Bobruysk

A Jewish presence in Bobruysk is first mentioned at the end of the seventeenth century. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Bobruysk was an important cultural, religious and political center of Russian Jewry, as well as both the Bund and Zionist movements.

The Jewish population of Bobruysk suffered from the calamities of the Soviet- Polish War (1919-1921). In the interwar period, Yiddish schools and a Yiddish court department operated in the city but were closed at the end of 1930s. Many of the city’s Jews were employed in the textile and timber industries. In the 1920s, the last religious books published in the USSR was printed in Bobruysk.

In January 1939, 26,703 Jews lived in Bobruysk, accounting for 31.7 percent of its total population. Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland soon increased this number.

On June 28, 1941, Bobruysk was occupied by German troops. Only a small part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate itself to the Soviet hinterland. Almost immediately after the conquest, the Germans issued an order compelling Jews to wear a yellow armband. From the first weeks, they murdered large groups of Jews in unknown places. Thus on August 5, 1941, SD members and soldiers of Police Battalion 307 assembled a large group of Jewish men under the pretext of transferring them to a labor camp. They were murdered in unknown place. In early August 1941, a ghetto was established on the open space near the airfield in the southeastern part of the city, and Jews from Starye Dorogi, Slutsk, Krichev and Glusk were brought there. The majority of Bobruysk Jewry was murdered in two big operations carried out in September and November 1941.

Between June and August 1942 about 1,500 Jewish men were sent from Warsaw ghetto and incarcerated in concentration camp near Bobruysk. Most of them were shot in the vicinity of Bobruysk.

Bobruysk was liberated by the Red Army on June 29, 1944.