Kupyansk

Jews began to settle in Kupyansk in the mid-19th Century. In 1897, the town was home to 71 Jews, who made up one percent of the total population. Most of the Jews of Kupyansk were small-scale traders and artisans. In 1917, there was a branch of the socialist Bund party in the town. The Jews of Kupyansk suffered greatly from the violence accompanying the period of revolutionary upheavals and civil war in Russia. In 1919, Anton Denikin’s White troops perpetrated a pogrom in Kupyansk, and this event claimed the lives of about a dozen local Jews. In the early 1920s, the number of Jews in Kupyansk increased, but it declined in subsequent years, mostly because of the emigration of Jews (especially the younger ones), who were moving to larger towns and cities in search of better educational and professional opportunities. In 1939, there were 124 Jews in Kupyansk, comprising 0.6 percent of the total population. At least some of the local Jews were able to leave the town before its occupation by the Wehrmacht on June 23, 1942. At the same time, a certain number of Jewish refugees from the western regions of Ukraine arrived in the town in the aftermath of the German invasion of the USSR. All the Jews remaining in Kupyansk under German occupation were murdered a short time after the arrival of German troops. The Red Army liberated Kupyansk on February 3, 1943.