Sirotino

A Jewish presence in Sirotino was first mentioned in regard to the first half of 19th century. In 1897 1,766 Jews lived in Sirotino, comprising 89 percent of the town's total population. In 1908 a large fire destroyed most of the houses in the town and the synagogues. In 1923 only 660 Jews remained in the town. Subsequently, the Jewish population of Sirotino continued to decline due to the migration of mainly young, Jews to cities. Under Soviet rule most local Jews were craftsmen, agricultural workers or, in the 1920s, merchants. In the late 1920s and early 1930s a mixed Jewish-non Jewish kolkhoz named after Moisei Uritsky (the Jewish Bolshevik who headed the Petrograd Cheka) operated in the vicinity of Sirotino and there was a 4-year Yiddish school in the town. Many Jews succeeded in leaving the town before the arrival of German troops in early July 1941 . According to some testimonies, the first Jewish victims of the Germans consisted of a group of men who were murdered in gas vans. The remaining Jews were ordered to wear yellow armbands and forced into a ghetto consisting of several houses on the town's outskirts. The ghetto inmates were allowed to leave the ghetto during the daytime. The ghetto was regularly raided by Germans and local auxiliary policemen in order to loot Jewish property. The inmates were forced to perform various types of work, maltreated, and killed. Some elderly Jews were forced to burn Torah scrolls in public. In the autumn or winter of 1941 (according to different sources) about 200 Jews of Sirotino were murdered outside the town. Sirotino was liberated by the Red Army on June 23, 1944.