Fraydorf

Fraydorf ("free village" in Yiddish) was a Jewish agricultural settlement established in 1928. In October 1930 the town became the center of a county that was proclaimed to be an ethnically Jewish entity. In the same year a Jewish kolkhoz was established in Fraydorf. Most of Fraydorf's inhabitants were agricultural or small-scale industrial workers. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a Yiddish secondary school in Fraydorf which served the town and surrounding localities, as well as a Jewish rural council. In the 1930s a Jewish pedagogical seminary and a technical school for machine operators, both with Yiddish as the language of instruction, were established in the town. Starting in 1931 the newspaper "Leninveg" (Lenin's Way) was published in Yiddish and Russian. In the late 1930s some non-Jews came to live in Fraydorf and, at the same time, many Jews left. In 1939 450 Jews lived in the town, comrpising 41.5 percent of the total population. Many Jews succeeded in leaving before the arrival of German forces in late October 1941. At the end of the year the few Jews who remained in Fraydorf, as well as Jews from Fraydorf County, were murdered at wells near the town. In February 1942 5 Jews (men and women) accused of spying were murdered near Fraydorf by members of the German 683rd Feldgendarmerie detachment. Fraydorf was liberated by the Red Army on April 14, 1944.