Lyubar

The first reference to the Jews of Lyubar dates to the end of the 17th century, when all local Jews fled before the arrival of Cossak troops. In 1897 Lyubar's 5,435 Jews comprised 43.4 percent of the total population. During the Russian civil war the Jewish population of Lyubar suffered from pogroms and military operations. For example, in May 1920 Red Army soldiers carried out a pogrom in which more than 50 Jews were killed, and about 180 wounded. In 1922 a yeshiva and a Yiddish school were operating in Lyubar. During the 1920s many young Jews left Lyubar in search of employment and educational opportunities. In 1939 the Jews in Lyubar numbered 1,857, comprising 70 percent of the total population. The village was occupied by German troops on July 8, 1941. Soon afterwards several Jews were shot for disobeying Germans orders. In August – September a large number of Jews from nearby villages were taken to Lyubar. Then the Jews were forced into a ghetto that was established on several streets in the center of Lyubar. The Jewish population was annihilated in a number of mass murder operations. During the first one several hundred Jewish men were shot in August 1941, while about 2,000 Jews from Lyubar, as well as Jews from nearby villages, were murdered in mid-September 1941 at the Peschannoye Tract at a former sand pit. The surviving Jews from Lyubar and nearby villages, mostly artisans and those who were found in hiding after the first shooting, were held in the former secondary school in Staryi Lyubar village. Later they were moved to the former monastery building at the local orphanage called Detgorodok (children's town) in Lyubar. There the Jewish inmates suffered from starvation, unsanitary conditions, robbery, and abuse at the hands of Ukrainian collaborators. These Jews were shot in late October 1941, apparently at the same murder site. Lyubar was liberated by the Red Army on January 8, 1944.