Dzerzhinsk

Until 1932 Dzerzhinsk was known as Koydanov. The origins of the Jewish community there dates to the mid-seventeenth century. During the Soviet-Polish war, on July 10-12, 1920 the local Jews suffered a pogrom carried out by retreating Polish troops. The property of 400 Jewish families was damaged (synagogues, houses, and shops were burned down, and property looted). Dzerzhinsk was the birthplace of Avrom Reyzen, a Yiddish prose writer, poet, and editor, and his brother Zalman Reyzen, a scholar of Yiddish language and literature, editor, journalist, and cultural figure. There was a Yiddish school in Dzerzhinsk which, until the late 1920s bore the name of Avrom Reyzen (who had emigrated to the USA). Reyzen visited the Soviet Union and the school in 1928. The following year he publicly spoke against the Soviet policy that justified the 1929 Arab attacks on the Jews in Hebron in Palestine. For that reason Reyzen was considered an enemy of the Soviet regime and the school’s name was changed. In 1939 Dzerzhinsk's 1,314 Jews comprised 15 percent of the total population. Dzerzhinsk was occupied by the Germans on June 28, 1941. Soon after the occupation began the Jewish men were rounded up under the pretext of being taken for forced labor. A short while later it was learned that they had all been murdered near Klypovshchina village. The remaining Jews of Dzerzhinsk were murdered between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1942. The Red Army liberated the town on July 7, 1944.