Berdychiv

Berdychiv
Бердичів
	Berdychiv
Basic data
Oblast :	Zhytomyr Oblast
Rajon :	District-free city
Height :	no information
Area :	35.00 km²
Residents :	87,193 (2004)
Population density :	2,491 inhabitants per km²
Postcodes :	13300
Area code :	+380 4143
Geographic location :	49 ° 54 '  N , 28 ° 37'  E Coordinates: 49 ° 53 '30 "  N , 28 ° 36' 45"  E
KOATUU :	1820800000
Administrative structure :	1 city
Mayor :	Wassyl Masur
Address:	пл. Жовтнева 1 13300 м. Бердичів
Website :	http://www.berdychiv.osp.com.ua/
Statistical information
Berdychiv

Berdychiv ( Ukrainian Бердичів ; Russian Бердичев Berditschew , Polish Berdyczów , Yiddish באַרדיטשעװ Bardichev ) is a city in the south of the Ukrainian Oblast Zhytomyr with about 80,000 inhabitants. The city is the administrative center of the raion of the same name and is located about 40 kilometers south of Zhytomyr . It is an important industrial center (mechanical engineering, shoe factory) and a traffic junction on the Ukrainian Southern Railway from Kiev via Kosjatyn to Sdolbuniw and on via Dubno and Brody to Lviv ( Kovel – Kosjatyn railway and Lviv – Sdolbuniw railway ).

history

Berdychiv was first mentioned as a settlement in 1320. After the ruling dynasty in Galicia-Volhynia died out in 1340, Berdychiv, like all of Volhynia , fell to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the war for the lands that followed . In 1430, Grand Duke Vytautas the Great granted rule over the Kalinik area of Putywl . In 1483 invading Crimean Tatars devastated the settlement.

Now owned by the Lithuanian Tyszkiewicz family , a town was founded here around 1546, and a castle was added later. In the course of the Union of Lublin , Berdyczów became, like all of Lithuania, part of the united Poland-Lithuania in 1569 , where it belonged to the Volyn Voivodeship . Fairs have been held in Berdyczów since 1675. As a result, the city became an important trading center.

Fortified Carmelite monastery

In the struggle of the Polish Szlachta in the Confederation of Bar against the loss of their influence in the aristocratic republic and against Russian influence on the election of kings and the latter itself, Berdyczów's monastery of the Discalced Carmelites was one of the battlegrounds in 1768. Casimir Pułaski was a co-founder of the Confederation and had gathered fighters in Volhynia and Podolia . The Russian troops already present in Poland-Lithuania, who had helped King Stanislaus II to vote in August 1762 through intimidation and Russian vote buying , took action against the Confederates. Pułaski holed up in the Carmelite Monastery, where he with 700 allies and 800 civilians held out against Russian sieges and onslaught for 17 days. The Russian commander Alexander Suvorov let him go against the promise to break away from the Confederation .

Berdyczów has been one of the most important centers of Jewish life in Poland since the 18th century. The Jewish population made up the majority of the city's population for a long time, around 75% in the 1789 census. In 1793 Berdyczów fell in the course of the second partition of Poland with large parts of Volhynia to the Russian Empire , where it was part of the new Volhynian governorate . A strong Hasidic movement arose in the city.

Nikolauskirche in Liebknecht-Strasse

In 1861 Berdychiv counted almost 47,000 Jews, making the city the second largest Jewish population of all Russian cities. Emigration dampened the strong population growth caused by many births. The anti-Semitic anti-Semitic discrimination on the part of the tsarist government (so-called May Laws ), which began in 1882, fueled Jewish emigration. From 1892 to 1921, the Berdychiv tram operated by horses ran in the village . In 1897 41,617 (about 80%) of the 53,728 inhabitants were Jews.

At the time of the October Revolution in 1917, the mayor's office was in the hands of a Bundist . Two years later, in the Russian civil war between whites and reds , anti-Semites carried out a pogrom in the city. In the Polish-Soviet War , the Second Republic of Poland tried to regain territories that had been lost in the partitions and in the spring of 1920 it advanced beyond Berdychiv to Kiev. When the city was captured by the Red Soviets later that year, many of the city's buildings were shot to pieces by Soviet artillery. According to the Polish-Soviet Peace of Riga (1921), Berdychiv with eastern Volhynia remained under Soviet rule and became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic .

Berdychiv was a cultural center for Jews, Poles and Ukrainians until the 20th century. In the first half of the 1920s, Yiddish was recognized in official use and as a court language. The Soviet authorities forbade Yiddish in official use in the 1930s, as they also closed the Yeshives , Batei Midrash and most synagogues. Jewish emigration increased. In 1926 Berdychiv had 51,440 inhabitants.

The murder of the Jewish population in 1941/42

After the German invasion on July 7, 1941, the Jewish population, who made up about half of the 66,306 inhabitants at the time, was systematically murdered on the edge of the nearby airfield. Among those murdered the major action of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C also the mother of was Vasily Grossman .

First of all, on July 10, 1941 , the city ​​commandant demanded a contribution of 100,000 rubles from the city's Jewish population. There were pogrom-like riots in which entire groups were murdered and the synagogues were set on fire. On August 25, 1941, the order to set up a ghetto was issued. On September 4, 1941, on the orders of the Higher SS and Police Leader, 1,500 young men were selected under the pretext of harvesting and shot outside the city.

Ten days later, Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C reached the city. The next morning around 4:00 a.m., the ghetto was cordoned off by the SS and police, and 18,600 people were driven to prepared pits at the city's airfield, where they were shot (September 15, 1941). The surviving Jewish residents were gradually murdered in several actions until mid-June 1942. On November 3, 1941, the families of the craftsmen who had previously been spared, a total of around 2,000 people, were murdered. On April 7, 1942, 70 Jewish women who were married to non-Jews were murdered. On June 16, 1942, the remaining craftsmen were killed.

Berdychiv was liberated by the Red Army on January 15, 1944 . At that time, 15 Jews were still living in the city.

See also: Jewish Cemetery (Berdychiv) and Choral Synagogue (Berdychiv)

sons and daughters of the town

• Levi Jizchak von Berditschew (1740-1810), Hasidic rabbi
• Israel Back (1797–1874), influential figure in Eretz Israel
• Osias Abrass , Chasan, Cantor and Composer
• Ignaz von Ephrussi (1829–1899), Greco-Russian banker and art collector in Odessa and Vienna
• Abraham Alter Fiszzon (1843–1922), Jewish actor and theater director
• Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Polish-British writer
• Boris Sidis (1867–1923), psychologist, psychiatrist and psychopathologist
• Noah Pryłucki (1882–1941), Yiddish philologist
• Pinchas Kahanowitsch (1884–1950), Yiddish writer (The Nister)
• Jakow Kornfeld (1896–1962), Russian architect and university professor
• Regina Horowitz (1900–1984), pianist and university professor
• Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989), Russian-American pianist
• Josef Berstein (1904–1964), Jewish-American film director
• Wassili Semjonowitsch Grossman (1905–1964), Soviet writer and journalist
• Vladimir Sak (1913–1994), chess player, coach of the Soviet chess school
• Valery Skworzow (* 1945), Russian-Soviet high jumper
• Svyatoslaw Piskun (* 1959), politician, prosecutor general of Ukraine, lieutenant general of the tax police
• Anatoli Salewski (* 1974), acrobat and equilibrist
• Volodymyr Matwijtschuk (* 1982), boxer
• Jurij Krymarenko (* 1983), high jumper
• Dmytro Razumkov (* 1983), politician

Varia

• In 1850 Honoré de Balzac married Ewelina Hańska in Berdychiv.
• Berdychiv is the setting in the silent film Jewish Happiness from 1925 based on stories by Scholem Alejchem and the setting of the novel Die Brüder Maschber (1939) by Pinchas Kahanowitsch (pseudonym: The Nister ) about the fall of a respected merchant family around 1870. There, the city of N. called.
• The asteroid (159181) Berdychiv , discovered on October 29, 2005 by the Andruschiwka Astronomical Observatory , was named in honor of the city.

literature

• Michaela Christ: The dynamic of killing: The murder of the Jews by Berditschew, Ukraine 1941–1944. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2011. ISBN 978-3-596-19185-7
• Wassili Grossman: The murder of the Jews in Berditschew . In: The Black Book. The genocide of the Soviet Jews . Edited by Wassili Grossman and Ilja Ehrenburg . German translation of the complete version, edited by Arno Lustiger , pages 59–72: Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994. ISBN 3-498-01655-5
• LG Berlin, March 9, 1960 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XVI, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1976, No. 490, pp. 339–377 Subject matter of the proceedings: Execution of at least 300 Jewish men, women and children housed in the former Armored Barracks South in Berditschew in August 1942 and of at least 22 severely disabled Russian prisoners who were also detained there Prisoners of war on December 24, 1942

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} "Berditschew" (entry), in: Der Große Brockhaus: Handbuch des Wissens in twenty volumes : 21 vols., Leipzig: Brockhaus, ¹⁵ 1928–1935; Vol. 2 “Asu-Bla” (1929), p. 539
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, sv Berditschew
3. ^ ^{A b c} Vasily Grossman: A Writer at War . New York, 2006, pp. 247-261.
4. ↑ (159181) Berdychiv in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).