Anna Kopelovich and relatives

Anna Kopelovich and relatives

This is my wife Anna (she stands, first from right), my dear cousin Itsik Margolis (second from right), Itsik`s wife Libe (second from left) and our relatives from Israel. But I want to tell you more about our friend Sasha Losev (first from left). He was a very important person for the Latvian Jewish society. I knew Alexander Germanovich Losev, or as we called him, Sasha since July 1961. I came to Riga after graduating from the institute in Moscow. Losev came with my brother to Riga to create the Jewish theater right after the war. Unfortunately, it was not a good time for founding theaters. Life was very hard. My brother, having finished VGIK, went to work to the foundry factory. And Sasha finished the pedagogical institute here and started to teach at an evening school. Then he got married, lived on Dzirnavu Street in one room in a shared apartment. Financially he lived very poorly. He was always engaged in matters of literature. His hobby was the history of interrelation between Russian and Latvian languages, Rainis, Pushkin and so on. He finished post-graduate courses by correspondence obtaining the degree of a candidate of sciences and worked in the Institute of Pedagogy at the Ministry of Education. In the beginning he was just a scientific employee, but he finished in the rank of a scientific secretary. He wrote a lot of articles and books. Sasha was always interested in Jewish issues, Jewish literature. At the same time he had many Russian and Latvian friends. He had been granted a three-room apartment, where in one of the rooms was his study, full of scientific materials, books, and magazines. He was very cheerful, and liked to tell Jewish jokes very much. It was a sheer pleasure to sit and talk to him. He felt very young and we loved him very much. We lived very near each other, he frequently came to see us and called on the telephone. When in 1991 the so-called freedom period began, my spouse Anna and Sasha and H. Bregman were the founders of Jewish schools. Anna created the first methodological instructions, first programs, and Sasha analyzed the Jewish national questions. And they created first Jewish schools. Now, unfortunately, the schools have changed. Now the questions of money prevail, and then these questions were not so important. There was one goal - to create a Jewish school, so that Jewish children could learn about Jewish culture, Jewish life, and in general the basics of their national culture. When Sasha died, there was a big funeral ceremony. All the Jewish community came, and the Jewish religious society, such a famous man he was. He died in 1997, and he is buried at the Jewish cemetery.
Open this page