Iwje

Extant documents first mention Jews in Iwje in relation to the early 17th century. In 1897 Iwje hade 573 Jews, who comprised 15.7 percent of the total population. Iwje was the birthplace of Shakhne Epshtein (1883-1945), a Soviet and American Jewish leftist journalist, who from 1942 to 1945 was the editor of the Soviet Yiddish newspaper Eynikayt, the newspaper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. After World War I Iwje became part of the second Polish Republic. Its Jewish population in 1921 rose to 2,076 or 76 percent of the total population. Throughout the 1920s a constellation of different Zionist groups existed in Iwje: Poalei Zion, Hehalutz, Hapoel Hamizrakhi, Hashomer Hatzair, and Beitar. At the same time a yeshiva operated in Iwje, along with the Beit-Yosef Musar yeshiva. The Tsisho Yiddish school of the 1920s was replaced by a Tarbut Hebrew-instruction school in the 1930s. According to some estimations, at the end of the 1930s about 3,000 Jews lived in Iwje. In September 1939 World War II began and Iwje was occupied by the Red Army. Units of the Wehrmacht entered Iwje on June 29, 1941. On August 2, 1941 a unit of the Security Police and the SS selected 220 Jewish men and shot them in the Stonewicze Forest, 1.5-2 kilometers southeast of Iwje. On the same day a Jewish council was established in the town and, somewhat later, a Jewish police force. Anti-Jewish decrees followed, e.g. a decree that prohibited Jews from consuming meat, butter, eggs, and alcohol, as well as from smoking. Furthermore, not only were contacts with non-Jews prohibited, but also contacts with Jews from nearby villages. Various accounts indicate different times for the establishement of the local ghetto - from July to October 1941. The latter date appears the most probable. In April 1942 the occupiers resettled Jews from Traby (which had had about 600 Jewish residents before the beginning of Operation Barbarossa), Lipniszki, Bakszty, Subotniki, and probably from other nearby villages, to Iwje. The ghetto population there rose to about 4,000 and epidemics of typhus and skin diseases took their toll. On May 12, 1942 the Germans selected 200-300 Jews who had legitimate working certificates and took them to the ghetto of Lida. Later they selected 1,200-1,300 more Jews who appeared healthy and able-bodied. The elderly and sick, as well as large families with small children, were taken to their deaths in the same Stonewicze Forest, where 2,300 Jews were killed on this day. After this operation, some young Jews succeeded in fleeing and to join the Soviet partisans. The Germans began to send groups of workers from Iwje to labor camps in Lida, Mołodeczno, Borisov, and other places. On January 20, 1943 all those still in the Iwje ghetto were sent to Borisov, where they died (most probably they were shot) in the peat bogs of Biała Bołota in March 1943. Iwje was liberated by the Red Army on July 8, 1944.