Fastov

Jews apparently started to settle in Fastov in the early 18th century. In the 1750s and 1760s the Jews of Fastov suffered greatly from attacks by the Haidamaks. Initially only several hundred Jews lived in Fastov. In the late 18th century Fastov became part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. In 1897 5,595 Jews lived in Fastov, where they comprised 54.4 percent of the town's total population. Most of Fastov's Jews were artisans or merchants. In the early 20th century Fastov had two private Jewish schools - one for boys and the other for girls, with Russian as the language of instruction. In 1881 only the intervention of the Russian police prevented a large-scale pogrom in Fastov. In 1913 two local Jews, the tailor Ephraim Pashkov and his apprentice, were arrested and charged with the murder of a boy (the victim, in fact, was actually Pashkovs' son Yossel). The authorities intended to stage a blood libel trial on the lines of the contemporary Beilis' trial in Kiev, but ultimately Pashkov and his assistant were released without a trial after the real murderer, a non-Jew, confessed to the crime. The Jews of Fastov suffered greatly from the violence accompanying the years of revolution and civil war in Russia. Approximately 1,000 Jews of Fastov were murdered and 100 wounded in a pogrom carried out by the White troops of Anton Denikin in September 1919. Much Jewish property was looted or destroyed and almost all of the Jewish houses were burned down. Today there is a memorial in Fastov dedicated to the pogrom victms. The inscription stresses the parallel between the pogrom of 1919 and the Holocaust events of 1941 in the town. During the 1930s the social structure of Fastov's Jews underwent profound changes as a result of the ban imposed by Soviet authorities on all private economic activity. Many Jews found employment in agriculture, in small-scale industry, or in government service. Many of Fastov's Jews, especially the younger ones, left in the 1920s and 1930s for larger towns and cities in search of educational and vocational opportunities. In the early 1920s there were some clandestine local Zionist activity, which was repressed by the Soviet authorities. At the same time the Soviet authorities were promoting Soviet Yiddish culture. In the 1920s and 1930s Fastov had a three-year school with an associated locksmith's workshop, a vocational school, and a seven-year general school - all with Yiddish as the language of instruction. In 1925 a Jewish orphanage for children who had lost their parents in the pogroms of the civil war was opened in Fastov. In 1939 Fastov's 2,149 Jews comprised 10.4 percent of the city's total population. Most of Fastov's Jews apparently succeeded in leaving before the town was occupied by German troops on July 20, 1941. Those Jews who remained were murdered by the Germans in several murder operations in the late summer or fall of 1941. The Red Army liberated Fastov on November 7, 1943.