Vitebsk

The Jewish presence in Vitebsk seems to date to the late 16th Century, when the city belonged to the Kingdom of Poland. The construction of the railway connecting Vitebsk to Orel and Dvinsk (present-day Daugavpils in Latvia) at the end of 19th Century boosted the development of the city in general, and of its Jewish community in particular. In 1897, Vitebsk was home to 34,440 Jews, who made up 52.2 percent of the total population.

Vitebsk was a major hub of Jewish religious, educational, cultural, and political life. From the late 18th Century, it had been an important center of the Chabad Hassidic movement. In the 19th Century, the ideas of Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, spread among the local Jews. After 1905, several private schools were opened in Vitebsk, with Jews making up the bulk of the student body. In 1897, the renowned Jewish painter Yehuda Pen opened an art school in Vitebsk, and the most famous student to come out of that school was Marc Chagall. Vitebsk was also the birthplace of Chaim Zhitlowsky, one of the main ideologists of Jewish Autonomism and Yiddishism.

In the late 19th-early 20th Centuries, Vitebsk was the scene of intense Jewish political activity. All Jewish political parties – including the religious Orthodox ones, the autonomist socialist Bund, and the Zionist Poalei Zion – were represented in the city

During World War I, Jews who had been expelled from Lithuania by the Russian Imperial authorities passed through Vitebsk, and many of them stayed in the city, swelling the local Jewish population.

Soviet rule was established in Vitebsk as early as late October 1917, immediately after the Bolshevik Uprising in Petrograd. The period 1918-1920 saw the establishment of the famous Vitebsk Art School, and some Modernist Jewish artists, such as Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky, were active there.

During the Soviet period, the socio-economic structure of the Vitebsk Jewish community began to change. The restrictions on private economic activity, which were imposed by the Soviet authorities in the late 1920s, forced the Jews to seek out other occupations. Thus, many former artisans and petty traders found employment in the growing industrial sector and government service. Some Jews also turned to agriculture. In the mid-1920s, a branch of OZET (Society for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land) was active in Vitebsk.

In Vitebsk, as everywhere else, the Soviet authorities cracked down on Jewish religious life, closing cheders and synagogues. In January 1921, a show trial of cheder teachers took place in Vitebsk.

The Soviet authorities also suppressed all other forms of independent Jewish activity in the city. Of all the Zionist parties and groups, only HeHalutz and Poalei-Tzion remained officially active in the USSR in the 1920s.

Nevertheless, Vitebsk remained an important center of Yiddish cultural and educational activities in the territory of Belarus in the 1920s and 1930s. Until summer 1938, Vitebsk had several Yiddish-language Jewish schools and kindergartens. In 1921-1937, the city was also home to a Yiddish Jewish teachers' college. In 1922, the first Yiddish-language court in the Soviet Union was opened in Vitebsk. The 1920 and 1930s witnessed an influx of Jews from nearby towns, who came to Vitebsk in search of new educational and professional opportunities. Meanwhile, many of the Jewish natives of Vitebsk left it for Moscow and Leningrad. In 1939, the city was home to 37,095 Jews, who made up 22.2 percent of the total population.

Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War on June 22, 1941, Vitebsk was subjected to heavy German bombing. Many of the local Jews – including government officials and industrial workers evacuated into the Soviet interior, or recruits called up for service in the Red Army – were able to leave Vitebsk before its occupation by German troops on July 11, 1941. However, a large number of Jewish evacuees traveling eastward on foot were overtaken by the swift advance of German troops and forced to return to the city. Shortly after the onset of the occupation, the German authorities in Vitebsk set up a Jewish Council, which was tasked with registering the entire Jewish population of the city and sending Jews to forced labor. All Jews over the age of 10 were required to wear yellow badges on their clothes. In late July 1941, a ghetto was established on the right bank of the West Dvina River, and the Jews of Vitebsk were given only two days to move into it. Several hundred Jews were deliberately drowned while crossing the river on their way to the ghetto. A small group of Jewish specialists were allowed to live outside the ghetto. The ghetto itself was located in the ruins of a factory and surrounded with barbed wire. The conditions in the ghetto were appalling, with the inmates suffering from overcrowding, starvation, and poor sanitary conditions. Many of the ghetto Jews died of hunger and typhus.

The murder of the Jews of Vitebsk began even before the establishment of the ghetto. About 1,000 Jews – mostly men, Communist Party members, government officials, and members of the intelligentsia – were murdered in July-August 1941. On October 1, 1941, about 50 Jewish refugees from the town of Gorodok near Vitebsk were shot dead. The Vitebsk Ghetto itself was short-lived, being liquidated as early as the beginning of October 1941. Several thousand of its inmates were shot near the city. In December 1941, members of Einsatzgruppe B murdered about 200 Jewish inmates of POW base camp No. 313, which was located in the city. Some of the Jewish physicians and pharmacists who lived outside the ghetto were murdered in 1942, while others managed to escape into the forests and join the partisans.

The Red Army liberated Vitebsk on June 26, 1944.