Malyn is a city of the Korostensky district of the Zhytomyr region. It is mentioned in sources since the 11th century. The name comes from the name of the prince of the Drevlians named Mal. According to another version, on behalf of the daughter of the ruler of Malusha. Malyn officially became the city only in 1938.

The first mention of Jews living in Malyn dates back to 1784. At that time, there were 28 Jews in the settlement. In 1847, the number of Jews increased to 1,064. According to the 1897 census, Jews made up 59.8% of the local population. There were three synagogues in the city.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a Jewish bank in the city, Jews owned a hotel, all grocery stores, six pharmacy warehouses, four tanneries and four hardware stores, 14 manufactories, two jewelry, 18 hat, two furniture and nine clothing stores.

Little Malyn is home to several prominent figures in Jewish history. Here were born the writer, translator and literary critic Vladimir Weisblat and his brother, doctor of medical sciences, famous dentist Solomon Weisblat, sculptor Batya Lishanskaya and her sister Golda Lishanskaya, who went down in history as Yanait Ben-Zvi - the wife of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi - the second president of the State of Israel and a well-known figure of the Zionist movement, as well as an Israeli actor and director, founder of the Tel Aviv Habima Theater Friedland Zvi.

Like many other Jewish townships, Malyn experienced a cultural boom in the 1920s and 1930s. There was a Jewish school and several national and cultural institutions here. In the late 1930s, they were all closed.

According to the data of 1939, 3.6 thousand Jews lived in the city. They made up one third of the local population. With the outbreak of World War II, part of the Malyn Jews left the city and went to stay with their relatives in Kyiv and Chernigov. Some of them tried to get out of the city by horse-drawn transport, the prices of which sharply increased in the first days of the war. There were rumors among the local population that the Jews were not able to take out all their wealth and bury them in the courtyards of abandoned houses in order to return after the war for their acquired.

Some members of the Jewish population did not see the evacuation as a plan of aktion, since they remembered how the German troops behaved in 1918.

Malyn was occupied a month after the start of the war. Shortly after the occupation, an extermination team arrived in the city. The gathering place for Jews became the territory of a furniture factory. From there, the doomed were taken to Shcherbov Yar, located between the city and the Malyn railway station. According to official figures, the Nazis shot over a thousand people.