Jews in Ukraine

At the end of the 18th century, as a result of three divisions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, part of its territories, where Jews had lived for several centuries, was annexed to the Russian Empire. The Jewish community of the empire, according to the 1897 census, reached a population of up to 5,200,000 people. In 1791, under Catherine, the Pale of Settlement was established, defining the territory outside which the residence of Jews was prohibited. It included former Polish lands, the southern regions of Ukraine and Crimea. It was the Pale of Settlement that largely predetermined the formation of shtetls – towns in which the main percentage of the population were Jews.

After the establishment of Soviet power, Jewish community life was almost completely destroyed. The shtetls began to decline.

In August 1939, the well-known “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, Northern Bukovina and Besarabia were signed by the Soviet Union. On the eve of the German invasion, about 2.7 million Jews lived on the territory of Ukraine (within modern borders). In terms of the size of the Jewish community, Ukraine ranked (in mid-1941) first in Europe and second in the world.