Borshagovka

Borshagovka is a village located in Pohrebyshchenskyi district of Vinnytsia district, Ukraine. In 2022, approximately 500 people lived there. Borshagovka locates near the confluence of the Orikhovatka and the Ros Rivers.

In 1793, after the second partition of Poland, Borshagovka became a part of the Russian Empire. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Borshagovka was a shtetls of the Skvira of Kyiv guibernia.

Historically, the village was divided into three parts: Mestechko (the centre with a market square where Jews mostly lived), Sad, and Zarechye.

Most of the information about the Jews of Borshagovka after the Revolution was obtained from an interview with a native of Borshagovka , Rakhil Karp, which she gave to the Shoa Foundation in the 1990s. Her entire family did not evacuate from the shtetl in 1941 and was executed in Pohrebyshche.

In the summer of 2022, I visited a village in search of any traces of the Jews and found only the remains of a destroyed Jewish cemetery and a few fragments of tombstones.

Borshagovka in 2020s:

In 1708, on the orders of Hetman Mazepa, the general judge Vasily Kochubey and the Poltava colonel Ivan Iskra were executed in the village. In 1908, on the 200th anniversary of the execution, a monument made from black stone was erected in the centre of the village. This monument is the oldest architectural object here.

 

In 1863, there was a synagogue in Borshagovka . From the 1880s, Rabbi Shlomo-Doyv-Ber Shapiro (1854–?) was the rabbi, followed by his son Yakov-Itskhok.

After the 1861 reform, Count Rzhevusky, who owned most of the land around Borshagovka, leased it to a local Jew named Gabe. According to the laws of 1881, Jews were prohibited from owning land, and then wealthy local Ukrainians began to lease the county land. In the centre of the shtetl was a Jewish mikveh on the Ros River.

In the early 20th century, thanks to the local Jewish community, a road was built connecting shtetls with Skvіra.

Among the wealthy residents of shtetl, there were merchant Singer and his son-in-law Chernov, who were said to be millionaires.

Pogroms

Borshagovka ceased to exist as a Jewish village during the Civil War of 1917-1920 when, due to numerous pogroms, Jews were forced to flee to other places.

From the memories of Rakhil Karp:
The Sokolovsky gang request a considerable sum of money from Jews. Bandits took 25 hostages and locked them in the synagogue. Jews failed to collect, and 20 hostages were killed. The village was burned from three sides. Residents actively participated in the pogroms. The most notable was Anton Lipinskiy, a Pole who led a gang and killed many Jews in the village.

Market square still a market square, 2023:

The town was destroyed due to pogroms in the summer and autumn of 1919. Here are the descriptions of the five largest ones:

June 1919 – numerous attacks by local gangs with human casualties.
July 1919 – Sokolovsky’s gang burned down shops and houses, killed ten people and injured 15, who later died from their wounds. Many women were raped.
July 1919 – on the day of the fair, Sherbanyuk’s gang burst into the town, took 43 men outside the town limits and killed them with swords, while 17 people were killed in the town. In addition, the property of Jews was looted.
August 1919 – Sokolovsky’s gang and Mezhinsky’s detachment broke into the town. Jews hid in the synagogue and the bathhouse but were pulled out and killed. Women and children mostly hid in the bathhouse, where they were dragged out, raped, and killed. One hundred twenty people were killed with incredible cruelty. Among the names of the dead were Bril Tsalikes and Shimshon Rybak.
In September 1919, Sokolovsky’s gang was operating around the town. All the Jews who could walk joined the retreating Red Army, and about 40 families left the town. Only sick and wounded Jews who could not walk remained. The gang invaded the town and burned down the last intact street. The remaining Jews were gathered by the bandits and thrown into the fire. As a result, 150 women and children were killed.

Description of pogroms in Borshagovka:

In total, up to 600 local Jews were killed during the pogroms.
Only poor people from Dzyunkiv came to Borshagovka to ask the local peasants for bread.
When Red Army soldiers caught Anton Lipinsk, one of the local militants, and executed him, the peasants from Borshagovka took revenge on the poor people from Dzyunkiv and killed them.

After the pogroms, the population fled to Skvira or Tetiev. In Skvira, most refugees died of hunger or typhus.
In Tetiev majority of Jews were killed during the bloody pogrom.

More information about pogroms in Borshagovka can be found here netormoz.wordpress.com

Rakhil Karp mentioned in her interview for the Shoa Foundation in 1998 that she was named after her grandmother, who died of grief after her husband and two sons were killed during the pogrom of 1919. Her husband and younger son were burned in the synagogue in Borshagovka, while the older son Moshko died during the Tetiev pogrom. At the same time, part of the mother’s family of Rakhil Karp were killed – her brother Isaac Alpert, pregnant sister Malia with two children and her husband.

The report on the disastrous situation of the Jews in Borshagovka was signed by three residents: Yakov Malsky, Chaim Levenberg, and Yosef Tsap. After establishing Soviet power in the 1920s, many Jews returned to the town.

In the 1920s, there was a Jewish school in the village. In the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish youth left the town and went to larger cities in the USSR after finishing school.

Here are the names and occupations of the Jews in Borshagovka in the 1920s mentioned by Rahil Karp in her interview:
– Pavelotsky was engaged in grain procurement
– The Karp family, Pinya and Maryasya, with their daughter Rahil, moved to Kyiv in the 1930s
– Chaim Karp was a shoemaker

The Jews were craftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, and one tinsmith. All of them were equally poor and lived relatively poorly.

The synagogue building was located on the town’s central street, not far from the church and the cathedral. The synagogue was a two-story building. It ceased to function as a synagogue in the 1920s. The building was destroyed during World War II.

Approximate site of the synagogue in Borshagovka:

There are also several heavily rebuilt Jewish houses in the centre of the former shtetl:

No rabbi was in the town, and he was invited from another town. A melamed in the village went to houses and taught children to read and write. There was no separate building for teaching, and the lesson was held in the student’s homes in turn.

Before Passover, the Jews kashered one house and baked matzo there for the entire town.

The Jewish population, like the non-Jewish population, suffered from the famine of 1933. Several children in one Jewish family died of hunger. Unfortunately, I was unable to find out the exact number and surname.

Before the war, several dozen Jews lived in Borshagovka. Residents remember that triplets were born in one Jewish family before the war.

Holocaust

At the beginning of the war, none of the Jews from the town could evacuate. The Jewish population of Borshagovka was sent to Pohrebyshche and executed. The family of Rachil Karp, who was called to the front, hid in a neighbouring village called Obozivka for about a year, but someone betrayed them, and they were sent to Pohrebyshche, where they were killed. It is also known that a local peasant woman in Obozivka hid a Jewish girl named Liza.

After the liberation, a trial was planned for three local policemen, but one of them committed suicide. Eventually, the other two were convicted and hanged for their brutality towards Jews and prisoners of war (the POW camp was located near the town). Throughout the occupation, Jews from Dzunkiv, Novofastiv, and Borshagovka were taken to Pohrebyshche and killed.

Only one Jewish woman, Raisa Plotitsa, survived the occupation. She managed to escape to Vinnytsia with the help of a Ukrainian woman named Maria Kaprun, who initially sheltered her in Borshagovka and later gave her documents and sent her away. Raisa survived and lived in San Francisco in the 1990s.

In her interview, Rachil Karp named the following local Jews who perished during the Holocaust:
– Chaim Volkovich Karp (who worked in an artel), his wife Pesa Srulevna, and their daughter Manya, born in 1924.
– The Fuchs family with two sons, Shika Polishchuk, his wife Surka, and their two children
– Elia and Rachilia Plotitsa with their daughter Sonia who was taken to Pohrebyshche
– the Gun family with their daughter and granddaughter
– Daniel Vaisban, his wife, mother-in-law, and son
– Pavlotsky family, including the head of the family, his wife, their daughter Rivka who had tuberculosis, and their granddaughter

Pesa Karp cared for Rivka Pavlotsky, who had tuberculosis, but she died before the general execution.

After the Jews were killed, their homes were looted.

After the WWII

No information is available about the Jews who lived in the town after World War II.

Genealogy

Some documents can be found here

Jewish cemetery

The cemetery is located on the territory of a farm on the picturesque bank of the Ros River. During the German occupation, a slaughterhouse was built on the Jewish cemetery, and all the monuments were taken to an unknown location. After the town’s liberation, buildings for local collective farms were constructed on the site. 

Last gravestones:

Ros river near the cemetery:

 

Comments

comments