Belaya Tserkov

Jews are first mentioned as living in Belaya Tserkov in 1589. The locality was known in Hebrew as Sdeh Lavan (White Field) and in Yiddish as Shvartse Tume (Black Church). The Jewish community of Belaya Tserkov was almost completely destroyed in 1648 during the uprising of Bogdan Chmielnitsky. The Jewish community started to revive shortly afterward -- only to be destroyed once again in 1703 by the Haidamaks. In the mid-18th century Belaya Tserkov become one of the centers of Hassidism. In 1768 many local Jews were murdered during a new uprising of the Haidamaks. The growth of the Jewish community in the city was related to the construction of a railway network there. In 1897 18,720 Jews lived in Belaya Tserkov; they comprised 52.9 percent of the city’s total population. At the turn of the century there were several state-sponsored and private Jewish schools, as well as a communal religious (Talmud Torah) school. In the early 20th century many Jews in Belaya Tserkov were active politically-the city had both Bundist and Zionist socialist organizations. The famous Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovich) lived in Belaya Tserkov for several years in the 1880s. In October 1905 the city again experienced anti-Jewish riots accompanied by looting of Jewish shops and houses. During World War I Jewish refugees from the western areas of the Russian Empire arrived in Belaya Tserkov. A committee for assistance to these refugees and also to families of Jews drafted into the Russian army was established in the city at this time. The Jews of Belaya Tserkov suffered greatly from the violence of the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia. Several hundred Jews of Belaya Tserkov lost their lives in the pogroms staged by various warring parties in 1919-1920. Several committees were established to assist the victims of these pogroms. With the establishment of Soviet rule in Belaya Tserkov the Jewish social structure in the city began to change. Whereas craftsmen were able to unite in cooperatives, the restrictions on private trade from the end of 1920s forced many Belaya Tserkov Jews to seek new occupations. Many Belaya Tserkov’s Jews found employment in industry, in government service, and in agricultural cooperatives. Until the mid-1920s, when the Soviet authorities banned it, Zionist activity took place in Belaya Tserkov. In the 1920s there was a court chamber in Belaya Tserkov that carried out its deliberations in Yiddish, as well as several Yiddish general education and vocational schools in the city. In the early 1920s the amateur Yiddish theatrical collective “Royte blitn” (Red Flourishing) and a Jewish branch of the Ukrainian Theatrical Union were established in the city. In the early 1930s the monthly “Na novye puti” (On New Ways) was published in Yiddish and Ukrainian in Belaya Tserkov. In the 1920s and 1930s the Jewish population of Belaya Tserkov declined since many, mostly younger, Jews left the city for larger ones in search of educational and vocational opportunities. In 1939 Belaya Tserkov's 9,284 Jews constituted 19.6 percent of the city’s total population. Due to the fact that Belaya Tserkov was an important railway junction thousands of Jews succeeded in leaving the city before it was occupied by German forces on July 16, 1941. As soon as the Germans entered Belaya Tserkov, all the remaining Jews were ordered to register, hand over their valuables, and sew Stars of David onto their clothes. They were also compelled to perform various kinds of grueling labor. A Jewish elder was appointed. Some sources say, about 5 Jewish communists were shot in one of the basements of the Brum trade premises in the center of Belaya Tserkov shortly after the Germans entered the town. A month after the start of the occupation mass-murders of the Jews of Belaya Tserkov started to be perpetrated by members of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C and by Ukrainian auxiliary policemen. Most of the betweeen 4,000 and 5,000 Jews who remained in Belaya Tserkov were shot to death in August 1941 (according to other sources some groups of Jews were killed in the course of 1942). Some of the Jews who survived the August 1941 massacre were concentrated into one building and forced to wear identifying armbands and perform various tasks. The survivors were murdered toward the end of 1941. Some of the able-bodied Jews from Belaya Tserkov had been sent to the labor camp in Antonovka village (in Buki County), where they were liberated by partisans in October 1943. In August 1943, within the framework of Operation 1005, the Germans exhumed the bodies of the murdered Jews in Belaya Tserkov and burned them. According to some sources, among the victims shot in the yard of then prison on Podvalnya Street, were also Jews. The Red Army liberated Belaya Tserkov on January 4, 1944.