Radomyshl

The first reference to Jews living in Radomyshl relates to 1765, when 117 Jews resided in the town. In the early 20th century there were about 7,500 Jews in Radomyshl, where they constituted a majority of the town's population. The Jewish community suffered acute losses in pogroms during the Russian civil war, culminating in March-June 1919, when approximately 1,000 Jews were killed by troops of Sokolovskiy. In the 1920s the Soviet authorities opened a school in the town with instruction in Yiddish. By the early 1930s private enterprise had been abolished in Radomyshl and many Jewish merchants became artisans and formed cooperatives. The local synagogue was closed in conformity with the Soviet anti-religious campaign. The ravages of the pogroms, the urbanization and industrialization that followed, and Soviet policies in the 1920s and 1930s combined to greatly reduce the local Jewish population, which in 1939 numbered about 2,350, or roughly one fifth of the total population. Germans troops entered Radomyshl on July 9, 1941, but the town was occupied only on July 20, 1941. The Germans at once set about abusing the Jewish residents. Jews were evicted from their homes and concentrated in a ghetto that was periodically relocated from one street to another. The Jewish men of Radomyshl were shot in July - August 1941. According to German reports 276 people, apparently most of them Jews, were shot in Radomyshl before late August 1941 by Sonderkommando 4A. In the ghetto the Germans created a condition of congestion and starvation that claimed many lives. The ghetto inmates were murdered in late September - early October 1941. Apparently around the same time, several dozen Jewish orphans from Radomyshl were also shot to death. Some testimonies report that during November 1941 about two dozen Jewish men were taken from Malin to Radomyshl and shot there. The town was liberated by the Red Army on December 30, 1943.