Dubăsari

Jews began to settle in Dubăsari (Dubossary in Russian) in the early 18th Century. In 1897, when it was part of the Russian Empire, the town was home to 5,220 Jews, who made up 43 percent of its population (and the population of the outlying villages). In 1903, there was a blood libel concerning the killing of a boy named Mikhail Rybachenko, a native of Dubăsari. The presence of a strong Jewish self-defense unit in Dubăsari prevented the eruption of violence there, but the antisemites used this libel as a pretext for the Kishinev Pogrom. Under Soviet rule, Dubăsari became a district center in the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an autonomous republic of the Ukrainian SSR. In the interwar period, the town, which lay in the western Soviet borderlands, underwent industrialization. It was home to a Jewish kolkhoz (collective farm) and several professional cooperatives. In 1939, Jews made up 49 percent of the total population of Dubăsari, which stood at 4,520. The town was occupied by the Romanian and German armies on July 24, 1941. By that time, a segment of the local Jewish community had managed to flee eastward, while many Jewish men were drafted into the Red Army. After the occupation of the town, the Romanian authorities set up a ghetto consisting of two streets, and they used it to imprison all the remaining Jews of the district of Dubăsari (a total of about 2,500). Pavel Tolmachinski was appointed head of the Dubǎsari Ghetto. Its inmates were required to wear a yellow Star of David, and were forbidden to leave the ghetto boundaries, which were guarded by Romanian soldiers. In late August (or early September) 1941, several dozen men of Einsatzkommando 12 (part of Einsatzgruppe D) arrived in Dubǎsari. Around the same time (late August 1941), several dozen Jews and some Soviet activists appear to have been shot in the area of the former old hospital, which had been turned over to the Einsatzkommando 12 unit. On September 12, the entire population of the ghetto was shot by the Einsatzkommando 12 murder squad. The massacre took place in the northeastern section of the town, near the former tobacco factory. On September 20, members of Einsatzkommando 12 killed another 1,500 Jews at the same site. These victims had been brought there from the towns of Krasnye Okna and Kotovsk. SS-Obersturmführer Max Drexel, head of the Einsatzkommando 12 murder squad, was in charge of these two killing operations. The execution of other Jewish detainees from various districts of Moldavia went on for about ten more days. On September 28, 1941, Einsatzkommando 12 left Dubăsari. Dubăsari was liberated by the Red Army on April 12, 1944.