Writing
British Infanticide: Child Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722–1859, ed. Jennifer
Thorn (Newark, Del., 2003), 45; Peter Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murder-
ing Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803 (New York,
1977); and Robert Malcomson, “Infanticide in the Eighteenth Century,”
in Crime in England, ed. J. S. Cockburn (Princeton, 1977), 187–209.
5 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 7.
6 Baby farming, or the “boarding of infants in exchange of money,” was a
practice that came under intense public scrutiny in England and Amer-
ica starting in the 1870s. Medical practitioners and social reformers rou-
tinely equated the system of “baby farming” with deliberate infanticide.
As Sherri Broder has shown, the notorious reputation of baby farms
could be attributed in part to the fact that a large proportion of the in-
fants were illegitimate—children of prostitutes, unwed mothers, and
deserted wives; see her “Child Care or Child Neglect? Baby Farming in
Late-Nineteenth Century Philadelphia,” Gender and Society 2, no. 2 (June
1988): 128–48. David Bentley has also shown that the pressure on women
 to work and maintain employment in Victorian England fueled the baby
farming industry; see his “She Butchers: Baby Droppers, Baby Sweaters,
[24] and Baby Farmers,” in Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social
Panic, and Moral Outrage, ed. Marjorie Levine Clark (Columbus, Ohio,
Jewish 2005), 198–214. For baby farming in Russia, see Catriona Kelly, Children’s
Social World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, Conn., 2007),
Studies 177–79.
• 7 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 46. Testimony of Mikhlia Baryshnika. An
Vol. 16 unnamed girl recommended that Baryshnika, who had been raped by
No. 2 her employer, visit a midwife who could “make her free again” by per-
forming an abortion.
8 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in
Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, 1987), 20–21.
9 M. M. Abrashkevich, Preliubodeianie s tochki zreniia ugolovnogo prava: Isto-
riko dogmaticheskoe issledovanie (Odessa, 1904), 619, cited in Laura En-
gelstein, Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin de Siècle
Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 93.
10 Ibid.
11 “Naselenie,” Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, 16 vols. (reprint, St. Petersburg,
1991), 11: 544.
12 These towns and districts included Vilna, Vileika, Radoshkov, Disna,
Druia, Lida, Oshmiany, Sventsian, and Troki.
13 LVIA, f. 388 (Statistical Commission), op. 1, d. 1087, ll. 71 ob.–72.
14 See, e.g., LVIA, f. 447, op. 19, d. 8227 (trial of Khana Kenigsberg for in-
fanticide, 1861); LVIA, f. 447, op. 1, d. 13070 (seduction case of Leah
Kul’kin, 1873); LVIA, f. 447, op. 1, d. 28965 (trial of Feiga Gordon for
giving birth to an illegitimate child, 1881); and Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Zhito-
myrskoï Oblast (hereafter DAZhO), f. 24, op. 14, d. 398 (trial of Shendlia
Iusilova for infanticide, 1885).
15 For instance, Jewish soldiers were not permitted to marry until the com-
pletion of their military service, so they occasionally persuaded poor do-
mestic servants to have premarital sexual relations with them after a
promise of marriage, as in the Leia Veismanova case (DAZhO, f. 19, op.
8, d. 144). Among the general population, illegal cohabitation had be-
come a major social problem by the 1890s. This topic dominated discus-
sions in the Russian Orthodox Church, which struggled to reinforce the
sacrament of marriage. See Gregory Freeze, Church, Religion, and Society
in Modern Russia (forthcoming).
16 LVIA, f. 378, d. 79, g. 1852, l. 9.
17 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, ll. 101–102 ob.
18 DAZhO, f. 19, op. 8, d. 144, ll. 41–42.
19 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, ll. 136–37.
20 Ibid., ll. 29 ob.–30.
21 Ibid., l. 236–36 ob.
22 Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish
Workers’ Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, Engl., 1989), 6.
 23 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228 (testimonies of Reiza Malakh, Eidka Toibe,
and Gidka Slonimushkes).
24 See, e.g., Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale. [25]
25 According to David Ransel, studies have shown a link between abandon-
ment of illegitimate babies and the occupation of the domestic servant. Lilith’s
For instance, the Prague lying-in hospital registered “over 88 percent of Midwives
its patients as domestics.” Similarly, the Riazan’ Zemstvo foundling home •
recorded 85 percent of the mothers as domestic servants. Ransel, Mothers ChaeRan Y.
of Misery, 163. Freeze
26 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228.
27 Ibid., ll. 44–45.
28 Ibid., ll. 45–45 ob.
29 LVIA, f. 447, op. 19, d. 10249 (rape of Etki Vainer, 1861–62) and d. 6534
(rape of Freidka Krzhizhanskaia, 1851).
30 The women came from towns and villages in the northwestern provinces
of the Russian Empire: Lida, Belostok, Rossien, Ponevezh, Oshmiany,
Zhizhmor, Yanishka (Vilna district), Minsk, Kovno, and Dinaburg.
31 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 57 ob.
32 Ibid., l. 195 ob.
33 Ibid., l. 149.
34 Ibid., l. 150.
35 Abortions were classified as a “premeditated act, a crime of choice, not
desperation.” Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 337.
36 “Doklad komissii po bor’be s iskusstvennyi vykidyshami Omskogo med-
itsinskogo obshchestva dvenadtsatomu Pirogovskomu s”ezdu vrachei,”
Obshchestvennyi vrach, no. 6, sec. 6 (1913), 690, cited in Engelstein, Keys to
Happiness, 343.
37 Engelstein, Keys to Happiness, 337.
38 N. S. Tagantsev, ed., Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel’nykh
1885 goda, article 1451, 11th ed. (St. Petersburg, 1901), cited in En-
gelstein, Keys to Happiness, 337.
39 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 1691.
40 DAZhO, f. 19, op. 8, d. 144, ll. 41–42.
41 Ibid., l. 94 ob.
42 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 83.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., l. 96.
45 Ibid., l. 50 ob.
46 DAZhO, f. 160, op. 1, d. 421 (Sura Rivka Kavruka), d. 332 (Basi
Feld’man), and d. 441 (Ides Golodnaia).
47 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 126.
48 Ibid., l. 115 ob.
49 Kelly, Children’s World, 299–301.
50 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, ll. 68–69.
51 Ibid., l. 132.
52 Ibid., l. 4 ob.
 53 Ibid., l. 17.
54 Ransel, Mothers of Misery, 86, 123, 150, 154, 214–15.
[26] 55 Broder, “Child Care or Neglect,” 130.
56 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 30 ob.
Jewish 57 Ibid., l. 37 ob.
Social 58 Ibid., l. 40 ob.
Studies 59 Ibid., l. 40. Eida Leizerova Vainer, who also resided in Kun’ka Voin-
• arovich’s apartment, added that her landlady had a small honey-making
Vol. 16 business on the side as well.
No. 2 60 Ibid., l. 40 ob.
61 Ibid., l. 134.
62 Ibid., l. 138 ob. The Russian stove (pech’) was a brick masonry heater on
which people cooked and slept during the winter. The large stove, usually
located in the center of a home, included built-in sleeping platforms for
one or two people; a bench below the stove was another warm place to
sleep.
63 Ibid., l. 193.
64 Ibid., l. 229.
65 Ibid., l. 170–170 ob.
66 Ibid., l. 37.
67 Ibid., ll. 96–98.
68 Ibid., l. 142 ob.
69 Ibid., ll. 21–23.
70 ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia
(Waltham, Mass., 2002), 183.
71 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, ll. 208 ob.–209.
72 Fanni Shvartsman, Moia sud’ba: Vospominaniia (Paris, 1900), 23–29.
73 Kelly, Children’s World, 301.
74 Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval
Europe (Princeton, 2004), 128–34.
75 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 123 ob.
76 Ibid., l. 126.
77 According to East European Jewish folklore, Lilith (Adam’s first wife who
refused to submit to him, left the Garden of Eden, and spawned a host of
demons) was a night demon who seduced men and killed children. See
Howard Schwartz, Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural (Oxford,
1991).
78 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 41 ob.
79 Ibid., l. 102 ob.
80 The court investigator observed that there were approximately 80 impov-
erished residents, predominantly Jews, in the building. Ibid., l. 11.
81 Ibid., l. 35.
82 Samuel Ramer, “Professionalism and Politics: The Russian Felder Move-
ment, 1891–1918,” in Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Rus-
sian History, ed. Harley D. Balzer (Armonk, N.Y., 1996), 117–42.
83 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, ll. 13–14.
 84 Ibid., l. 15.
85 Ibid., l. 84.
86 Ibid., l. 69 ob. [27]
87 Ibid., ll. 19–20.
88 Ibid., l. 64. Lilith’s
89 Ibid., l. 30. Midwives
90 Ibid., l. 33. •
91 Broches, “Little Abrahams,” 95. ChaeRan Y.
92 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 36–36 ob. Freeze
93 Ibid., l. 201 ob.
94 Ibid., l. 31.
95 Ibid., l. 32 ob.
96 Ibid., l. 47 ob.
97 Broches, “Little Abrahams,” 91, 93.
98 LVIA, f. 448, op. 1, d. 5228, l. 79.
99 Ibid., l. 2.
100 “Vnutrennie izvestiia,” Kievlianin, 132 (1890): 3.
101 “Vnutrennie izvestiia,” Kievlianin, 96 (1890): 3.
102 C. Y. Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 36–41.
103 Broches, “Little Abrahams,” 102.
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