Ozarintsy

Jews apparently first settled in Ozarintsy in the early 18th century. In 1897 Ozarintsy's 994 Jews comprised 25 percent of the total population. Most Ozarintsy Jews were artisans or small-scale merchants. The Jews of Ozarintsy suffered from violence during the revolutionary years and the civil war in Russia. Under Soviet rule many local Jews found work on a Jewish collective farm named after the Soviet functionary Petrovskiy. A large number of Jews, especially younger ones, left Ozarintsy at this time in search of educational and vocational opportunities in larger towns and cities. In 1926 600 Jews lived in Ozarintsy, where they comprised 14 percent of the total population. From the 1920s until the late 1930s a Yiddish school operated in Ozarintsy. The Jews of Ozarintsy suffered greatly during the Great Famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s. After the start of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Jewish refugees from Bessarabia sought refuge in Ozarintsy. German and Romanian troops occupied Ozarintsy on July 20, 1941. Immediately Romanian soldiers locked the entire Jewish population of the town in the building of a former synagogue with the intention of either blowing the building up or burning it down with all those inside. Ultimately, however, the Jews were released although several dozen Jewish men, mostly Bessarabian refugees, were shot at the local Polish cemetery near Ozarintsy. Several days later Romanian soldiers brutally murdered about 30 more Jewish men in the town itself. In September 1941 Ozarintsy became part of Transnistria, the Romanian zone of occupation. The town's Jews were incarcerated in a ghetto in inhuman conditions and used for various types of work both by the Romanian authorities and by German ones. The ghetto inmates had to wear white armbands with a yellow Star of David. In early 1942 many of the ghetto inmates died as a result of a typhus epidemic. Ozarintsy was liberated by the Red Army on March 10, 1944.