Uman

Jews lived in Uman since the 17th century. The Jewish community of Uman was almost completely destroyed in 1648, during the Chmielnicki Uprising. During the 18th century the local Jews suffered greatly from attacks by the Haidamaks. In 1768 Haidamak troops of Ivan Gonta and Maksym Zalizniak slaughtered several thousand Uman Jews. Decades later, this event, known as "the massacre of Uman," so deeply affected the founder of Bratslav Hassidism Rabbi Nakhman (also known as Nakhman of Bratslav) that he decided to spend the last year of his life in Uman and asked to be laid to rest in the local cemetery, where the victims of the massacre had been buried. With time Rabbi Nakhman's burial site became the site of pilgrimage for his followers and remains so for Bratslav Hassidim to this day. Only in the 19th century did the Jewish population of Uman begin to grow significantly, reaching 17,945, or 57.9 percent of the town's total population in 1897.

In the 19th century Uman was an important center of the Haskala, the Jewish enlightenment movement. At the turn of the century, Uman had a government sponsored Jewish school for boys, a vocational school for Jewish girls, and three private Jewish schools for boys – all with Russian as the language of instruction.

In the early 20th century the Jews of Uman were active politically. Many of them affiliated with the Zionist movement, with the socialist Bund, or with Russian, mainly socialist, parties.

During a pogrom in Uman in 1905 one Jew was murdered and much Jewish property was looted or destroyed. A Jewish self-defense force prevented more extensive damage. The Jews of Uman suffered greatly from the violence accompanying the years of revolution and civil war in Russia. In a wave of pogroms that swept Uman in the spring and summer of 1919 approximately 1,000 Jews were murdered, Jewish women were raped, and Jewish property was looted or destroyed.

In 1917 a school for adults under the aegis of the Kultur Lige organization, which promoted Yiddish education and culture, was opened in Uman. Under Soviewts in the 1920s and 1930s there were several Yiddish schools, including general educational, vocational schools sponsored by ORT (the Society for Handicraft and Agricultural Work), and evening schools. For a short time at the beginnig of 1920s in a number of Jewish schools Hebrew was the language of instruction. A branch of the Zionist HeHalutz movement existed in Uman in the 1920s. The Soviet authorities opposed the pilgrimage of Bratslav Hassidim to the burial site of Rabbi Nakhman. In the 1920s a police station with Yiddish-speaking policemen operated in the city.

The ban imposed by the Soviet authorities on all private commercial activity in the 1930s led to changes in the occupational structure of Uman's Jews. Many Jews sought employment in industry or agriculture. A number of Jewish families left Uman for Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East. Many Jews, especially younger ones, left Uman for Kiev and other large cities to seek for new educational and vocational opportunities. In 1939 Uman's 13,233 Jews comprised 29.8 percent of the town's total population.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, refugees (including Jews) from the western areas of the USSR arrived in Uman. However, very few Jews succeeded in leaving Uman before it was occupied by German troops on August 1, 1941. Quite soon after the start of the occupation, the persecution and murder of Uman's Jews began. Within the first weeks of the occupation, several dozen members of the local Jewish intelligentsia were murdered. Jews also were forced to work at various kinds of hard labor. On September 21 (or 19), 1941, approximately 1,000 Jews were murdered in a pogrom carried out by local Ukrainian policemen and German soldiers. Another 1,500 Jews were murdered by members of Einsatzgruppe C during the following days. At this time also the Jews of Uman were registered and ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David, which were later were replaced by yellow patches on their chests and backs. In late September or early October, the Jews of Uman who had survived the massacres of late summer-early fall 1941 were concentrated in the neighborhood of Rakovka (a Jewish neighborhood in the center of Uman), which became a ghetto. Although the ghetto was not closed, its inmates were strictly forbidden to leave and were forced to perform various types of labor. The ghetto was raided regularly at night by German and Ukrainian policemen, who engaged in looting and the abuse of its residents. The German authorities imposed exorbitant "taxes" on the ghetto dwellers. To ensure the timely collection of these taxes and to provide the Germans with workers for forced labor a Jewish council, headed by two Jews named Samborskiy and Tabachnik, was appointed. Members of the Jewish Order Service of the ghetto were known for their brutality toward the ghetto inmates. In early October 1941 members of the 304th Order Police Battalion carried out a large-scale massacre during which most of those in the ghetto were murdered. Only skilled workers and those Jews who avoided the massacre by going into hiding were still living in the ghetto in late 1941. The ghetto was liquidated in the second half of April 1942. The able-bodied Jews were deported to a labor camp in the village of Kuzmina Greblya in nearby Ladyzhinka County. Those deportees became too weak to work were shot to death in or near the camp. The remaining ghetto inmates were shot in the forest not far from the city. In the spring of 1942 the Germans established in the city a labor camp, to which Jewish deportees from Romanian-annexed Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia were taken. Most of the inmates of this camp were murdered between 1942 and 1944.

The Red Army liberated Uman on March 10, 1944.