Korostyshev

The first Jews settled in Korostyshev in the 16th century; sources refer to a synagogue there in 1602. In 1897 4,160 Korosyshev's Jews comprised approximately 53 percent of the entire population. In the mid-1920s, as a result of migration at the beginning of the 20th century, revolution and the calamities of civil war, the Jewish population in the town declined to 3,017. During the inter-war period a Yiddish school and a Jewish kolkhoz operated there. In 1939 only 2,170 Jews resided in the town, where they comprised 19.3 percent of the entire population. German military forces occupied Korostyshev on July 9, 1941. The occupiers established a ghetto on Petrovskaya Street for the local Jews. The latter had to wear a yellow patch, and it was forbidden for them to trade with the non-Jewish population. At the end of July 1941 and around September 20, 1941, the Germans murdered about 100 Jews. In the fall of 1941 the Germans, with the assistance of auxiliary police, shot to the death most of the ghetto inmates, in the forest near the Teteriv River. The Red Army liberated Korostyshev on November 11, 1943.