Sudilkov

Jews settled in Sudilkov in the 17th century. In 1705-1706 they suffered from attacks by Cossacks. In 1798 a Jewish printing house was established in the town. Sudilkov had a long tradition of manufacturing tallesim (Jewish prayer shawls). In 1897 the Jewish population of Sudilkov was 2,713, comprising 48.9 percent of the total population. Pogroms were carried out against the Jews in 1917 and 1919. Under Soviet rule in the 1920s a cooperative that was officially given permission to produce textiles in fact produced tallesim. In 1930 a Jewish kolkhoz was founded near the town, and during the 1920s and 1930s a Yiddish school operated there. In 1939 Sudilkov's Jews numbered 1,311, comprising 20.2 percent of the total population. The Germans captured Sudilkov in early July 1941. Several days later some refugees from Poland and Western Ukraine arrived in the town. The Jews were ordered to wear yellow badges on their clothes. The young Jewish men were taken to perform different kinds of forced labor and all the Jews were restricted to living in specified areas of the town. On August 20, 1941 members of the 45th Reserve Police Battalion murdered 471 Jews, mostly young men and women, outside the town. In January 1942 the remaining Jews of Sudilkov, mainly women and children, were taken by Ukrainian auxiliary police and members of the gendarmerie (German rural police) to the Shepetovka ghetto and murdered, along with the Jews from Shepetovka and nearby localities, outside Shepetovka in the summer of 1942. During the round up a group of old men and women was shot to death on the spot and their bodies thrown into the cellar of a house in the town. Sudilkov was liberated by the Red Army in February 1944.