Ladyzhin

Jews apparently started to settle in Ladyzhin in the early 17th century. All of Ladyzhin's Jews were brutally massacred in 1648 by the Cossacks of Bogdan Chmielnitsky. Almost a century passed before Jews started to return to Ladyzhin. In 1738-1768 the Jews of Ladyzhin were subjected to assaults and looting during the Haidamak rebellion. In 1897 Ladyzhin's 3,212 Jews comprised 48.75 percent of the town's total population. In October 1905 there was a pogrom during which Jewish houses and shops were looted. The Jewish population of Ladyzhin suffered greatly from the violence of the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia. The town was assaulted repeatedly by various warring parties, Jewish property was looted and a number of Ladyzhin Jews lost their lives. In March 1920 an orphanage for Jewish children who lost their parents in this wave of violence was opened in Ladyzhin. During the Soviet period some of the Jews became industrial workers or government officials; others turned to agriculture. In 1930 a Jewish kolkhoz, "A Gutes Lebn" (Good Life) was established near Ladyzhin; it lasted a decade. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a Yiddish school in Ladyzhin. In 1939 Ladyzhin had 720 Jews, who comprised 13.2 percent of the town's total population. Few Jews managed to leave Ladyzhin before it was occupied by German troops on July 24, 1941. Soon after the start of the occupation members of the German Todt organization burned alive three elderly Jews of Ladyzhin. Most Ladyzhin Jews who had remained in the town were murdered on September 13, 1941. Two days later Ladyzhin was occupied by Romanian troops; it became part of the Romanian-occupied zone of Transnistria. The Romanians established a labor camp in Ladyzhin to which several hundred Jews from various locations in Trostyanets County were taken. In early 1942 most of these Jews, except for a few skilled workers, were transferred to the Pechora camp. In mid-1942 about 1,000 Jews from Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia were deported to Ladyzhin and forced to work at the local stone quarry. Those unable to work were murdered by the Germans. Most of the deportees were later transferred from Ladyzhin to German labor camps along Highway IV, where most of them perished. Ladyzhin was liberated by the Red Army on March 13, 1944.