Borodyanka

 

Borodyanka is an urban-type settlement (since 1957).

In the XVI-XVIII centuries. – a place in the Kyiv povet (district) and voivodeship (province) at the end of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the second partition of the Commonwealth (1793), the shtetl of Borodyanka was part of the Russian Empire. It was a shtetl in the Kyiv district, Kyiv province.

This article was created by Anna Ponomarenko and the full version can be found here
Anna interviewed more than 10 people and collFected all the information in the article. Below is just a small part of the collected information.

Article was translated by Daniel Pesin.

The Jewish Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron says that Jews began to settle in Borodyanka in the 18th study, until 1765. Their colony was called Mariyampol.

About 300 Jewish families lived in Borodyanka at the beginning of the 19th century. The Jews did not run large enterprises. Mostly they were handicraftsmen and artisans.

According to archival documents (tax and real estate) in the town of Borodyanka for 1893, we learn that, except for the landowner Shembek, everyone on the list were meschans (residents of shtetls) with Jewish names. There are such surnames: Chernyakhovsky, Rapoport, Zhuk, Ovrutsky, Riznitsky, Borodyansky, Kotlyarsky, Shtykel (the second in terms of the total relative value of property after Shembek), Feldman, Khazan, Khaitin, Merzlyak, Kravets, Karchemsky, Men, Sapozhnik, Varshavsky, Levitsky, Sidelsky, Dombrovsky, Gorodetsky, Shklyarovsky.

There was a synagogue in the town.

Avrom-Leib Herman (1858–?) was a rabbi in Borodyanka from 1885.

Nadezhda Pavlovna Yatsenko, in the article “We have our own home” from the newspaper “Nadezhda” dated July 2002, writes about Borodyanka at the beginning of the 20th century: “We had a single two-story house in Borodyanka, where Chaim Shtikel lived. On the first floor, he kept a hairdresser, a shoe shop, and a shop, and on the second floor he lived with his family.

Jews lived mainly in the centre of the town, on the modern Shevchenko street.

Photos of the center of Borodyanka, beginning of 20 century:

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During the years of the Russian Revolution of 1917-1920, the Jews of Borodyanka suffered greatly from the pogroms.

In 1917 there were single incidents of Jews being robbed.

On February 23, 1918, a gang entered the town, killed 2 Jews and threatened with a pogrom, demanding “that the Jews give out 2 machine guns and 70 rifles hidden among them”. The Jews paid them with money.

Yosef-Ber Tsimberg (1865-1919), who lived in Borodianka, was killed by the Petliurists. He was killed and robbed while driving from the fair. He is survived by his wife, Hana-Mikhlya Tsimberg.

During one of the pogroms, the synagogue and the house of Rabbi Avraham Herman were burned down.

In 1920-1921, there were the following pogroms in Borodyanka, recorded in any historical documents:
1) from January 1 to March 15, 1920 – probably Orlik;
2) before October 1920 – probably Orlik;
3) 1921 – three pogroms: Mordalevichi in February, Orlik on February 15 and March 19.

In 1920-1921, as a result of constant terror by local gangs, most of the Jews left Borodyanka for safer places. 114 Jews lived in Borodianka in 1923

Among the birth certificates for 1926 according to Borodianka, one can find the following names and occupations of the Jews of that time:
– tailors (Khaitin, Kaganovsky, Karchemsky, Sherman, Kishkin, Lev, Gorodetsky, Radovilsky), blacksmith (Gutnik), hatmaker (Talsky), forager (Firfer), shoemakers (Gutnik, Gimpelevich, Kaganovsky, Levitsky), tanner (Kotlyarenko) ;
– the manufacturer of kvass (Kofman), the butcher (Tsimberg), the baker (Mozyrsky);
– merchants (Eisenberg, Sakhnovsky, Yaroslavsky, Zhilinsky, Vysotsky, Ovrutsky),
– watchmaker (Schwarzer);
– an employee of a glass factory (Eisenberg), an employee of the glass guta (Heifetz);
– glazier (Yuditsky), carpenter (Bilson);
– teacher (German);
– photographer (Brodsky);
– clerk (Karachunsky),
– an employee (registry office), an employee for the needs of the partnership (Tchaikovsky).

In the 1920s, a Jewish school was established in the town, where Rabbi Nukhim Abramovich Herman worked as a teacher. The school was located on the site of the modern park, opposite the post office. The school was closed in 1933.

In 1939, 284 Jews (7% of the population) lived in the town.

It is not known what part of the Jewish population managed to evacuate. I can assume that it was at least half, since the shtetl was not far from Kyiv on the important Kovel-Kyiv highway.

At the end of August 2021, the act of the special Soviet commission of November 1943 on the crimes of the Nazis in the village of Borodyanka was declassified. It talks about the arrests and detention of people in the former club, executions in the collective farm garden, at the local cemetery and on the territory of the former brick factory.

In what exact place and under what circumstances the Jewish population of Borodyanka was exterminated, I was unable to find out.

In February 1943, the Gestapo ordered the release of one of the huts on the outskirts of Borodyanka, where the Nazis brought 24 arrested people, including several families. The house was filled with hay and burned along with the victims in it. The number of victims burned at the site of the monument varies. Whether Jews were among them is not exactly known, but it is unlikely that any of them remained alive in 1943.

After the WWII

After the war, the Korol, German, Karchemsky, Kerner, Vysotsky, Levitsky, Nudelman, Feldman and other families returned to Borodyanka.

Photos of the Borodyanka Jews, collected from different family archives by Anna Ponomarenko:

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After the war, David Kravets returned to his native Polesskoe, but his house was gone, his relatives were killed, and his brother did not return from the war. And he decided to go to Borodanka to some people he knew, and he stayed there. He married and had two sons. He worked in agricultural engineering. In 1976, he was found by his brother, who survived the war. The meeting was unforgettable 30 years after the war. The brothers are buried at the Borodyanka non-Jewish cemetery.

Isaak Brodsky was the only professional photographer in Borodyanka in the first half of the 20th century. Yakov Korol studied under him.

It was to Yakov in 1963 or 1964 that someone brought an old photographic film. Yakov developed 20 frames on it, these turned out to be photographs of Borodyanka from the beginning of the 20th century.

Ishika Tsimberg was famous for selling sparkling water in Borodyanka in the early 1950s.

The Jewish community was organized in the 1990s with over 30 members.

With the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2022, Borodyanka found itself at the epicentre of the fighting between Russian and Ukrainian troops. Many buildings were destroyed.
Most of the members of the Jewish community left through Poland for Israel.

No Jewish buildings have been preserved – only separate private houses on Shevchenko street have been which were rebuilded.

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The oldest metric books of the Jews of Borodyanka in the public domain can be found for 1875.

Jewish cemetery

There are 30 tombstones at the Borodyanka Jewish cemetery, the earliest of which dates back to 1915, the latest to 1990.
The cemetery was destroyed more than once; the fence was broken.

In 1960, several tombstones were destroyed there, and in 1970 Jews began to be buried in the Orthodox Christian cemetery.

In 2020, the cemetery was fenced and cleaned at the expense of the European Union.

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