Verkhovnya

Verkhovnya was a village in the Ruzhin County. In the mid-19th century, it was home to seventy-six Jews, who made up seven percent of the total population. By 1897, the number of local Jews had grown to 316, or about thirteen percent of the total population. In the years following the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, the Jewish population declined, as a result of the migration of local Jews to larger towns. In 1926, a group of twenty-six Jews in Verkhovnya organized a Jewish agricultural cooperative. On the eve of the Soviet-German War, there were twenty-five Jewish families in the village. They worked at the local kolkhoz (collective farm), and also at the grain mill and the oil mill. A local pharmacy and barbershop were also run by Jews. Verkhovnya was occupied by German troops in mid-July 1941. The Jewish men of the village were shot in late August that year. The rest of the Jews were sent to the ghetto in Vcherayshe, where they were shot together with the other Jews. Verkhovnya was liberated by the Red Army in late December 1943.