Skip to website content >

The Jewish Community of Bar

Bar

Бар

Town in Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine

Bar became part of the Russian Empire after the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. Since 1796 until the 1917 Russian Revolution it was a district capital in the region of Podolia.
 

HISTORY

The Jewish community of Bar was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Ukraine, with the first mention of a Jewish presence dating to 1542. A 1556 agreement with the citizens of Bar permitted Jews to own buildings, and granted them most of the same rights and responsibilities as the other residents; the agreement was formally ratified by the Polish king, Sigismund II. Bar’s Jews were permitted to visit other towns in the district for business purposes but were forbidden to provide lodging for Jewish visitors in the city.

The community grew during the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century; in 1648 there were 600 Jewish families living in Bar. Most of the town’s families were wealthy, and during this period, the town’s Jews traded in places as far away as Moldavia.

During the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-1649), many of Bar’s Jews were murdered. Additionally, many were killed by the Cossacks and Tatars in 1651.

In 1717, the bishop granted the Jewish community permission to build a synagogue.

After Bar became part of the Russian Empire, the community grew substantially. The Jewish population numbered 4,442 in 1847. By 1897 it had grown to 5,773 (58% of the total population). In 1910 the Jewish population was 10,450 (46% of the total).

The Jews of Bar were once again subject to anti-Jewish violence in the summer of 1919. A pogrom broke out in Bar, during which 20 Jews were killed.

Religious and communal life came to an end in 1922, when Ukraine came under Soviet rule. Nonetheless, a Yiddish school operated in Bar.

During the interwar period most Jews worked as office workers, artisans, or in one of the three local factories.

In 1926 the Jewish population totaled 5,270 (55% of the total population). In 1939 the Jewish population was 3,869 (41% of the total population).


THE HOLOCAUST

Bar was occupied by the Germans, Italians, and Romanians on July 16, 1941. While Bar itself was administered by the Germans, the train station was part of the Romanian-controlled district of Transnistria. Many Jews from Romania were deported to Bar.

Three ghettos were established in Bar on December 20, 1941; two eventually merged. Most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were shot during mass executions that took place in August and October of 1942. Several dozen families, after first hearing rumors that the Jews would be taken out of the ghettos and killed, fled to Romanian-controlled Kopaigorod, where they were able to survive.

Bar was liberated by the Red Army on March 24, 1944.

POSTWAR

Jewish community was not renewed after the war.

In 1964, former Jews from Bar established two memorials at the murder sites. They also planted trees and fenced off the mass graves.

Jacobo Timerman (1923-1999), author and journalist who defied Argentina’s 1976-1983 military regime and drew international attention to the country’s “Dirty War”, born in the small Ukrainian town of Bar and brought to Argentina by his parents at the age of 5. His famous 1981 book, "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number", documented Argentina’s institutionalized violence against political dissidents who disappeared in the 1970s and ’1980s, at least 100 of whom were journalists.

In 1962 Timerman founded the newsmagazine "Primera Plana", which was inspired by "Time" and "Newsweek". In 1971 he founded the newspaper "La Opinión", which he based on "Le Monde", and edited the paper until it was shut down by the military government in 1977. "La Opinión" was one of the few important newspapers in Argentina to write extensively about government corruption, state-controlled anti-Semitism and repression. The newspaper campaigned tirelessly against the arbitrary arrests and published the habeas corpus presented to the courts by the families of the desaparecidos (disappeared).

Timerman soon attracted enmity from all sides. In his book, Timerman wrote that the newspaper was called “an adversary of the military government for being terrorist, an adversary of mass culture for publishing sophisticated writers, an adversary of Christian morality for publishing leftist writers, an adversary of the left for publishing the work of Soviet dissidents, and an adversary of the family for writing about the sexual habits of young Americans.” The bombing of his offices and home followed anonymous death threats, and the government closed "La Opinión" on numerous occasions between 1973 and 1976.

The military arrested Timerman in April 1977. He underwent grueling interrogations, extended stretches of solitary confinement and systematic torture for almost six months until a military tribunal ruled that no grounds could be established for holding him under arrest. Although he was released from jail the following month, he was placed under house arrest for two more years. Finally, he was stripped of his citizenship and property in 1980 and put aboard a plane to Israel. In "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number", Timerman denounced the country’s military dictatorship and the disappearances, abuses and torture of thousands of Argentinians. The book drew worldwide attention to the atrocious injustices happening in his country.

Timerman returned to Argentina in 1984, one year after democracy was restored, and took over as editor of the daily "La Razón". He again ran into trouble in 1988 when Carlos Saúl Menem, then governor of Rioja province and a presidential candidate, sued him for libel and defamation. He was acquitted in two separate trials. When the Supreme Court of Argentina, acting on President Menem’s request, reopened the case, Timerman fled to Uruguay. The charges against him were finally dropped in April 1996 following international pressure.

Although an enthusiastic Zionist, Timerman was outraged by the First Lebanon War in 1982 and what he saw as the unjust treatment of the Palestinians.

Ukraine

Україна / Ukrayina

A country in eastern Europe, until 1991 part of the Soviet Union.

21st Century

Estimated Jewish population in 2018: 50,000 out of 42,000,000 (0.1%). Main Jewish organizations:

Єврейська Конфедерація України - Jewish Confederation of Ukraine
Phone: 044 584 49 53
Email: jcu.org.ua@gmail.com
Website: http://jcu.org.ua/en

Ваад (Ассоциация еврейских организаций и общин) Украины (VAAD – Asssociation of Jewish Organizations & Communities of Ukraine)
Voloska St, 8/5
Kyiv, Kyivs’ka
Ukraine 04070
Phone/Fax: 38 (044) 248-36-70, 38 (044) 425-97-57/-58/-59/-60
Email: vaadua.office@gmail.com
Website: http://www.vaadua.org/

Vinnitsa

In Ukrainian: Вінниця / Vinnytsia 

A city in Vinnitsa Oblast, Ukraine.

The earliest information available on the Jews of the town is from 1532 about Jewish merchant Mekhel, who traded with Turkish Moldavia in livestock and wool cloth. Until the end of the 18th century, the community remained rather small and suffered from the attacks of the Ukrainian rebels who fought against Polish rule (Chmielnicki, the Haidamacks), the oppression of the Polish governors and mayors, as well as from the wars which brought about the disruption of commerce on the nearby borders. In 1776, 381 Jews belonged to the kahal (a Jewish community council) of Vinnitsa; of these, 190 lived in the town and the rest in the surroundings.

The Russian annexation (1793) resulted in continuous growth of the Jewish population in the town and its region. The census of 1897 found 11,689 Jews (over one-third of the population) living in the town and in 1910, there were 20,257 Jews (45. 5% of the total population). They earned their livelihood mainly in tailoring and from commerce in agricultural produce.

The community of Vinnitsa did not suffer in 1919-20 because the town served as the regional capital of the successive governments in the region. In 1926 there were 21,812 Jews (41%). The yevsektsiya (Jewish sections of the Communist Party) waged a savage campaign to destroy the religious and national life of the Jews of Vinnitsa, and the town became a center of its activities throughout Podolia. A Jewish pedagogic institute was established and during the late 1930s, a communist Yiddish newspaper Proletarisher Emes was published in Vinnitsa.

A few months after the occupation of the town by the Germans, on Rosh Ha-Shana, September 22, 1941, 28,000 Jews of the town and its surroundings were exterminated in Vinnitsa. According to the 1959 census, there were about 19,500 Jews (c. 16% of the total population) in Vinnitsa. The former great synagogue was closed by the authorities in 1957 and converted into a storehouse.

Khmelnytskyi

Хмельницький / Khmelnitzki; Khmelnytskyi 

Until 1954 known as Proskurov or Proskuriv

A city and the administrative center ov Khmelnytskyi Oblast in the historical region of Volhynia, Ukraine.

In 1765 there were 750 Jews in the city who paid poll tax; by 1847 the number had risen to 3,107. With the expansion of the city toward the end of the 19th century, the Jewish population increased, reaching 11,411 (50% of the total population) in 1897. With the retreat of Ukrainian troops before the red army in February 1919, Proskurov suffered one of the most vicious pogroms of the civil war period. Units of local Communist forces, both Ukrainians and Jews, rebelled and attempted to gain control of the railroad station. On the failure of the attempt, Semosenko, hetman of the Ukrainian troops stationed in the city, gave orders to slaughter all the Jews. On February 15th Semosenko's forces marched into the city, methodically killing every Jew they could find. A local priest who begged the soldiers to stop was killed at the door of his own church. Three and a half hours after the soldiers had entered the city, a telegraphed order came from headquarters, calling a halt to the slaughter, but by then 1,500 people had been murdered and thousands injured.

Despite the demands made by representatives of the Jewish community to the Petlyura government, Semosenko was never punished.

There were 13,408 Jews (42% of the population) in Proskurov in 1926, but Jewish communal life has declined under Soviet rule. With the German invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, Proskurov's Jews were herded into a ghetto and murdered; the last on November 30, 1942. The 1959 census recorded 6,200 Jews (10% of the total population), but the real number was probably around 10,000.
In 1970 there was no synagogue but kosher poultry was available.

Shargorod

Pol. Szarogrod; in Jewish sources Sharigrad; in Ukrainian: Шаргород / Sharhorod

Town in Vinnitsa Oblast, Ukraine. Until 1793 within Poland.

An organized Jewish community existed there from the latter half of the 17th century. Both Jewish and gentile inhabitants of Shargorod suffered from continued assaults by the Cossacks. In this period the community erected a magnificent fortified synagogue. When the town was conquered by the Turks toward the end of the 17th century the building was used as a mosque. During the 18th century the Jews of Shargorod played an important role in the trade with Turkey. In 1765 the community numbered 2,210, and was then the largest in Podolia. At the end of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century Shargorod was center of Shabbateanism. The Chasidic leaders Naphtali Herz of Shargorod and Jacob Joseph of Polonnnoye were active in the town, the latter holding rabbinical office until 1748.

In the 19th century the Jews engaged in the trade of agricultural products, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, peddling in the villages of the region, and crafts. In 1881-82 the community suffered from pogroms. The Jewish population numbered 3,570 in 1847, and 3,859 (73% of the total) in 1897. In 1926 the community numbered 2,697 (55.9%).

During the Nazi occupation and under Romanian administration the Jews of Shargorod suffered serious losses. In 1970 Jews were living there but there was no synagogue.

Litin

Lityn, Літин

A town in Podolia, north-west of Vinnitsa, Ukraine.

In 1578 the King of Poland, Stephen Bathory, permitted the owner of the estate of Litin to establish a town on his land and to hold two annual fairs which all the citizens of the land, Christians, Jews, and merchants from foreign countries, would be permitted to attend.

In 1616 there were 88 houses in the town; 12 belonged to Jews. In 1765 there were 481 Jews; in 1847, 1,804, and in 1897, 3,874 (41% of the total population). In May 1919 a Ukrainian gang conducted pogroms in Litin and 180 Jews were killed and Jewish property looted. In 1926, 2,487 Jews lived in the town (30% of the total).

With the Nazi occupation (July 1941) the Jews of Litin were gathered in the ghetto in the district capital of Vinnitsa and killed, together with the other residents of the ghetto (September 22, 1941).

ANU Databases
Jewish Genealogy
Family Names
Jewish Communities
Visual Documentation
Jewish Music Center
Place
אA
אA
אA
The Jewish Community of Bar

Bar

Бар

Town in Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine

Bar became part of the Russian Empire after the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. Since 1796 until the 1917 Russian Revolution it was a district capital in the region of Podolia.
 

HISTORY

The Jewish community of Bar was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Ukraine, with the first mention of a Jewish presence dating to 1542. A 1556 agreement with the citizens of Bar permitted Jews to own buildings, and granted them most of the same rights and responsibilities as the other residents; the agreement was formally ratified by the Polish king, Sigismund II. Bar’s Jews were permitted to visit other towns in the district for business purposes but were forbidden to provide lodging for Jewish visitors in the city.

The community grew during the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century; in 1648 there were 600 Jewish families living in Bar. Most of the town’s families were wealthy, and during this period, the town’s Jews traded in places as far away as Moldavia.

During the Chmielnicki massacres (1648-1649), many of Bar’s Jews were murdered. Additionally, many were killed by the Cossacks and Tatars in 1651.

In 1717, the bishop granted the Jewish community permission to build a synagogue.

After Bar became part of the Russian Empire, the community grew substantially. The Jewish population numbered 4,442 in 1847. By 1897 it had grown to 5,773 (58% of the total population). In 1910 the Jewish population was 10,450 (46% of the total).

The Jews of Bar were once again subject to anti-Jewish violence in the summer of 1919. A pogrom broke out in Bar, during which 20 Jews were killed.

Religious and communal life came to an end in 1922, when Ukraine came under Soviet rule. Nonetheless, a Yiddish school operated in Bar.

During the interwar period most Jews worked as office workers, artisans, or in one of the three local factories.

In 1926 the Jewish population totaled 5,270 (55% of the total population). In 1939 the Jewish population was 3,869 (41% of the total population).


THE HOLOCAUST

Bar was occupied by the Germans, Italians, and Romanians on July 16, 1941. While Bar itself was administered by the Germans, the train station was part of the Romanian-controlled district of Transnistria. Many Jews from Romania were deported to Bar.

Three ghettos were established in Bar on December 20, 1941; two eventually merged. Most of the ghetto’s inhabitants were shot during mass executions that took place in August and October of 1942. Several dozen families, after first hearing rumors that the Jews would be taken out of the ghettos and killed, fled to Romanian-controlled Kopaigorod, where they were able to survive.

Bar was liberated by the Red Army on March 24, 1944.

POSTWAR

Jewish community was not renewed after the war.

In 1964, former Jews from Bar established two memorials at the murder sites. They also planted trees and fenced off the mass graves.

Written by researchers of ANU Museum of the Jewish People
Jacobo Timerman

Jacobo Timerman (1923-1999), author and journalist who defied Argentina’s 1976-1983 military regime and drew international attention to the country’s “Dirty War”, born in the small Ukrainian town of Bar and brought to Argentina by his parents at the age of 5. His famous 1981 book, "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number", documented Argentina’s institutionalized violence against political dissidents who disappeared in the 1970s and ’1980s, at least 100 of whom were journalists.

In 1962 Timerman founded the newsmagazine "Primera Plana", which was inspired by "Time" and "Newsweek". In 1971 he founded the newspaper "La Opinión", which he based on "Le Monde", and edited the paper until it was shut down by the military government in 1977. "La Opinión" was one of the few important newspapers in Argentina to write extensively about government corruption, state-controlled anti-Semitism and repression. The newspaper campaigned tirelessly against the arbitrary arrests and published the habeas corpus presented to the courts by the families of the desaparecidos (disappeared).

Timerman soon attracted enmity from all sides. In his book, Timerman wrote that the newspaper was called “an adversary of the military government for being terrorist, an adversary of mass culture for publishing sophisticated writers, an adversary of Christian morality for publishing leftist writers, an adversary of the left for publishing the work of Soviet dissidents, and an adversary of the family for writing about the sexual habits of young Americans.” The bombing of his offices and home followed anonymous death threats, and the government closed "La Opinión" on numerous occasions between 1973 and 1976.

The military arrested Timerman in April 1977. He underwent grueling interrogations, extended stretches of solitary confinement and systematic torture for almost six months until a military tribunal ruled that no grounds could be established for holding him under arrest. Although he was released from jail the following month, he was placed under house arrest for two more years. Finally, he was stripped of his citizenship and property in 1980 and put aboard a plane to Israel. In "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number", Timerman denounced the country’s military dictatorship and the disappearances, abuses and torture of thousands of Argentinians. The book drew worldwide attention to the atrocious injustices happening in his country.

Timerman returned to Argentina in 1984, one year after democracy was restored, and took over as editor of the daily "La Razón". He again ran into trouble in 1988 when Carlos Saúl Menem, then governor of Rioja province and a presidential candidate, sued him for libel and defamation. He was acquitted in two separate trials. When the Supreme Court of Argentina, acting on President Menem’s request, reopened the case, Timerman fled to Uruguay. The charges against him were finally dropped in April 1996 following international pressure.

Although an enthusiastic Zionist, Timerman was outraged by the First Lebanon War in 1982 and what he saw as the unjust treatment of the Palestinians.

Ukraine

Ukraine

Україна / Ukrayina

A country in eastern Europe, until 1991 part of the Soviet Union.

21st Century

Estimated Jewish population in 2018: 50,000 out of 42,000,000 (0.1%). Main Jewish organizations:

Єврейська Конфедерація України - Jewish Confederation of Ukraine
Phone: 044 584 49 53
Email: jcu.org.ua@gmail.com
Website: http://jcu.org.ua/en

Ваад (Ассоциация еврейских организаций и общин) Украины (VAAD – Asssociation of Jewish Organizations & Communities of Ukraine)
Voloska St, 8/5
Kyiv, Kyivs’ka
Ukraine 04070
Phone/Fax: 38 (044) 248-36-70, 38 (044) 425-97-57/-58/-59/-60
Email: vaadua.office@gmail.com
Website: http://www.vaadua.org/

Vinnitsa

Vinnitsa

In Ukrainian: Вінниця / Vinnytsia 

A city in Vinnitsa Oblast, Ukraine.

The earliest information available on the Jews of the town is from 1532 about Jewish merchant Mekhel, who traded with Turkish Moldavia in livestock and wool cloth. Until the end of the 18th century, the community remained rather small and suffered from the attacks of the Ukrainian rebels who fought against Polish rule (Chmielnicki, the Haidamacks), the oppression of the Polish governors and mayors, as well as from the wars which brought about the disruption of commerce on the nearby borders. In 1776, 381 Jews belonged to the kahal (a Jewish community council) of Vinnitsa; of these, 190 lived in the town and the rest in the surroundings.

The Russian annexation (1793) resulted in continuous growth of the Jewish population in the town and its region. The census of 1897 found 11,689 Jews (over one-third of the population) living in the town and in 1910, there were 20,257 Jews (45. 5% of the total population). They earned their livelihood mainly in tailoring and from commerce in agricultural produce.

The community of Vinnitsa did not suffer in 1919-20 because the town served as the regional capital of the successive governments in the region. In 1926 there were 21,812 Jews (41%). The yevsektsiya (Jewish sections of the Communist Party) waged a savage campaign to destroy the religious and national life of the Jews of Vinnitsa, and the town became a center of its activities throughout Podolia. A Jewish pedagogic institute was established and during the late 1930s, a communist Yiddish newspaper Proletarisher Emes was published in Vinnitsa.

A few months after the occupation of the town by the Germans, on Rosh Ha-Shana, September 22, 1941, 28,000 Jews of the town and its surroundings were exterminated in Vinnitsa. According to the 1959 census, there were about 19,500 Jews (c. 16% of the total population) in Vinnitsa. The former great synagogue was closed by the authorities in 1957 and converted into a storehouse.

Khmelnytskyi

Khmelnytskyi

Хмельницький / Khmelnitzki; Khmelnytskyi 

Until 1954 known as Proskurov or Proskuriv

A city and the administrative center ov Khmelnytskyi Oblast in the historical region of Volhynia, Ukraine.

In 1765 there were 750 Jews in the city who paid poll tax; by 1847 the number had risen to 3,107. With the expansion of the city toward the end of the 19th century, the Jewish population increased, reaching 11,411 (50% of the total population) in 1897. With the retreat of Ukrainian troops before the red army in February 1919, Proskurov suffered one of the most vicious pogroms of the civil war period. Units of local Communist forces, both Ukrainians and Jews, rebelled and attempted to gain control of the railroad station. On the failure of the attempt, Semosenko, hetman of the Ukrainian troops stationed in the city, gave orders to slaughter all the Jews. On February 15th Semosenko's forces marched into the city, methodically killing every Jew they could find. A local priest who begged the soldiers to stop was killed at the door of his own church. Three and a half hours after the soldiers had entered the city, a telegraphed order came from headquarters, calling a halt to the slaughter, but by then 1,500 people had been murdered and thousands injured.

Despite the demands made by representatives of the Jewish community to the Petlyura government, Semosenko was never punished.

There were 13,408 Jews (42% of the population) in Proskurov in 1926, but Jewish communal life has declined under Soviet rule. With the German invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, Proskurov's Jews were herded into a ghetto and murdered; the last on November 30, 1942. The 1959 census recorded 6,200 Jews (10% of the total population), but the real number was probably around 10,000.
In 1970 there was no synagogue but kosher poultry was available.

Shargorod

Shargorod

Pol. Szarogrod; in Jewish sources Sharigrad; in Ukrainian: Шаргород / Sharhorod

Town in Vinnitsa Oblast, Ukraine. Until 1793 within Poland.

An organized Jewish community existed there from the latter half of the 17th century. Both Jewish and gentile inhabitants of Shargorod suffered from continued assaults by the Cossacks. In this period the community erected a magnificent fortified synagogue. When the town was conquered by the Turks toward the end of the 17th century the building was used as a mosque. During the 18th century the Jews of Shargorod played an important role in the trade with Turkey. In 1765 the community numbered 2,210, and was then the largest in Podolia. At the end of the 17th and the first half of the 18th century Shargorod was center of Shabbateanism. The Chasidic leaders Naphtali Herz of Shargorod and Jacob Joseph of Polonnnoye were active in the town, the latter holding rabbinical office until 1748.

In the 19th century the Jews engaged in the trade of agricultural products, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, peddling in the villages of the region, and crafts. In 1881-82 the community suffered from pogroms. The Jewish population numbered 3,570 in 1847, and 3,859 (73% of the total) in 1897. In 1926 the community numbered 2,697 (55.9%).

During the Nazi occupation and under Romanian administration the Jews of Shargorod suffered serious losses. In 1970 Jews were living there but there was no synagogue.

Litin

Litin

Lityn, Літин

A town in Podolia, north-west of Vinnitsa, Ukraine.

In 1578 the King of Poland, Stephen Bathory, permitted the owner of the estate of Litin to establish a town on his land and to hold two annual fairs which all the citizens of the land, Christians, Jews, and merchants from foreign countries, would be permitted to attend.

In 1616 there were 88 houses in the town; 12 belonged to Jews. In 1765 there were 481 Jews; in 1847, 1,804, and in 1897, 3,874 (41% of the total population). In May 1919 a Ukrainian gang conducted pogroms in Litin and 180 Jews were killed and Jewish property looted. In 1926, 2,487 Jews lived in the town (30% of the total).

With the Nazi occupation (July 1941) the Jews of Litin were gathered in the ghetto in the district capital of Vinnitsa and killed, together with the other residents of the ghetto (September 22, 1941).