Novograd Volynskiy

The first reference to a Jewish presence in Novograd Volynskiy (before 1796 Zviahel, Zvil in Yiddish) dates to 1488. In 1765 there were 577 Jews living in the town. During the following decades the Jewish community grew significantly; in 1897 the 9,387 Jews living in the town comprised 55 percent of its total population. At the end of World War I and during the Russian civil war (1918-20), local Jews were victims of pogroms that culminated in July-August 1919, in the murder of approximately 1,000 Jews by Ukrainian gangs and Petlyura's army. During the Soviet era several factories opened in the town, and by the end of the 1930s about 1,300 Jews had become factory workers. Artisans were united in cooperatives. The town's Jewish children were educated in Yiddish government schools and kindergartens. In the late 1920s Rabbi Chaim Shaul Bruk headed a not state recognized yeshiva with 130 students. On the eve of World War II the number of Jews in the town had dropped to 6,840, or roughly 30 percent of the population. Novograd Volynskiy was occupied by German troops on July 8, 1941. The murder of the town's Jews started in late July 1941 and lasted until September of the same year. The Jews who survived these murder operations (most of them skilled workers in occupations needed by the Germans) were rounded up and interned in the ghetto, which was composed of shacks belonging to a linen factory and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Jews from Rogachov, Yarun and nearby towns and villages were also concentrated in the Novograd Volynskiy ghetto. Starvation was rampant since only working adults received rations. The ghetto population declined steadily during the severe winter 1941-1942 as terrible living conditions, starvation, and exhaustion took their toll. According to various sources, either in November 1942 or in the winter of 1943, a number of ghetto inmates fled to the forests north of Zhitomir, where some of them joined partisans units. The remaining ghetto population, as well as some captured Jews, were shot. Novograd Volynskiy was liberated by the Red Army on January 1, 1944.