Novaya Odessa

Jews settled in Novaya Odessa in the late 19th century. In 1897 1,010 Jews lived in the town, where they comprised 18.3 percent of the total population. By the end of the 1930s a majority of the Jews had left Novaya Odessa: in 1939 the remaining 228 Jews comprised only 3.8 percent of the population. In the interwar period there was a Yiddish school in Novaya Odessa that was closed down in the late 1930s. German and Hungarian troops occupied Novaya Odessa on August 12, 1941. Most of Novaya Odessa's Jews managed to leave before the arrival of these forces. In September of the same year a ghetto was established in Novaya Odessa in a large courtyard between houses on the town's main street. Jews from Novaya Odessa itself and from the villages of the County, along with refugees from Bessarabia, were concentrated there. The ghetto inmates were forced to sew Stars of David onto their clothes. They were brutally maltreated and forced to perform grueling work. The Novaya Odessa ghetto existed for only a very short period of time. In late September and early October 1941 125 of its inmates were murdered outside of town. The Jews from Novaya Odessa itself and from the County who had not been killed in the mass-murders of September-October 1941 were murdered in 1942. Novaya Odessa was liberated by the Red Army on March 16, 1944.