Yaryshev

Jews apparently started to settle in Yaryshev in the early 18th century. In 1897 Yaryshev's 1,499 Jews comprised 41.2 percent of the total population. Most of Yaryshev’s Jews were small-scale merchants or artisans. On the eve of World War I Jews dominated the economic life of Yaryshev, owning most of the shops and leasing a mill. The ban imposed by the Soviet regime on private economic activity forced many Yaryshev Jews to search for new occupations. Many turned to agriculture. In the 1920s several dozen Jewish families of the town engaged in tobacco growing. Also in the 1920s a Jewish agricultural cooperative, Kultura (Culture), was established; in the late 1920s or early 1930s it became a collective farm. In the 1920s there was a Yiddish four-year school in Yaryshev. In 1927 the town council in Yaryshev held its deliberations in Yiddish. During the 1920s and 1930s many young Jews left Yaryshev for larger towns and cities in search of educational and vocational opportunities. In 1939 the 509 Jews in the town constituted 17.7 percent of the total population. After the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, a number of Jewish refugees from Bessarabia arrived in Yaryshev. German and Romanian troops occupied Yaryshev on July 19, 1941. On the first day of the occupation about a dozen Jewish men, unaware of the occupiers’ intentions, came out to greet the Axis troops, who shot these Jews to death. The occupiers immediately ordered the local Jewish community to hand over all the gold in their possession. In the fall of 1941 the Jews of Yaryshev were concentrated in an area on the outskirts of town and a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire was established there. The ghetto inmates were forced to sew Stars of David onto their clothes on the chest and the back. The Jews were humiliated, beaten, and forced to perform various types of grueling labor. They were also regularly required to surrender various items to the occupiers. Each time hostages were taken to ensure the timely delivery of these items, but the hostages were often shot to death in any case. Most of Yaryshev's Jews were murdered in the vicinity of the town in the second half of August 1942. Able-bodied Jews were deported to the labor camp in Letichev, in the Kamenets-Podolsk District, and murdered there, apparently in late 1942. Yaryshev was liberated by the Red Army on March 21, 1944.