Edineţi

At the turn of the 20th century, Edineț (Edintsy in Russian) was a predominantly Jewish town in Bessarabia (then part of the Russian Empire). In 1897, there were 7,379 Jews living in Edineți, comprising 72 percent of its population. In 1918, after World War I, the town became part of the independent Kingdom of Romania. In the interwar period, Edineț, known at the time as Edineț(i)-Târg, was home to 5,341 Jews, who made up about 90 percent of the population. The town was an important commercial hub in the northern part of Bessarabia. In the 1920s-1930s, the Jews of Edineți owned several oil and flour mills, a weaving factory, a power plant, and other businesses involving food production and commerce. It was also a major center of education, being home to three elementary schools, one of which was a Tarbut school belonging to the Zionist network of Hebrew-language educational institutions. There was also a private high school and a Talmud Torah. Jewish political parties – both Zionist (e.g., the General Zionists, Po'ale Zion, Tzeirei Zion, Mizrachi) and non-Zionist ones, together with their youth movements (e.g., Gordonia and Maccabi Hatzair) – were active in the town. The community also operated a Jewish hospital. On June 28, 1940, in the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army occupied Bessarabia, and Edineți became part of Soviet Moldova. Some of Edineți's wealthiest Jews were expropriated and deported to the eastern regions of the USSR, along with some Zionists. Private commerce was paralyzed, and cooperatives for Jewish artisans were set up. Following the German-Romanian invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, some Jews retreated with the Red Army, while others fled to larger towns. However, many stayed put. The Romanian army occupied Edineț on July 6, 1941. The first Romanian soldiers to enter the town incited the local population against the Jews. As a result, over the next several days massacres were committed by the Romanian gendarmes with the support of some non-Jews from the town and from the nearby villages of Ruseni, Goleni, and Urdineşti. During the pogrom, several hundred Jews were killed in their homes and in the streets. They were buried at the Jewish cemetery. Shortly afterwards, several dozen Jews, mainly men, were executed by a Romanian unit at the Jewish cemetery as alleged communists and Soviet activists. The Jewish residents of Edineți who managed to survive these massacres were later gathered and deported to Transnistria. During the summer and fall of 1941, a Jewish transit camp operated in Edineți. The camp, headed by Victor Popovici, lay northwest of Edineți, near the road to the village of Rotunda. Officially, the Edineți transit camp was established on August 20, 1941, with the arrival of deportees from Bukovina and Bessarabia. However, a month earlier a quasi-ghetto had been set up in Edineți, to provide temporary accommodations to a group of Jews convoyed from the town of Lipcani to the Dniester River. The deportation of the Jewish inmates of the Edineți camp began on October 10, 1941, and ended a week later. After the beginning of the deportation, Jews who were sick or recovering from typhus were shot. Edineți was liberated by the Red Army on March 23, 1944.