Zgurița
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Zgurița ( Rum. ) Згурица ( Russian ) |
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| State : |
 Moldova
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| Administrative unit : | Drochia district | ||
| Coordinates : | 48 ° 7 ' N , 28 ° 1' E | ||
| Residents : | 2,840 | ||
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Zgurița ( Romanian ), Russian Згурица , is a village in Drochia Raion in northern Moldova . Founded in 1853 as the last Jewish agricultural colony in Bessarabia , it was a village and a local trading center with a Jewish majority until the 1930s. In the 2004 census, 2840 inhabitants were determined.
location
Zgurița is located on a side road (R7) that leads from the city of Soroca on the bank of the Nistru in a south-westerly direction through Drochia, the main town of the Rajon , to Rîșcani and meets the E583 . This connects Bălți , the largest city in northern Moldova, with Edineț further north. Coming from Soroca, the R7 branches off to the west after twelve kilometers from the R9, which runs parallel to the Nistru to Otaci , and after another twelve kilometers reaches Zgurița. The distance to Drochia is 18 and to Rîșcani around 40 kilometers. A road leads south to the similarly distant small town of Florești .
The place is surrounded by flat hills covered with natural steppe grass. They form the extensive landscape that is typical of northern Moldova at a height of 100 to 300 meters. Planted strips of trees, which serve as avenue trees along the agricultural driveways, structure the grassy plains. In the fields, mainly wheat, corn and sunflowers are planted on moderately fertile brown earth soils . Isolated original forest islands consist of low-growing oaks and beeches . The climatic region in the northern half of the country with average annual rainfall of up to 500 millimeters is known as the forest steppe zone.
history
The historical region of Bessarabia, which was somewhat larger than today's Moldova, was completely under Ottoman rule from the 16th century . After the victory of the Russian Empire in the Russo-Turkish War in 1812, Bessarabia fell under Russian control and was one of the areas known as the Pale of Settlement in which Jews were allowed to settle. Many Jewish craftsmen and traders immigrated from Poland, the Ukraine and Galicia . Under the rule of Nicholas I , 17 Jewish agrarian colonies were founded between 1836 and 1853, benefiting from privileges granted to farmers, with a total population of over 10,000 in 1858. By 1859, Jews made up 83,900 (7.9 percent) of the population of Bessarabia, 12.5 percent of whom were farmers. In 1897 the number of Jews had risen to 288,168 (11.8 percent). Some were settled in their own agricultural colonies.
In this context, Jewish settlers from Bessarabia founded Zguri gründa ( Yiddish) on 400 hectares of leased land in the vicinity of existing Romanian villages in 1853 זגוריצה) the last of the 17 colonies. In 1873 the Jewish landowner terminated the lease, which lost the legal status as a Jewish agricultural colony. The Jews were further restricted in their development opportunities as a result of the May Laws of May 3, 1882, which included a ban on Jews from settling outside of cities and the cancellation of leases outside cities. Unrest and assaults against Jews in rural areas in the 1880s forced many Jews to move to the cities. At the turn of the century, more than half of the Jews of Bessarabia lived in the cities to the north, where they consistently made up over a third of the population. Only 7.1 percent of the Jews in Bessarabia were employed in agriculture in 1897.
Between 1890 and 1903 no Jews could settle in Zgurița. Of the 2020 inhabitants in 1897, 1802 were Jews (85 percent). After the February Revolution of 1917 , the social situation of the Jews temporarily improved. At the end of the First World War , the Romanian army marched into Bessarabia in January 1918. After the land reform in Romania in 1922 , 150 Jews in Zgurița were allocated land on which they mainly grew vegetables. The community organized a loan fund, the 193 members of which in 1925 consisted of 113 traders, 40 farmers, 25 craftsmen and other professional groups. In 1930, 2541 of the 3039 inhabitants were Jews (83.9 percent). The local Tarbut organization ( Tarbut , Hebrew "culture", supra-regional, secular, Zionist educational initiative) operated a primary school and a kindergarten.
After the Romanian government withdrew from the advancing Red Army in June 1940, Bessarabia belonged to the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) on the Axis side until Romania entered the war in June 1941 . When fighting began in World War II when the Soviet army withdrew, Zgurița was bombed on July 3, 1941 and some houses went up in flames. Jews who fled into the surrounding area were captured two days later and detained in the open. Many Jews, especially women, were mistreated, others murdered by trigger-happy soldiers. The same thing happened to the Jews in other places ; only a few had an opportunity to flee. A short time later, the deportation of Jews from Bessarabia to Transnistria began . A large number of them, especially the elderly and children, died while being transported from illness, hunger and thirst. At the end of 1941 there were practically no more Jews living in Bessarabia. Of the Jews deported from Zgurița, all young men were sorted out at Cosăuţi, the border town on the Nistru north of Soroca. They had to dig their own graves before they were shot. The remaining Jews were deported to Tiraspol and Balta . Few were still alive after the war. In August 1944, the Soviet troops returned to Bessarabia and restored the MSSR, which existed until independence in 1991. The last remaining Jew of Zgurița was the owner of the flour mill, he left the place in 2001.
Townscape
At the 2004 census, Zgurița had 2,840 inhabitants. Of these, in 1912 they identified themselves as Moldovans , 774 as Ukrainians , 118 as Russians , 16 as Romanians, 5 as Bulgarians and 3 as Roma . The dead straight expressway touches Zgurița on the northern edge, from where the place expands in a flat hollow following a meandering stream to the south. The few simple farmsteads north of the road extend to an elongated reservoir formed by the Căinar stream. At the northern end of the lake is the smaller neighboring village of Măcăreuca. The lake is dammed by a dam over which the expressway runs. From the dam, the water passes under the road into a small and somewhat deeper reservoir and from there into another small lake before the stream flows south and finally flows into the Răut . Fruit trees and vegetables thrive in the enclosed gardens. Geese are kept in a large part of the homesteads. There is a primary school, a secondary school ( Școala Profesională ), about three grocery stores and a tiny market. The center of the village is marked by a memorial for the victims of the Second World War. The cemetery is located on the uninhabited hill west of the stream across from the town center.
The former synagogue was preserved from the 19th century . The rectangular two-storey building with a flat hipped roof is structured on the outer walls by wide pilasters . Apart from the central entrance door, the street facade has no opening; the upper floor is illuminated on the street side by three symmetrically arranged arched windows. In Soviet times the building served as a warehouse, today it is empty. It is in a poor state of preservation with some cracks in the masonry.
Jewish Cemetery
The former Jewish cemetery in a field surrounded by bushes has fallen into serious disrepair and is not well maintained. On 2000 square meters there are over 1000 tombstones , which are overgrown today and three quarters of which have overturned or broken.
literature
- Zguritza . In: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Romania, Volume 2 . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1980, p. 352
Web links
- Zgurița, Moldova. JewishGen Database
- Website of the place (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ^ Wilfried Heller, Mihaela Narcisa Arambașa: Geography. In: Klaus Bochmann, Vasile Dumbrava, Dietmar Müller, Victoria Reinhardt (eds.): The Republic of Moldau. Republica Moldova. A manual. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2012, pp. 159–161, ISBN 978-3-86583-557-4
- ^ Mariana Hausleitner: Germans and Jews. The legacy of the disappearing minorities . In: Klaus Bochmann u. a. (Ed.): The Republic of Moldova , p. 218
- ↑ Yefim Kogan: History of Jews in Bessarabia in the 15th to 19th Centuries. Geography, History, Social Status. 2008, p. 13
- ↑ Vladimir Solonari: The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic during the Second World War (1941-1945). In: Klaus Bochmann u. a. (Ed.): The Republic of Moldova, p. 93
- ↑ Краткая История села "Згурица". oldstory.info (Russian)
- ↑ Demographic, national, language and cultural characteristics . (Excel table in Section 7) National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldoca
- ^ Jewish Heritage Sites and Monuments in Moldova . ( Memento of December 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) United States Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, Washington 2010, pp. 79f