Yaltushkov

Jews are first mentioned as living in Yaltushkov in the second half of the 18th century. In 1883 there was a pogrom in Yaltushkov during which the windows of Jewish houses were broken and Jewish passersby were beaten. In 1897 Yaltushkov's 1,238 Jews constituted 35 percent of the town’s total population. Most local Jews were craftsmen or small-scale merchants. The Jews of Yaltushkov suffered greatly from the violence of the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia. 50 Jews lost their lives during pogroms staged by various warring parties. Jewish women were raped and Jewish shops and homes were looted or destroyed during these pogroms. After the establishment of Soviet rule in the early 1920s a rural council with deliberations in Yiddish was established in Yaltushkov. The ban imposed by the Soviet regime on private economic activity deprived many Yaltushkov Jews of their source of livelihood and, therefore, forced them to search for new occupations. Some of the town’s Jews turned to agriculture, particularly tobacco-growing. Many Jews of the town found employment at the local sugar and textile factories or other factories in the area. In the early 1930s a Jewish agricultural cooperative established in Yaltushkov became the Jewish collective farm Naye velt (Yiddish for "a new world"). The Jewish residents of Yaltushkov suffered from the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a four-year Yiddish school in Yaltushkov. In 1939 Yaltushkov's 1,212 Jews constituted 20.1 percent of the total population. Few Jews managed to leave the town before it was occupied by German troops on July 15, 1941. Assaults on and abuses of Jews started almost from the first days of the occupation. Jewish residents of the town were compelled to carry out grueling work in construction and agriculture and scores of them died in the process. On December 20, 1941, the Jews of Yaltushkov were forced into a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire. They were joined there by Jews from surrounding villages. The ghetto inmates had to sew yellow patches onto their clothing. In the ghetto they suffered from overcrowding, hunger, and disease. Raids in the ghetto by Germans and local auxiliary policemen claimed a number of victims. Some able-bodied Jews were deported to labor camps in Guli and Yakushintsy villages. Most of the inmates of the Yaltushkov ghetto, about 1,500 people, were murdered in two murder operations in August and October 1942. Yaltushkov was liberated by the Red Army on March 26, 1944.