Yefingar

Yefingar (Hebrew yafe nahar meaning "beautiful river") was founded in 1807 on the left bank of the Ingul River. It was the first Jewish agricultural colony in the Kherson Province of the Russian Empire and was established by 43 Jewish families from the territory of present-day Belarus. Later, the Russian government began to settle German colonists there to teach the Jews how to farm effectively. Nevertheless, at the end of the 19th century the Jews constituted 91.5 percent of Yefingar's population of 2,038. In 1905, during the peak of the pogroms in the Russian Empire, the Jews of Yefingar created a self-defense force that successfully repelled attacks against the Jewish population of the colony. The Jewish population of Yefingar suffered greatly during the years of revolution and civil war. Many of the colony's Jews were killed in pogroms, while others starved to death or died in epidemics. In 1926 1,528 Jews lived in Yefingar, comprising 90.7 percent of the total population. In the early 1920s two agricultural cooperatives were established in the village, along with enterprises that processed agricultural products. Two kolkhozes, Desyatiletiye Oktyabrya (10th Anniversary of the October Revolution) and Molotov, existed in Yefingar. In 1927 Yefingar became the seat of a Jewish rural council. From 1928 to 1938 there was a Yiddish seven-year school in Yefingar and also a Jewish orphanage and a library. In 1939 the Yiddish school was transformed into a Russian one. The Jewish population of Yefingar continued to decrease in the 1920s and 1930s. Yefingar was occupied by German troops on August 12, 1941. Few Jews were evacuated or left the village on their own before the arrival of the Germans. Almost immediately after the start of the occupation the persecution of Jews started. On September 10, 1941, about 520 Jews living in Yefingar were murdered near the village of Konstantinovka, several kilometers from Yefingar. Yefingar was liberated by the Red Army on March 14, 1944. After the war the name of the village was changed to Pliushchevka.