Kakhovka

Jews apparently began to settle in Kakhovka in the mid-19th century. In 1897 its 3,000 Jews comprised 40 percent of the total population. Most of the Jews of Kakhovka were merchants or artisans. After the Bolshevik Revolution the occupational structure of the Jews of Kakhovka started to change. Many Kakhovka Jews became salesmen in government enterprises; others started to work in agriculture or the food-processing industry, or became members of the free professions. Many Jews, especially younger ones, left Kakhovka in the 1920s and 1930s for larger cities in search of new work and educational opportunities. There was a Yiddish seven-year school with an affiliated vocational school in Kakhovka in the late 1920s and 1930s and also a Yiddish boarding-school. 1,072 Jews lived in Kakhovka in January 1939, when they comprised 8.5 percent of the total population. Kakhovka was occupied by German forces on September 1, 1941. Immediately after the establishment of a German military administration in the town the local Jews were ordered to register and to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothes. Able-bodied Jews were forced to perform grueling work, such as repairing the Moscow-Simferopol road, digging trenches, etc. The mass murders of Jews started almost immediately after the Germans occupied the town. Already in early September 1941 between 40 and 100 Jewish men were shot. The rest of the Jewish population of the town, mainly women, children, and old people, were murdered soon afterward, either in the second half of September or in October 1941. Jews who succeeded in surviving those massacres but were discovered by Germans and local policemen were murdered in the course of 1941-1942. Apart from the Jews of Kakhovka itself, more than a dozen Jews from the neighboring Chaplinka County were murdered in Kakhovka in late 1941. Kakhovka was liberated by the Red Army on November 2, 1943.