Izyaslav

There was already a relatively large Jewish community in Izyaslav in the 17th century. In 1648 the local Jews suffered at the hands of Bogdan Chmielnitsky's Cossack troops. In 1705-1708 Jews of Izyaslav were attacked in pogroms by the Haidamaks. In 1897 the Jewish population was 5,998, or 47 percent of the total.In November 1917 the Jews of Izyaslav suffered another pogrom. Under Soviet rule many Jews worked at state owned enterprises. A government school with instruction conducted in Yiddish operated in the town in the late 1930s. In 1939 the Jewish population of 3,208 comprised 28 percent of the total population. The Germans occupied Izyaslav on July 5, 1941. At the beginning of the war some refugees from Poland and the western parts of Ukraine arrived in the town; only few local Jews managed to escape to the Soviet interior. The remaining Jews were ordered to wear yellow badges on their chests and backs. Many of them were made to perform forced labor.

In August 1941 the members of Police Regiment South shot to death hundreds of local Jews in the forest outside the town.

After this murder operation a ghetto, comprising about 20 homes and surrounded with barbed wire, was set up in the old part of the town for the remaining Jews and ones from the town of Belogorodka and other nearby localities. The Germans appointed Avraham Minevich as Jewish elder. Overcrowding and starvation in the ghetto contributed to a high mortality rate. Apparently in June 1942, during the liquidation of the ghetto, the inmates were shot to death in the forest near Soshnoye village. A group of skilled workers was allowed to remain in the town in one building.

In the fall of 1942 several Jews who had managed to hide during the June murder operation were taken by Ukrainian policemen and shot to death at the same murder site. On January 1 or 2, 1943 the last remaining Jews in Izyaslav, the "specialists," were murdered at the site as well. Izyaslav was liberated by the Red Army on February 28, 1944.