Staraya Sinyava

The earliest reference to the presence of Jews in Staraya Sinyava dates to 1570. Almost all the local Jews appear to have been murdered during the Chmelnitsky uprising (1648-1649). The Jewish community gradually revived, and in 1897 the town was home to 2,279 Jews, who made up forty-nine percent of the total population. In June 1919, the local Jews suffered a pogrom. In the 1920s and 1930s, a Jewish council operated in the town. In 1939, there were 1,237 Jews in the town, comprising almost twenty-eight percent of the total population. Only a few Jews appear to have fled from Staraya Sinyava following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Germans troops occupied the town on July 14 that year. On August 19, Einsatzgruppe C murdered some 300 Jews from Staraya Sinyava. Shortly thereafter, the town's remaining Jews were concentrated in a ghetto, which was fenced off with barbed wire. According to a Soviet ChGK document, 180 Jews perished in the ghetto. Apparently in the summer of 1942, the inmates of the Staraya Sinyava ghetto were taken to the ghetto in Starokonstantinov. They were murdered later, along with Jews from Starokonstantinov, Gritsev, and Ostropol. Another eighty Jews, who had been caught hiding, were shot dead outside the town in the summer of 1943. Staraya Sinyava was liberated by the Red Army on March 7-8, 1944.