Stalindorf

Stalindorf was established as a Jewish agricultural colony in 1924, by migrants from various parts of Ukraine and Belarus, under the name of Chemerisk (after Alexander Cheremiskii, the secretary of the Central Bureau of the Jewish Section (Evsektsiia) of the Russian Communist Party). In 1930 it became part of the newly created Izluchistoye Jewish ethnic county, which the same year was renamed Stalindorf County. In 1931 Chemerisk became a county center and its name was changed to Stalindorf. Most of Stalindorf’s Jews worked on three kolkhozes, “Ukrainian Red Cross”, “Kombayn,” and “Chemeriskii”, which in 1930 were united into the kolzhoz of “Birobidzhanets.” In the 1930s Stalindorf had a seven-year Yiddish school and a county newspaper in Yiddish “Stalindorfer Emes” was published there. Some of the deliberations in various county institutions in Stalindorf took place in Yiddish. In the late 1930s Jewish life in Stalindorf began to be suppressed: "Stalindorfer Emes” was closed down and the Yiddish school became a general secondary school. In the second half of the 1930s many Jews started to leave Stalindorf. In 1939 only 748 Jews remained in the village, where they comprised 47.7 percent of the total population. Few Stalindorf Jews succeeded in leaving before the Germans occupied the village on August 16, 1941. The murder of Jews in Stalindorf County started late in that year. The Jews of the villages were incarcerated in a labor camp. In April or May 1942 about 450 Jews from Stalindorf and several other villages in the area were murdered near the village of Novo-Pavlovka. Jews from Stalindorf County continued to be murdered until well into 1943. Stalindorf was liberated by the Red Army on February 2, 1944. After the war the name of the village was changed to Stalinsk and later to Zhovtnevoye.