Novorossiysk

The first Jews settled in Novorossiysk in 1846. In the tsarist period the Jewish community mainly consisted of Jews beloning to groups who were allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement, including wealthy or highly educated people and their families. In 1897 980 Jews lived in Novorossiysk, where they comprised 7.5 percent of the total population. Later the Jewish community built a Jewish elementary school and a synagogue, which had a rabbi. In the mid-1920s about 2,000 Jews lived in Novorossiysk, where they comprised approximately two percent of the city’s population. The number of Jewish residents increased after the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, when Novorossiysk became a destination of civilian evacuation or flight. The Germans occupied Novorossiysk on September 10, 1942, and many local Jews, as well as those who had arrived there from western parts of the USSR, managed to flee to the Soviet interior. On October 15, 1942, the German administration ordered the Jews to be registered and to establish a Jewish council. The Jews were promised that they would be resettled and be able to work, but on October 16, 1,000 Jews were assembled at the local Gestapo headquarters. German machine-gunners immediately surrounded the group, seized their belongings, and then took them to the port at Sudzhukskaya Kosa. There they were shot to the death at an anti-tank trench. Several Jews who had not been murdered then were shot later at the city’s Gestapo headquarters. The Red Army liberated Novorossiysk on September 16, 1943.