Gorodnya

Jews settled in Gorodnya in the late 17th century. As a result of a pogrom in 1703 the Jews abandoned the town and returned there only in the early 19th century. In 1918 soldiers from the Central Ukrainian Council carried out a pogrom that killed two Jews in Gorodnya. Between 1918 and 1920 several additional waves of pogroms staged by various armed groups forced Jews to leave the town. Sometimes, for example, in 1905 and in 1921, due to activity of temporary Jewish self-defence units local Jews managed to prevent pogroms. Most Jews in Gorodnya were artisans or merchants (until private commerce was forbiden by the Soviet authorities at the beginning of the 1930s); others worked at Gorodnya’s porcelain factory. The number of Jews in the town was 731 in 1939, when they comprised 8 percent of the town’s total population. Gorodnya was occupied by German troops on August 28, 1941, by which time many Jewish families had managed to leave. The remaining Jews were required to register by the German authorities, who ordered the Jews to wear a white arm band with a yellow star and recruited them for forced labor. In September 1941 21 Jews were shot by Sonderkommando 7b in the Gorodnya area and in October there was a mass shooting of Jews near the village of Aleshinskoye. Some Jews from Gorodnya were shot by Germans in early November 1941; the location is not known. Later the remaining Jews in Gorodnya were concentrated in one street under the supervision of German and Ukrainian police and forced to live there until mid-December 1941, when they were all murdered by Germans. Gorodnya was liberated by the Red Army on September 24, 1944.