Kamenny Brod

Kamenny Brod was founded in 1862. In 1897, the town's 1,147 Jews made up sixty-five percent of the total population. In the late 19th – early 20th centuries, local Jews were craftsmen, artisans, or petty traders. The major local enterprise, a factory producing china and faience that had begun operation in 1877, was owned by a Jew named Zusman. Until 1917 a branch of the Bund was active in the town. During the Russian Civil War, the Jews of Kamenny Brod suffered from pogroms and looing, with 250 Jewish men being killed on July 10, 1919 in a pogrom perpetrated by the Ukrainian army. In 1939, Kamenny Brod was home to 857 Jews, who comprised thirty-seven percent of the total population. Kamenny Brod was occupied by German troops in July 1941. Few Jewish families had managed to flee in time. In early August, Nazi collaborators began to loot the property of the Jewish families. In mid-August 1941, most of the local Jews were shot in a stone quarry, with the men being killed first, followed by the women and children some time later. The Jewish survivors of these two murder operations, some of them children, were shot on the streets of Kamenny Brod. According to some sources, Jewish members of the Communist Party and the Komsomol were sent to Markhlevsk and shot dead there. Soviet documents report the murder of at least two Jews in 1942 for being Soviet activists. The final murder operation against the local Jews was carried out in early November 1943 in the vicinity of the village of Dibrovka. Kamenny Brod was liberated by the Red Army in early January 1944.