Lozovaya

Lozovaya was established in the 1860s as a station on the Kursk-Kharkov railway. The first Jews began to settle there around the same time. Although the official regulations of 1882 banned Jews from residing in Lozovaya, which lay outside the Pale of Settlement, this rule was not observed too strictly, and in 1897 the town was home to 813 Jews, who made up 21.9 percent of the total population. Additional Jewish families settled in Lozovaya after the lifting of the ban on Jewish residence in 1903. Most local Jews were artisans and petty traders, and Jewish-owned businesses in Lozovaya included an iron foundry and a lime quarry. At the turn of the century, the town had a Russian-language Jewish public school for boys and a mixed Jewish private school. In May 1881, following the assassination of Russian Emperor Alexander II, Lozovaya became the scene of anti-Jewish riots organized by local railway workers, which resulted in the destruction of five Jewish homes. The Jewish community of Lozovaya suffered greatly from the violence accompanying the revolutionary upheavals and the Civil War in Russia. In 1918, anti-Jewish riots broke out in the town, and in 1919 Anton Denikin's White troops carried out a pogrom against the local Jews, killing several of them. During the early Soviet period, the socioeconomic situation of the Jews of Lozovaya changed profoundly. Since the new authorities banned all forms of private economic activity, many local Jews were forced to seek out new occupations. Some of them turned to agriculture. In the 1930s, a Jewish collective farm named Kolos ("Ear of Wheat") was established near the town. Over the same period, the 1920s and 1930s, many Jews, especially young ones, left Lozovaya for larger towns and cities, in search of new educational and vocational opportunities. In 1939, Lozovaya had 528 Jewish residents, who constituted 2.4 percent of the total population. Some local Jews were able to leave the town ahead of its occupation by German troops on October 11, 1941. Several dozen Jews who had stayed were murdered, apparently as early as late October 1941, by members of Einsatzgruppe C. Another massacre took place in late 1942. In late November 1941, a detachment of Sonderkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C shot 740 Red Army POWs, many of them Jews, in the POW camp in the town. In the course of 1942-1943, Lozovaya changed hands several times, before being liberated for good by the Red Army on September 16, 1943.