Letichev

Jews settled in Letichev (formerly Leshin) in the late 16th century. In 1648, during the uprising of Bogdan Chmielnitsky, Letichev was burned down by the Cossacks, who in 1664 again murdered Jews who had not managed to escape the town. Among the prominent Jewish figures connected to Letichev was Yehuda Leib Nevakhovich, a representative of the Jewish enlightenment, a translator, publicist, and playwright who wrote the first drama in Russian on a Jewish theme. During the pogroms of 1881-1882 Jewish property was damaged. In 1897 the Jewish population stood at 4,108, which amounted to 58 percent of the total. In March 1919, during the Russian civil war, the Ukrainian army of Symon Petliura carried out a pogrom in the town. Under Soviet conditions many Jews moved to work in cooperatives while some Jews worked in agriculture on the nearby Jewish kolkhoz. Letichev had a 10-year Yiddish school that operated until 1938. In 1939 the Jewish population of 1,946 comprised 36.4 percent of the total. The Germans entered Letichev on July 17, 1941. On September 22, 1941, on Rosh Hashanah eve, a ghetto comprising several dozen Jewish owned houses was established in a part of the town near Bazarnaya [Market] Square. The Jews were required to wear a yellow badge. The ghetto was surrounded with barbed wire and the Jews were required to hand over to the Gebeitskommisar (regional commissar) of Letichev Hammer (or according to one testimony he was named Frieber) their gold, other valuables and warm clothing. Starvation, hard labor, and diseases, such as typhus, led to a high mortality rate in the ghetto. The Jews were taken from the ghetto to work at the stone quarry outside the town. Apparently in the early spring of 1942, on the territory of the town's Dominican church (where there had previously been a German concentration camp for Soviet POWs), a labor camp was set up, where Jews (mainly artisans and craftsmen) from the nearby towns of Derazhnya, Volkovintsy, Kalyus, and other towns of the Kamenets-Podolsk District were held. They were taken from the camp, along with some Jews from the ghetto, to construct the main Proskurov-Vinnitsa road. In May 1942 several thousand Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were also sent to the camp, leading to considerable overcrowding. Apparently in the late summer of 1942 the ghetto was divided in two: one part – for the Jewish craftsmen and their families and the other - the larger part - for all the rest of the Jews. In September 1942 over 1,500 Jews from the larger ghetto were murdered by an SS murder squad outside the town near Zaletichevka village. Several days later a group of Jews who were found in hiding were killed at the same location. In November 200 Jews were murdered by Gendarmerie (rural order police) members in the labor camp and in the same month apparently a large group of Jewish specialists with their families from the second ghetto was shot to death near Zaletichevka. On January 30, 1943 the last skilled workers and the remaining laborers in the camp were murdered at the same site by SS men. Letichev was liberated by the Red Army on March 25, 1944.