Minsk

The earliest reference to the presence of Jews in Minsk, which was then part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, dates to the 15th century. In 1495, the Jews of Minsk, together with the rest of the Jewish population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, were expelled to Poland; they were permitted to return in the early 16th Century. In 1569, Minsk became part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Jews of Minsk suffered from numerous armed conflicts in the region. In 1654, during the Russian-Polish war, Minsk was occupied by Russian troops, and the Jews were forced to leave the city. Their community was reestablished in 1667, following the restoration of Polish rule. In the late 17th Century, Minsk suffered from a conflict between the Russian Orthodox and the Greek Catholic communities. Members of the Russian Orthodox community carried out a pogrom against the Jews and the Greek Catholics, killing several of the former.

In 1793, Minsk was joined to the Russian Empire. By the end of the 19th Century, its Jewish community was the fourth largest in the Pale of Settlement. In 1897, Minsk was home to 47,562 Jews, who constituted 52.3 percent of the city's total population. At the time, Jews dominated the local timber trade and money lending, as well as the city's nascent industrial sector. They were also prominent in the wholesale and retail trades, and in the crafts.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Minsk was an important hub of Jewish education and culture, being the location of many general and vocational private and public Jewish schools, as well as of several religious schools.

At the turn of the century, the city had a vibrant Jewish communal life, and a choral synagogue was built there in 1904.

The Jews of Minsk were politically involved. By the end of the 19th Century, the city was an important center of the Jewish labor movement. Many local Jews supported the social-democratic Zionist Poalei Zion party and the non-Zionist Bund party. Following the outbreak of the First Russian Revolution (1905-1907), Minsk Jews took an active part in anti-government demonstrations and strikes. During the riots of 1905, 54 Jews were killed by czarist troops.

During World War I, Minsk witnessed an influx of thousands of Jewish refugees from the combat zone, including students of the renowned Volozhin Yeshiva. The Jewish population of the city swelled from 45,000 in 1914 to 65,000 in 1917. The February Revolution in Russia led to an upsurge in Jewish political activity in Minsk, and the number of Jewish periodicals published in the city mushroomed. The new publications included the Yiddish-language Zionist magazine Der Yid; the newspaper Dos Yidishe Vort; the Bundist newspaper Der Veker, and He-Khaver, a Russian-language magazine published by a Zionist youth organization.

Between 1918 and 1919, Minsk changed hands several times. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks gained control of the city, and, following elections to the local council, the Bund member Aron Vaynshteyn became head of the Minsk legislative body (Duma). In February 1918, Minsk was occupied by German troops. The short-lived Belarusian People's Republic, which was proclaimed in early 1918, granted a national-cultural autonomy to the Jewish minority. In the first government of the BPR, two ministerial posts, that of Finance and that of Jewish Affairs, were held by Hersh Belkind and Moshe Gutman, respectively. In early 1919, Minsk became a center of the HeHalutz Zionist movement. The head of this movement, Yosef Trumpeldor, assisted in the creation of a Jewish self-defense force in the city.

Following the reestablishment of Soviet rule in Minsk in January 1919, all of the Jewish newspapers and magazines, with the exception of the Bundist Der Veker, were banned. The Bolsheviks were driven out of Minsk in early August 1919, when the city came under Polish control. This takeover was accompanied by a pogrom, which claimed the lives of 30 Jews. Under Polish rule, two Yiddish dailies were published in Minsk: the Zionist Farn Folk and the Bundist Der Minsker Veker. The retreat of the Polish forces from Minsk in early July 1920 led to another pogrom, which included extensive looting and destruction of Jewish property.

In July 1920, Minsk was retaken by Soviet forces, and, a month later, it became the capital of the newly proclaimed Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Under Soviet rule, the Jewish community in the city was dissolved, as were all political parties (except for the Jewish Communist Party [Poalei-Zion] and HeHalutz, which remained legal and active into the 1920s). As early as the 1920s, several synagogues were closed down, with the largest one, the Choral Synagogue, being handed over to the new Belarusian State Jewish Theater, which staged plays in Yiddish.

The Soviet ban on private economic activity dealt a major blow to Minsk Jews, many of whom were left without means of subsistence, and had to look for different occupations.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet authorities cracked down on Zionism and the Hebrew language, while simultaneously promoting cultural and educational activities in Yiddish. Belarus was the only Soviet Republic where Yiddish was granted official status, alongside Belarusian, Russian, and Polish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Minsk was a stronghold of Yiddish culture, being home to a network of schools with Yiddish-language instruction, the Jewish Department of the Belarusian Culture Institute, and the Jewish Pedagogical Institute at the Belarusian State University. The city was also home to several Yiddish publications, the largest of which were the daily Oktyabr, the literary magazine Shtern, and the historical and socioeconomic periodical Tsaitshrift. A constellation of prominent Yiddish poets and writers – including Izi Kharik, Zelik Akselrod, Moyshe Kulbak, and Moyshe Teyf – lived and worked in Minsk during this period.

However, all Jewish schools and departments in higher educational institutions were shut down in the summer of 1938. Several prominent Yiddish authors and literary figures – including Izi Kharik, Moshe Kulbak, and Zelik Akselrod – were arrested and killed either in the Great Purge or its aftermath.

In 1939, Minsk was home to 70,998 Jews, who comprised 29.7 percent of the city's population. Following the outbreak of World War II, some Jewish refugees from the Polish territories occupied by Germany were allowed to settle in Minsk. A second wave of refugees, this one from Western Belorussia, reached Minsk after the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941.

Relatively few Jews managed to escape from Minsk before the entry of German troops into the city on June 28, 1941. From the earliest days of the occupation, men of military age, Jews and non-Jews alike, were incarcerated in a camp, which was initially located on Storozhovskaya/Dauman Street, and was later moved to Drozdy in the northwestern section of the city. Approximately 1,000 Jewish inmates of this camp were murdered as early as the first days of July 1941 by members of Einsatzgruppe B. The Minsk Ghetto was established in mid-July 1941 in the Rakov suburb, the oldest and poorest section of the city, on the left bank of the Svisloch River, and the remaining Jewish inmates of the camp were transferred there.

In early July 1941, the German occupation authorities appointed a Jewish council, with the former Soviet official Ilya Mushkin as its head. Mushkin, who maintained contact with the ghetto underground, was murdered by the Germans in early 1942 and replaced by Moshe Yoffe, a refugee from Wilno. He was executed in summer 1942. The last head of the Judenrat, the Polish refugee Nachum Epstein, also served as chief of the ghetto police. He was regarded by the inmates as an active Nazi collaborator. The Jews of Minsk were ordered to register with the newly created Judenrat and wear yellow badges on their clothes.

Initially, the Germans planned to surround the Minsk Ghetto with a brick wall; and the Jews were required to pay a sum of 30,000 chervontsy to finance its construction. However, the wall was never built, and the ghetto was surrounded with barbed wire. It was one of the largest ghettos in the occupied Soviet territories, and its Jewish inmates came not only from Minsk, but also from nearby settlements. Able-bodied inmates were transferred to the labor camp on Shirokaya Street (present-day Kuibyshev Street, near the Komarovka Market) in the northeastern part of the city. This camp also accommodated Soviet Jewish POWs and Jewish deportees from Warsaw.

October 1941 saw the beginning of the deportation of German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to Minsk, and the first massacres of Jews from Minsk. A section of the ghetto that had become vacant following the killings was referred to as the "Special" (or "Hamburg") Ghetto, and used to house the able-bodied deportees. The conditions in the ghetto were appalling, with its inmates suffering from hunger and overcrowding. From the beginning, they were subjected to nightly raids by German soldiers and local auxiliary policemen, who would rob and murder them. The ghetto had two clinics, which employed Jewish doctors fired from other hospitals in Minsk; an orphanage, and a "home" for the disabled.

In time, the extermination of Minsk Jewry preceded, coincided with, and followed the establishment of the ghetto. In mid-August 1941, about 100 Minsk Jews were shot near the city, in the presence of SS-Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler. On September 1, 1941, about 1,000 inmates of the Minsk Ghetto were shot east of the city. November 1941 saw the mass shooting of tens of thousands of Jews, who were killed to make room for the Jewish deportees transported from Western and Central Europe. The mass killings of inmates of the Minsk Ghetto continued unabated in 1942 and 1943. In September 1943, the camp on Shirokaya Street was liquidated, with its inmates being deported to the Sobibor death camp. The deportees included Alexander Pechersky and other future leaders of the Sobibor Uprising of 1943. In June 1943, the liquidation of the Minsk Ghetto began. It continued until October of that year. Some of the inmates were deported to the Majdanek and Sobibor death camps, while others were murdered on the spot. As early as August 1941, a clandestine resistance organization was established in the ghetto. The cell was headed by the Polish communist Hersh Smoler and the local communist Michael Gebelev. The resistance in the Minsk Ghetto concentrated primarily on smuggling as many Jews as possible out of the Ghetto and into the forests, which were home to partisan units.

The Red Army liberated Minsk on July 3, 1944.