Gritsev

Jews settled in Gritsev (or Ritsov in Yiddish) in the 17th century. In 1897 the Jewish population was 979 or 97 percent of the total. The Jews of the town suffered a pogrom on September 21, 1917. Under the Soviets a Yiddish school operated in the town until the end of the 1930s. In 1939 the town's Jewish population of 1,095 comprised 36.1 percent of total. The Germans captured the town on July 5, 1941. Shortly afterwards two groups of Jewish men were murdered by the Germans and members of Ukrainian auxiliary police. The Jews of Gritsev were ordered to place a large Star of David on the front of their homes and to wear a yellow patch on their clothes. In the first days of August 1941 a ghetto surrounded with barbed wire was set up on one of the town's streets and a Jewish elder was appointed. Every day the men were taken from the ghetto to perform hard physical labor, such as chopping wood, while the women were taken to clean the local commandant's and police offices. On August 4 286 Jewish men were separated from their families (apparently along with some women) and shot to death in the Gritsev forest by a Waffen SS unit. Apparently in May 1942, Jews from Gritsev were transferred to the Starokonstantinov ghetto and later murdered outside the town, along with Jews from Starokonstantinov, Staraya Sinyava, and Ostropol. In 1942 14 Jews from Gritsev, led by Yitzhak Bilyk, joined the partisans but most of them were killed in combat. Gritsev was liberated by the Red Army on March 6, 1944.