Murovano Kurilovtsy

Jews started to settle in Murovannye Kurilovtsy in the second half of the 18th century. 1,410 Jews lived in Murovannye Kurilovtsy in 1897, when they constituted 32.5 percent of the total population. At the turn of the century Murovannye Kurilovtsy had a Jewish state-sponsored school with Russian as the language of instruction. The Jews of Murovannye Kurilovtsy suffered greatly from the violence during the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia. Many of them were forced to abandon the town in the aftermath of a 1917 pogrom but returned when the situation stabilized. In the early 1920s a branch of the Zionist HeHalutz organization was active in Murovannye Kurilovtsy, providing local Jews with agricultural training in preparation for emigration to Palestine. The imposition by the Soviet authorities of a ban on all forms of private economic activity at the end of the 1920s aggravated the economic situation of many of the town's Jews. The artisans were forced to join cooperatives, while merchants switched to other occupations. Some Jews found employment in government or municipal service, while others turned to agriculture. In the late 1920s a Jewish kolkhoz was established in Murovannye Kurilovtsy; in the 1930s it merged with a Ukrainian collective farm. During this period Murovannye Kurilovtsy had a Jewish rural council that conducted its deliberations in Yiddish and promoted various Yiddish cultural activities. The Jewish council supervised the local Yiddish school that operated from the early 1920s to the late 1930s. In 1933 the Jews of Murovannye Kurilovtsy suffered greatly during the Great Famine in Ukraine. In 1939 the town's 1,014 Jews constituted 25.2 percent of the total population. Few Jews of Murovannye Kurilovtsy succeeded in fleeing to the Soviet interior after German forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. German troops occupied the town on July 17, 1941. Initially troops from Germany's ally Hungary were stationed in Murovannye Kurilovtsy. These Hungarian soldiers prevented local Ukrainians from staging a pogrom against the Jews. At the same time the Jews were forced to perform various types of backbreaking work. In the fall of 1941 Murovannye Kurilovtsy came under German rule and the persecution of Jews increased. Not only did the Jews have to continue carrying out forced labor but they were also compelled to pay various fines and to hand over gold and other valuables in their possession. In November 1941 the Jews of Murovannye Kurilovtsy were forced into a ghetto established in the most poverty-stricken area of the town. A Judenrat was appointed to supply forced laborers, to serve as a conduit for the fines imposed on the Jews by the occupation authorities, and to prevent the Jews from leaving the ghetto without permission. The ghetto inmates were allowed to leave the ghetto for only an hour once a week to go to the market. The Jews were also forced to wear white armbands with a blue Star of David. About 100 Jews from Romanian-occupied Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia were also incarcerated in the ghetto. In August 1942 Jews from Snitkov and Verbovets were brought to Murovannye Kurilovtsy. Most of Murovannye Kurilovtsy's Jews, who then numbered about 2,500 (1,100, according to German reports), were murdered on August 21, 1942 a short distance outside the town. Some skilled workers who were spared in this massacre were sent to the labor camp at Letichev, while others were left in the Murovannye Kurilovtsy ghetto to work for the occupying authorities. Most of these workers were murdered in September or mid-October 1942 near the village of Popova, southeast of Murovannye Kurilovtsy. The last few Jews of Murovannye Kurilovtsy were murdered in March 1944, a short time before the liberation of the town by the Red Army on March 24, 1944.