Vitebsk, Soviet Union, Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, Belarus
Before World War II Viciebsk had a significant Jewish population: according to Russian census of 1897, out of the total population of 65,900, Jews constituted 34,400 (around 52% percent).[4] The most famous of its Jewish natives was the painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985).
In 1919 Viciebsk was proclaimed to be part of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia (January to February 1919), but was soon transferred to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later to the short-lived Lithuanian–Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (February to July 1919). In 1924 it was returned to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
During World War II the city came under Nazi German occupation (10 July 1941 – 26 June 1944). Much of the old city was destroyed in the ensuing battles between the Germans and Red Army soldiers. Most of the local Jews perished in the Viciebsk Ghetto massacre of October 1941. Vitebsk Ghetto or Witebsk Ghetto was a short-lived ghetto in the town of Vitebsk in modern-day Belarus. It was created soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union; immediately after the Nazis took control of the town on 11 July 1941.
Approximately 16,000 Jews lived in the ghetto.[1] In October, the Nazi administrators declared that the poor conditions in the ghetto created a health hazard for local inhabitants and that an epidemic had started in the ghetto; in fact, this declaration was a pretext to move and massacre the Jews. Less than three months later, on 8 October 1941, the Nazis started a massacre of the Vitebsk Jews, which ended on 11 October with the deaths of most of the ghetto's inhabitants (sources vary as to the exact number). Many bodies were disposed in the nearby Vitba river. From July 11, 1941 to June 26, 1944, the city was under German occupation. An underground anti-fascist organization operated in the city. The history of the struggle of the inhabitants of Vitebsk with the invaders is devoted to the book The Vitebsk Underground, and 2 documentary expositions of the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local Lore [13] .
In the summer and autumn of 1941 in the occupied Vitebsk, the German fascist invaders and their accomplices, the policemen, destroyed the prisoners of the Vitebsk ghetto - up to 20,000 people: the elderly, women, children. The Tulovsky (Ilovsky) ravine became the main place of executions.
In October 1943, Soviet troops reached the distant approaches to Vitebsk. In the winter of 1943-1944, they repeatedly tried to capture the city (the Gorodok operation (1943) , the Vitebsk offensive operation ), but could only reach the nearest approaches and embrace it deeply from the north.
On June 23, 1944, the troops of the 39th Army of the 3rd Belorussian Front under the command of Lieutenant General Lyudnikov I.I. and the 43rd Army of the 1st Baltic Front under the command of Lieutenant General Beloborodov A.P. launched the offensive operation Bagration .
On the night of June 25, 1944, in the area of the village of Gnezdilovo, the two armies joined together, forming the Vitebsk boiler, into which 5 German divisions fell. The war brought great losses to Vitebsk. Of the 167.3 thousand people who lived in it in 1939, after the liberation only 118 inhabitants remained. It was destroyed 93% of the housing stock of the city. In the first postwar five-year period the city was rebuilt. Its industrial complex covered machinery, light industry, and machine tools.
Becoming Soviet Jews
May 17, 2015
Minsk, the present capital of Belarus, was a heavily Jewish city in the decades between the world wars. Recasting our understanding of Soviet Jewish history, Becoming Soviet Jews demonstrates that the often violent social changes enforced by the communist project did not destroy continuities with pre-Revolutionary forms of Jewish life in Minsk. Using Minsk as a case study of the Sovietization of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement, Dr. Elissa Bemporad reveals the ways in which many Jews acculturated to Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s while remaining committed to older patterns of Jewish identity, such as Yiddish culture and education, attachment to the traditions of the Jewish workers' Bund, circumcision, and kosher slaughter. This pioneering study also illuminates the reshaping of gender relations on the Jewish street and explores Jewish everyday life and identity during the years of the Great Terror.
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Presenter: Dr. Elissa Bemporad