Postawy

The first documentary references to the presence of Jews in Postawy date to the early 19th Century, but Jews had probably lived in this town prior to that. In 1897, Postawy was home to 1,310 Jews, who comprised 54.7 percent of the total population. Most local Jews made their living from trade and basic crafts. The community was divided along religious lines: About half of the Jews were Hasids (mainly of the Chabad movement), while the other half were non-Hasidic misnagdim. In 1915, during World War I, Russian Cossack units passing through the town carried out a pogrom there. After World War I and the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-20, Postawy was ceded to Poland. Its economy was in decline, and many local Jews either moved to larger settlements or immigrated overseas. The town had a chapter of the leftist Yiddishist Bund, as well as cells of the major leftist Zionist movements and parties. Two Jewish schools, a Yiddish-language school of the TSISHO network and a Hebrew school belonging to the Tarbut network, competed for Jewish students. There are different estimates of the number of Jews living in Postawy in the interwar period. According to the census of 1931, the Jewish population of the entire Postawy County stood at 2,769; therefore, the number of Jews in the town itself can probably be estimated at about 1,000-1,500. In the late 1930s, in response to the rise of aggressive antisemitism in Poland, an inter-party Jewish self-defense unit was formed in Postawy. In September 1939, World War II began, and Postawy was annexed to the USSR. The Soviets liquidated private enterprise in the town. The school curriculum was "sovietized", and Yiddish was made the sole language of instruction. All non-communist political activity was banned. At the same time, hundreds of Jewish refugees from German-occupied western Poland arrived in Postawy, swelling its Jewish population to 2,000-2,500 by the summer of 1941. On June 22, 1941, the Soviet-German War broke out, and German troops occupied Postawy on July 6. In the first days of the occupation, they shot several (probably 16) "Soviet activists", most of them Jews. In July 1941, the Germans issued anti-Jewish decrees (the requirement to wear the Star of David on the clothes, a prohibition on interacting with non-Jews and on leaving the town, etc.) and established a ghetto in the northern section of Postawy. The Jews were required to perform forced labor, and sporadic killings of individual Jews went on unabated. In early 1942, the gendarmes shot 55 Jews from Postawy and some nearby villages in the Kaszyce Forest, 3 kilometers south of the town. The Germans continued to deport Jews from the surrounding rural localities to the Postawy Ghetto, whose population had reached 2,500 people, and possibly even more, by fall 1942. On November 21, 1942, the perpetrators escorted the ghetto Jews northward along Bazylianska Street, and then shot them at pits that had been prepared beyond the railway. Some were killed over pits dug at the intersection of Brasławska (present-day Leninskaya) Street and the railroad tracks. The exact number of victims is unknown. A German report dated November 26, 1942 speaks of the murder of 1,826 Jews, not counting those who had been burned in the buildings and bunkers. The international Postawy community maintains that 4,000 Jews were killed in November 1942 (killings of Jews who had attempted to hide or flee from the murder sites went on after November 21). Both estimates may include the Jews killed in nearby Duniłowicze on the same day. Several dozen Jews from Postawy escaped into the forests and survived, mainly as Soviet partisans. Postawy was liberated by the Red Army on July 5, 1944.