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Ghetto in Chernivtsi, Ukraine

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

In 1930, Jews made up 38% of the city's population. 42.9 thousand people lived here. In the period from 1939 until the beginning of the Soviet-German war in the summer of 1941, the Jewish population of Chernivtsi increased to 51.5 thousand due to refugees. Information about the number of evacuees was not preserved.

On July 5, 1941, Chernivtsi was occupied by Romanian and German troops. From July 7 to 9, the German Sonderkommando 10 b carried out the first extermination action. About 400 Chernivtsi Jews were driven to the Romanian House of Culture, where they were tortured. Then they were destroyed in the area of ​​​​military shooting ranges on the Prut River. From July 9 to 10, the bodies of the dead were taken to the local Jewish cemetery. The bodies were buried in three large mass graves and 12 graves of 12-15 people. The invaders destroyed 36 synagogues in the city. At the end of July 1941, Sonderkommando 10 b left the city. Chernivtsi remained under the rule of the Romanian administration.

According to Romanian data, as of October 1, 1941, 49.4 thousand Jews remained in Chernivtsi.

In September 1941, the Romanian authorities issued an order for the use of Jews for forced labor in factories and in the private sector. In the city, a Commission for Registration and Control of Jews was created, in which all Jews aged 18 to 50 were to be registered.

On October 10, 1941, the governor of Bukovina, Corneliu Kolotescu, signed a decree on the creation of a ghetto in Chernivtsi. The next day, Romanian soldiers surrounded several city blocks with a fence and barbed wire and began the resettlement of Jews in a closed ghetto.

In October, the first wave of deportations of Chernivtsi Jews from their ghettos to the territory of Romanian Transnistria began. On October 14, 1941, 4,000 people were deported from Chernivtsi by rail, and another 5,000 on October 28 and 30. By mid-November, more than 28,000 Jews were deported from the city.

According to the data of the occupying authorities, at the end of May 1942, 19.5 thousand Jews remained in the ghetto. In June-July 1942, several more deportation actions took place. The last deportation took place in September 1942. Then the Romanian authorities took out 500 Jews.

Mayor Trajan Popović persuaded the military authorities to stop the deportations and leave qualified workers in the city to keep the city's economy running.

By the time the Soviet troops arrived, more than 17,000 Jews remained in the city.