Stolin

Jews seem to have begun to settle in Stolin around 1648, during the period of Cossack riots and pogroms led by Khmelnitsky, and a permanent Jewish community was established there by the end of the 17th Century. In 1897, Stolin was home to 2,489 Jews, who made up about 75 percent of the town's population. In the 19th Century, Stolin was an important center of the Hasidic movement. The Stolin Dynasty was founded by Rebbe Asher Perlow (1765–1826), son of the famous Rabbi Aaron Perlow of Karlin ("Aaron the Great", 1736–1772). In 1921, when Stolin became part of Polish Republic, there were some 3,000 Jews living there, comprising about two thirds of the total population. Some of the Jews made their living as merchants and artisans, while others worked in the lumber industry and exported grain and agricultural produce along the Horyn River. Local Jewish educational institutions included a Yeshiva, a modern religious school, and a Hebrew-language Tarbut school and kindergarten. Zionist youth movements and parties were active in the town, as was the Bund. When the Soviets occupied Stolin in 1939, they arrested twenty Zionist and Bund activists and exiled them, along with their families, into the Soviet interior. The Hebrew-language school was transformed into a Soviet one, and Yiddish became the language of instruction. In the fall of 1939, the town's Jewish population swelled because of the influx of refugees from the Nazi-occupied regions of western and central Poland. Stolin was occupied by German troops on July 12, 1941. According to some sources, in July and early August 1941 there were attempts to carry out a pogrom against the Jewish population on the part of local residents and previously released Soviet prisoners. On August 22, 1941, the German Gebietskommissar and his staff arrived in town. He appointed a Judenrat, with Berger (Bergner), a refugee from Łódź, at its head. The Jews of the town were periodically compelled to pay exorbitant ransoms and required to wear special armbands, and those over the age of sixteen had to perform forced labor. The Jews of Stolin were subjected to various prohibitions: on public prayer, contact with the Christian population, and meat consumption. About 1,500 women and children deported from Dawidgródek arrived in Stolin in July or August that year. On May 22-23, 1942, a ghetto was established in the town. Many Jews from the neighboring villages had been brought to Stolin by that time. The ghetto Jews were employed in workshops, and they performed various kinds of forced labor. The members of the Stolin Ghetto Judenrat were shot in mid-September 1942. On the following day, the rest of the ghetto inmates were murdered near the town. Only several dozen Jews managed to avoid the massacre by staying hidden. They later fled into the nearby forests, where some of them joined partisan units. Stolin was liberated by the Red Army on July 7, 1944.