Chausy

Jews lived in Chausy from the mid-17th century. In the early 20th century there were about 2,500 Jews in the town, about half of the total population. Under Soviet rule, as a result of urbanization and industrialization in the USSR, the number of Jews in Chausy declined significantly. By January 1939, only 1,272 Jews, comprising 17.6 percent of the population, remained. At the end of the 1920s two Jewish kolkhozes "Emes" and "Novyi put" were established in the area. Many other Chausy Jews worked in crafts, mainly in shoemaking and sewing cooperatives. In the 1930s the town had a Yiddish school, which was closed down in mid- 1938. A smaller Yiddish school operated in the village of Dranukha, not far from Chausy. After the outbreak of World War II a number of Jewish refugees arrived in Chausy from Nazi-occupied Poland. From the time of the German invasion of the USSR until the town was occupied on July 15, 1941, a number of Chausy Jews managed to escape to the Soviet interior. During the first days of the German occupation four members of the Communist Party and 31 Jews from Chausy were shot to death; the Jews were accused of conspiring with the Communists. Shortly after this, all Jewish inhabitants were concentrated in a ghetto set up in the Kozinki quarter on the edge of the town. The majority of Chausy’s Jews were murdered in the summer and fall of 1941 in two mass operations. Later those Jews who had managed to survive were discovered in hiding and shot. In the summer of 1942 the Germans also killed children from mixed marriages. The Red Army liberated Chausy on June 26, 1944.