Zvenigorodka

Jews lived in Zvenigorodka at least since 18th century. In the 1740s and 1750s the Jews of Zvenigorodka suffered from attacks by the Haidamaks. Only several dozen Jews lived in the town until the late 18th - early 19th centuries, when Zvenigorodka became part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. The economic development of the area in the 19th century and the construction of a railway brought many Jews to the town. In 1897 6,389 Jews lived in Zvenigorodka, where they constituted 37.75 percent of the total population.

Zvenigorodka was the birthplace of the famous Russian-Jewish financier and philanthropist Baron Horace (Naphtali Herz) Guenzburg.

The Jews of Zvenigorodka suffered greatly from the violence which accompanied the years of revolution and civil war in Russia. Scores of local Jews lost their lives in pogroms carried out by various warring parties between 1918 and 1920.

Jewish life in Zvenigorodka underwent profound changes during the Soviet period. The ban imposed by the Soviet authorities on private economic activity at the beginning of the 1930s forced many Jews in the town to search for other occupations. In the late 1920s a Jewish collective farm was established in Zvenigorodka. In the late 1920s a court chamber with deliberations in Yiddish operated in Zvenigorodka, as well as a Yiddish school, a Jewish orphanage, and a Jewish theater.

In the 1920s and 1930s many Jews, especially young ones, left Zvenigorodka for larger towns and cities in search of new educational and vocational opportunities. In 1939 1,957 Jews lived in the town, where they constituted 14 percent of the total population. Following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, a number of Jewish refugees from Poland arrived in Zvenigorodka.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Jewish refugees from western areas of Ukraine arrived in the town. Some local Jews succeeded in leaving the town before it was occupied by German troops on July 29, 1941. The murder of Jews started soon afterward. In the fall of 1941 about 100 Jewish men and boys were murdered in the vicinity of the town. Soon after this, Zvenigorodka's Jews were confined to the ghetto that was established on several of Zvenigorodka’s streets. Even though the ghetto was not fenced or walled off, the Jews were forbidden to leave it. Ghetto inmates were forced to wear white armbands with a Star of David, and a man named Lasurik, infamous among his fellow Jews for his corruption, was appointed ghetto head. Jews from adjacent counties were also confined in this ghetto. The ghetto was raided regularly by local auxiliary policemen, who beat and robbed its inmates.

In May 1942 several hundred able-bodied ghetto inmates were transferred to the labor camp of Nemorozh, 5 kilometers north of Zvenigorodka. Some of the inmates of this camp were later transferred further north, to the Smilchintsy labor camp in nearby Lysyanka County. About 1,500 Jews who remained in the Zvenigorodka ghetto were murdered in June or July 1942 near the town, while a limited number of craftsmen were allowed to remain in the ghetto. In late 1942 most of the inmates of the Nemorozh camp and some of the inmates of the Smilchintsy camp were murdered in a forest between these two localities. In the summer of 1943 those Jews still alive were brought back to Zvenigorodka and murdered near the town, together with the Jewish craftsmen who had remained in the ghetto.

The Red Army liberated Zvenigorodka on January 28, 1944.