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Jews in Klintsy, Russia

A photo catalog of the burials of this cemetery is available at the LINK

Klintsy is a settlement in the Bryansk region of Russia. It was founded as a settlement of the landowner Ivan Borozdnya on the site of the Ukrainian villages of Glukhovka and Stodola in 1707. In 1782, by the decree of Empress Catherine II, the settlement received the status of a posad. Since July 1919, the settlement was part of the Gomel province of the RSFSR. Since 1925, Klintsy received the status of a city.

The settlement was located within the Pale of Settlement. According to the 1897 census, 2,000 Jews lived in Klintsy. They made up 34.3% of the local population. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were several synagogues in the city.

In October 1905, local Jews suffered a pogrom. The memories of Doba-Mera Medvedeva (Gurevich), born in 1892, about those events have been preserved. She said that rumors about the impending pogroms spread after the publication of the October Manifesto of 1905.

On Friday, October 21, 1905, on market day, the city was flooded with peasant carts. The Jews, having come to the shops, found painted yellow crosses on the doors. In the afternoon, pogroms and robberies began, and in the evening, several fires broke out in Jewish shops.

According to Medvedeva's recollections, the bailiff sent police officers to the wealthy Jews. They waited out the pogrom in the prison at the police station. On the morning of Saturday October 22, 1905, the Jews were released, declaring that the pogroms were over. At the request of the manufacturers, the authorities set up guards at the entrance to the city and sent a priest to reason with the visiting pogromists.

In the 1920s, a Jewish orphanage was built in the city at the expense of the Joint.

In the second half of the 1920s, part of the Jews of Klintsy went to the Crimea to create agricultural partnerships. Several hundred people left the city. In the late 1920s, the authorities tried to create two Jewish agricultural partnerships in the Klintsy District.

By 1926, the proportion of Jews in the city's population was 23.5%.

In the late 1930s, an underground yeshiva of the Lubavitcher Hasidim headed by Yosef Goldberg worked in Klintsy.

By 1939, about 6.5 thousand Jews lived in the city.

The city was occupied in August 1941. The Nazis created two closed ghettos on its territory. During the years of the Holocaust, according to various estimates, up to 4 thousand Jews of Klintsy and the surrounding area were killed. At the end of the 1940s, there were 0.5 thousand Jews living in the city. In 1946, the authorities allowed the opening of a synagogue, which was attended by up to 300 people on holidays. After the synagogue closed from the 1960s to the early 1990s, Jews gathered illegal minyan in rented houses.

In 1990, a Jewish community was registered in the city. According to 2002 data, there were 1,500 Jews in Klintsy.