Alushta

Jews were officially allowed to reside in Alushta only in 1903. In 1910 they numbered 544, comprising 13 percent of the total population. Local Jews were mainly merchants, craftsmen, doctors, or clerks. In 1939 the 251 Jews of Alushta comprised 2.6 percent of the total population. In all of Alushta County there were 277 Jews. On the eve of the German occupation of the area about 120 Jews managed to leave Alushta for eastern parts of the USSR while another 20 fled to the Yalta region. The Germans occupied the town on November 4, 1941 and the Jews were ordered to wear an armband with the Star of David. On November 24, 1941 a unit of Sonderkommando 10b shot to death 30 Jews from Alushta and Biuk-Lambat, along with some Communists, as a reprisal for a partisans raid on a German military convoy. In early December 1941 about 250 Jews from Alushta and its surroundings were shot to death by an Sonderkommando 11b murder squad in the park of Trade Union Sanatorium No. 7. Alushta was liberated by the Red Army on April 14, 1944.