Pavlograd

Jews started to settle in Pavlograd at the end of the 18th century. In 1897 4,392 Jews lived in the city, comprising 27.8 percent of the total population. At the beginning of the 20th century many local factories, shops, and warehouses were owned by Jews. The Jews in Pavlograd suffered from the calamities of the revolutionary years and the civil war in Russia. In December 1918 Makhno's bands staged a pogrom there that claimed many victims. Until the 1930s there was a Yiddish school in Pavlograd. In 1935 the language of instruction in this school became Russian, with Yiddish being studied as an additional language. In 1929 the Jewish kolkhoz "Frayhayt" (Freedom) was founded near Pavlograd. In the 1920s and 1930s many Pavlograd Jews were artisans or worked in the printing or the leather industry. During the Soviet period the Jewish population of Pavlograd started to decrease. In 1939 2,510 Jews lived in Pavlograd, comprising 7.4 percent of the total population. After the German attack on Poland many Jewish refuges from Poland arrived in Pavlograd. The Germans occupied Pavlograd on October 11, 1941. An indeterminate number of Jews managed to escape or evacuate to the east before the occupation started. Those who remained were registered immediately by the occupation authorities, compelled to sew yellow Stars of David onto their clothes, and forced to carry out physically exhausting work. In late 1941 the Jews of Pavlograd, along with Jews from other localities, were concentrated in a labor camp on the grounds of Plant No. 359 in the suburb of Gorodishche. The inmates of this camp were forced to perform grueling forced labor. The Jews of Pavlograd were murdered from the first weeks of the German occupation of the city. In November 1941 670 Jewish refugees from Poland were murdered. After the Jews were incarcerated in the labor camp, they were murdered at this site or were regularly deported to different localities in the vicinity of Pavlograd and murdered there. In June 1942 the Germans liquidated the Jewish labor camp in Gorodishche. Pavlograd was liberated by the Red Army on February 17, 1943, reoccupied by German forces on February 22, 1943, then liberated again by Soviet forces on October 17, 1943.