Voronovitsa

Jews started to settle in Voronovitsa in the early 18th century. Due to attacks by the Haidamaks in the second half of the century the Jewish population of Voronovitsa declined. It increased in the course of the 19th century. In 1897 Voronovitsa's 1,411 Jews comprised 46.8 percent of the total population of the town. Most of Voronovitsa's Jews were merchants or artisans.

The Jews of Voronovitsa suffered greatly from the violence of the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia.

In the 1920s there was a three-year Yiddish school in Voronovitsa.

After the Soviet authorities imposed a ban on private trade, many Voronovitsa Jews were compelled to seek new occupations. A number of Jews found employment in the sugar and textile factories in or near the town or in agriculture.

In the early 1930s the Jews of Voronovitsa were hit hard by the Great Famine that ravaged Ukraine. Many Jews, especially younger ones, left Voronovitsa for larger towns, in search of sustenance and also of educational and vocational opportunities.

In 1939 Voronovitsa's 860 Jews comprised 23 percent of the total population.

After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, refugees from the western regions of the USSR arrived in Voronovitsa. German forces occupied Voronovitsa on July 21, 1941. Very few Jews had succeeded in leaving before that. Soon after the start of the occupation the Jews of Voronovitsa were concentrated in an area of the town's market. In the late fall of 1941 Jews deported from Romanian-controlled Bessarabia and Bukovina arrived in Voronovitsa. On November 12, 1941, Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C shot 630 local residents, mostly Jews; 650 more Jews living in Voronovitsa were murdered on December 3 and 27, 1941. In 1942 a labor camp for Highway IV, which was to connect Lvov with Taganrog, was established in Voronovitsa and several hundred inmates from the Pechora death camp in Transnistria were brought there. The inmates of the Voronovitsa camp were murdered in several murder operations in 1942 and early 1943.

Voronovitsa was liberated by the Red Army on March 13, 1944.