Tales of Salvation: Narratives of the Rybnitser Rebbe’s Miracles in the Ghetto

The focus of the paper will be on the memories of Ribnitzer Ghetto prisoners and numerous oral interviews collected during field expeditions to Transnistria in 2017-2019, as well as on the materials of hagiographic collections. Among the most important plots are stories about the cancellation of executions owing to the prayer of Rebbe Chaim-Zanvl Abramowitz (the Ribnitzer Rebbe). In the retellings of the survivors’ descendants, these stories are transformed into a statement about minor human losses in the ghetto or about a total absence of victims (that does not correspond to reality). We will first analyze several motives of miracles in the ghetto; then compare the genre of these stories with traditional Hasidic tales from the Holocaust; and finally, highlight the general structure of these stories and relate it to the mechanisms of forgetting traumatic experience, as well as to the religious coping phenomenon.