In the 19th century, Bratslav was one of the centers of Hasidism. Jews made up 40% of the town's inhabitants. In the twentieth century, the Jewish population declined. By 1939, more than 1,000 Jews lived here, accounting for a quarter of the local population.

The city was occupied in July 1941. It came under the control of the Romanian occupation authorities. In the fall of 1941, a ghetto was created in the city, into which local Jews and part of the Jews expelled by the Romanians from Bukovina and Bessarabia were herded. According to the Romanian authorities, there were approximately 750 people in the Bratslav ghetto. Once a week, prisoners were released outside the ghetto to fetch water and buy food at the market.

On the night of January 1, 1942, the prisoners were sent to a concentration camp in the village of Pechera, not far from Bratslav. During the transportation, about 50 people were killed, and the bodies were dumped into the Southern Bug River.

A small part of the Jews remained in the city, who were used by the invaders for construction work. By the spring, they were also transferred to the Pechersk camp. In addition to Bratslav Jews, Jews from nearby villages, as well as the cities of Trostianets, Ladyzhin, Tulchyn, Mohyliv-Podilskyi and other territories of Ukraine occupied by Romanian troops, were in the camp. In the camp, according to historians, there were more than 11 thousand prisoners. It got the name "Dead Loop".

The conditions were so intolerable that cases of cannibalism were recorded in the camp. Not more than 1 thousand prisoners survived the imprisonment.

In Bratslav itself, in the summer of 1942, the invaders created two labor camps. They included 1.2 thousand Romanian and about 300 Ukrainian Jews. The prisoners were used as labor for German construction companies. Camps were located in the building of the school and the accounting college. The prisoners had to work in stone quarries from dawn to dusk. They were given half an hour a day for a lunch break.

During the occupation, about 1.8 thousand Jews were killed in Bratslav itself. After liberation in 1944, just over 200 local and Romanian Jews remained in the city.

At the turn of the 1990s, a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in the Bratslav region was erected at the new Jewish cemetery in Bratslav. After Ukraine proclaimed independence, the Star of David appeared on the memorial.

Also on the bank of the Southern Bug, there is a monument to the pupils of the Jewish orphanage killed by the invaders.

In the village of Pechera there is also a memorial to the children who died in the concentration camp.