Wolpa

The first Jews settled in Wołpa in the second half of the 16th century. The town's Jewish community experienced its heyday in the late 16th – first half of the 17th century. Wołpa was famous for its unique wooden synagogue, built in the first half of the eighteenth century. This structure, considered a masterpiece of wooden architecture, was burned down by the Nazis during World War II. The community went into decline and shrank in the 19th century. Most of the town's remaining Jews made their living from a combination of trade, the crafts, and basic agriculture. In 1897, the year of the all-Russian census, there were 1,151 Jews in Wołpa. After World War I and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20, Wołpa was ceded to Poland. The Polish census of 1921 recorded the presence of 941 Jews in the town. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Wołpa was home to an estimated 900 Jews. In the interwar period, Zionism became increasingly popular among the younger generation of the Jews of Wołpa. The four-year "Torah va-Avodah" school was opened in the town, under the aegis of the religious Zionist HaMizrachi movement. The town also had cells of other Zionist youth movements: Poale Zion, HeHalutz, Hashomer Hatzair, etc. On September 17, 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, Wołpa and its surroundings were occupied by the Red Army and annexed to Soviet Belarus. On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and on July 1, after a day of aerial bombardment, German troops entered the town. Local Jews were rounded up and sent to perform forced labor, mostly in demolishing the bombed-out Jewish houses and building the office of the German Amtskommissar (to this end, the salvageable bricks, and other available materials, were used). In the fall of 1941, the occupiers set up a ghetto in Wołpa. In the spring of 1942, they permitted local Jews to work (for free) in agriculture. On November 2, 1942, the Germans assembled all the Jews of Wołpa in the church square and sent them to the Wołkowysk transit camp. At the same time, they singled out sixty-six Jews and shot them at the local Jewish cemetery. The Jewish deportees from Wołpa shared the fate of the other inmates of the Wołkowysk transit camp, being deported to the Nazi death camps. Wołpa was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944.