Tarashcha

Jews were first mentioned as residing in Tarashcha in the mid-18th century. In 1897 its Jewish population reached 4,905 or 43.6 percent of the total population. Most of Tarashcha's Jews were small-scale merchants or artisans. In the late 19th-early 20th centuries Tarashcha had a two-year general government-sponsored Jewish school and a school for Jewish girls with Russian as the language of instruction. In 1882 there was a pogrom in Tarashcha during which Jewish property was looted and destroyed. The Jews of Tarashcha suffered greatly from the violence accompanying the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia. In a series of pogroms carried out between 1917 and 1919 scores of the town's Jews were wounded and Jewish property was looted and destroyed. One pogrom was averted by a Jewish self-defense force that arrived from Kiev. In the interwar period there was a Yiddish school in Tarashcha, with a Jewish kindergarten associated with it. During the 1920s and 1930s many Jews, especially younger ones, left Tarashcha for larger towns and cities in search of educational and vocational opportunities. In 1939 1,140 Jews were living in Tarashcha, where they constituted 13 percent of the town's total population. After the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Jewish refugees arrived in Tarashcha. Apparently half of the Jews living there managed to leave Tarashcha before it was occupied by German forces on July 29, 1941. Almost immediately after the start of the occupation, all the male Jews in Tarashcha were forced to wear armbands with the Star of David and to perform various kinds of work. Most of the Jews who remained in the town were murdered in late summer-fall 1941 and in early 1942. The Red Army liberated Tarashcha on January 5, 1944.