Bogodukhov

Until the late 19th Century, the town of Bogodukhov was off-limits to Jews, since it lay outside the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were allowed to live. Therefore, the first Jews settled in Bogodukhov only in the second half of the 19th Century, when the anti-Jewish restrictions had been loosened somewhat, and certain categories of Jews were allowed to move outside the Pale. Initially, the Jewish community of Bogodukhov was very small. In 1897, the town was home to 89 Jews, who made up 0.8 percent of the total population. At the turn of the century, local Jews made their living as tanners and leather traders.

The Jews of Bogodukhov suffered from the violence that accompanied the revolutionary upheavals and the Russian Civil War. In 1919, Anton Denikin's White troops perpetrated a pogrom in the town. Nevertheless, Bogodukhov appears to have been considered relatively safe at the time, compared to other nearby localities, and many Jews sought refuge there. By the mid-1920s, the number of Jews in Bogodukhov had risen significantly, reaching 259 (or 1.6 percent of the total population) in 1926.

In the 1920s and 1930s, that figure dropped again. Many of the younger Jews left Bogodukhov for larger towns and cities, in search of new educational and professional opportunities. In 1939, the town was home to a mere 136 Jews, who made up 0.85 percent of the total population. In the wake of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Jewish refugees from other parts of the country arrived in Bogodukhov. Most of these refugees, along with the majority of the local Jews, were apparently able to flee into the Soviet interior before the German occupation of the town on October 12, 1941. Several dozen of the Jews who had stayed behind were murdered in summer 1942, upon the orders of the German military authorities.

Bogodukhov was liberated by the Red Army on February 17, 1943; reoccupied by the Germans less than a month later, and liberated by the Red Army for good on August 8, 1943.