My great grandparents escaped persecution while the Czar was still in power. I want to learn more about them and there ancestors but my mom told me all records about jews were destroyed.
The problem is that there were frequent violent pogroms against Jewish villages. It isn’t so much that anyone set out to destroy the records themselves; it’s that everything got destroyed with depressing regularity. Further, post-revolution, religion was banned. Synagogues were seized or destroyed and with them, any records of Jewish life.