Borisov

The first Jews probably settled in Borisov in the late 15th–early 16th centuries. The census of 1776 lists 249 Jewish taxpayers in the town. In 1897, 7,722 Jews lived in Borisov, comprising 51 percent of the town's total population. In the early 20th century, Borisov had two Yiddish schools and a Talmud Torah with 140 pupils. Jews played an important role in the town's industrial development. The owners of all the local match factories were Jews, as were the majority of their employees. The Jews of Borisov were robbed and mistreated in the summer of 1920, when the town came under Polish occupation, and 300 local Jews were wounded in a pogrom staged by Polish soldiers. During the Soviet period the town had two seven-year Yiddish schools and a Yiddish primary school. In 1931, fifty-four local Jewish families worked at the Mayak Sotsializma (Lighthouse of Socialism) collective farm. In 1939, the town was home to 10,011 Jews, who made up 20.4 percent of the total population. Borisov was occupied by the Germans on July 2, 1941. Fifty Jews were shot in the first murder operation, in August 1941. At the end of that month, the remaining Jewish population of 7,000 was forced into a ghetto, which had been set up in the northern section of the town on August 27, 1941. The non-Jewish residents of that neighborhood were moved into Jewish-owned houses outside the ghetto area. The ghetto comprised several blocks of houses bounded by Svoboda, Sovetskaya, and Krasnoarmeyskaya Streets. It was surrounded with barbed wire and guarded by Belarusian policemen, under the command of the SD. The inmates were required to perform forced labor; they received extremely meager food rations, and were forbidden to have any contact with non-Jews. During the period from the occupation of Borisov in July 1941 to late October that year, several groups of ghetto inmates were murdered in the town. The Jews would be taken out of the ghetto in groups, on the pretext of being sent to their daily work, but none of them ever returned to the ghetto. SD reports mention groups of 118, 176, and 321 Jews being murdered in Borisov beginning in September 1941. However, the site of these massacres is unknown. The Borisov Ghetto was liquidated on October 20–21, 1941. According to German sources, 1,500–2,000 Jewish artisans were kept alive at the time, but they were shot later, in December 1941. According to some sources, a small group of specialists were sent to the Minsk Ghetto. Borisov was liberated by the Red Army on July 1, 1944.