Liubar

Lieber Tov (Yiddish), Ljubar, Luber, Lubar (Polish), Любар (Ukrainian), Любар – Liubar (Russian)

Liubar is a small town on the Sluch River, about 60 km west of Berdychiv and 75 km southwest of Zhytomyr in Zhytomyr region.

Majority of the text for this article was taken from the book of “Protecting Memory” project.

The first Jews to settle in Liubar may have arrived as early as the 15th century, but their descendants fled the town during the peasant and Cossack uprising in the mid-17th century. Jews did not begin to return to Liubar until 1703.
By 1765, the Jewish population had grown to 61, with another 100 Jews in the surrounding villages.

Under the terms of the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, Liubar fell to the Russian Empire. There, the town formed a part of the Volhynia Gubernia.

In 1847, the population of the Liubar Jewish Community numbered 3,770, a figure that included Jews in the nearby villages. However, according to the first and only census of the Russian Empire, the Jewish population of Liubar rose to 5,435 in 1897. Jews thus made up over 43 percent of the town’s population.
In the early 1900s‘, the Jews of Liubar maintained a main synagogue and at least six study houses of learning. The main synagogue, a choral synagogue made of stone, was located near the river bank and dated around 1861.

Map of the Liubar, 1897:

On the eve of the First World War, the town had a Jewish hospital, a vocational school for Jewish men, a mutual aid society, and a school for Jewish orphans and poor children (Talmud Torah). The free professions (pharmacists, doctors, dentists), skilled crafts (carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors), and commerce (retailers for groceries, grain, building supplies, books, clothing, and manufactured goods) employed many Jews, but others were ordinary day labourers. One of the local photo studios and the print shop were Jewish-owned. Jews also owned the mead brewery and butter factory and, at the very least, held the lease on a local water mill.

Map of the Liubar by Boris Degtyar (1922 – 2012):

The secular Zionist movement, which pursued the dream of Jewish independence in Palestine, had also made inroads into Liubar before 1914.

From September 28 to October 17 1920, the Jews of Liubar endured repeated violence carried out over several days during a three-week period by differing formations of the Red Army. The soldiers left 60 dead and 300 wounded in the first five days of the violence alone.

The scale of devastation was enormous. Local relief workers reported that about 70 percent of the town’s Jews were left without means.The effects of migration and revolution-era mass violence left a deep mark on Ukraine’s Jewish population. Almost 1,300 fewer Jews were living in Liubar in 1926 (4,146) than in 1897 (5,435). Within its 1926 boundaries, Liubar was just over 59 percent Ukrainian and a little more than 35 percent Jewish.

In the 1920s, there was a Jewish theatre in the town. Unfortunately, the names of only two artists – Ashivov and Rosenfeld – have been preserved.
Before the war, a well-known doctor, Rosenboym, lived in Lyubar. It is also known that a religious school teacher (possibly a melamed) was named Goykher (he lived before the war).

In the 1920s, the authorities facilitated the creation of a Jewish collective near Liubar, where Jews cultivated hops. Liubar itself became the seat of a “Jewish national council”, which made Yiddish an official language. As a result, the town’s borders were redrawn to relocate Ukrainians to neighbouring communities and to maximize the Jewish presence.

Zionist activity was driven underground in the early years of the Soviet Union, while state-sponsored anti-religious campaigns hampered spiritual life. Nevertheless, in Liubar, some Jews continued to observe the Sabbath and high holidays and did all they could to adhere to Jewish dietary laws. One local Holocaust survivor even described his bar mitzvah – the passage to adulthood for Jewish boys – as late as 1940: Hebrew verses were transliterated into Yiddish so that the boy could read them.

Classes of the Liubar Jewish school:

In 1935, a Moscow-based Yiddish newspaper announced the discovery of a secret committee of religious Jews in Liubar. These Jews had sent an appeal for Passover matzah to an association of former Liubar natives in the United States. Included in the request was a depiction of life in the Soviet Union “in sombre tones”.

In the late 1920s, Jews began leaving small towns such as Liubar and moving to larger cities in search of professional training and jobs. Those who remained endured forced collectivization and the ensuing famine alongside their non-Jewish neighbours.

The Yiddish school in Liubar was turned into a Russian school in 1939.

The problematic Soviet census of 1939 showed that there were 1,857 Jews still living in Liubar, a decline of over 60 percent compared to 1926.

 

Holocaust

Luftwaffe planes bombed Liubar on the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, destroying a nearby oil depot. Refugees from Rivne and Dubne had arrived in Liubar and provided first-hand accounts of German “rampages”.

Many Jews in Liubar failed to grasp the danger, seeing themselves as merely “simple workers”, not communists. Most lacked the means to leave anyway. The closest train station was more than 20 km away in Pechanivka, which the Germans captured on July 6. That same day, the battle for Liubar began. On July 9 1941, German troops, advancing from the west and northeast, captured Liubar. The number of Jews in the town was likely around 1,700, including no fewer than 180 refugees from cities west of Liubar. Only a few hundred Jews were drafted or evacuated. Some who left did not get far before being attacked by German planes. Many of these Jews were killed. Survivors of such attacks were often forced to return home.

Wehrmacht administrators introduced the first anti-Jewish measures. These included making the Jews wear identifying armbands and forced labour. Jews were forbidden to associate with non-Jews. Radio sets were also confiscated from Jews. Chopping wood, digging pits, burying fallen soldiers, cleaning, clearing away debris, and harvesting potatoes and hops were among the tasks imposed on Jews.

Mykola Kudimov, a German teacher from the Ukrainian school, was installed as head of the Ukrainian rayon administration. His police chief until October was Fedir Kyian and later Stanislav Kulchytsky.
The shooting of Jews in Liubar began about a week into the occupation when an 18-year-old Jewish boy known around town to have learning difficulties set fire to a haycock near town. He and his entire family – five persons in total – were murdered at the Jewish cemetery. Another four Jews were killed at the cemetery a few days later, allegedly because they had worked on the village council and were Soviet activists. An open ghetto was established. German and local policemen needed only to patrol the intersections in order to contain the Jews. Acquaintances could no longer bring in food. Jews who slipped out through gardens and orchards were usually caught. Food soon became scarce, and hunger spread. The only Jews allowed out were those belonging to labor details.

Around August 5, a roundup of Jewish men took place. It began in the morning with local police going door to door in the ghetto, knocking, and telling men to come out to work.This appears to have been the start of a ruse that workers were needed for forest work in the vicinity of Shepetivka. The men were purportedly told to bring a supply of food and report to the school in the town centre at a specific time. Local policemen were seizing Jewish men where they found them by some point in the day. The men were held in a school under local police guard. The next morning, Germans arrived in trucks, got the men on board, and drove them away. The Germans transported these men about 4.5 km from the center of Liubar – just outside the hearing range – to a location east of the neighboring village of Yurivka. On the edge of a small forest called Ladyva Vilshana, the Germans had the men dig a large pit. Then the Germans shot them. At least 200 men were killed that day. The date for this first operation is said to be August 9. The next day, locals from a hamlet near Ladyva Vilshana came to Liubar and told the Jews what had happened.

The second roundup must have involved greater coercion since the Jews knew what had happened the first time. The police detained men where they could, took them to the same school, and held them there overnight. The next morning, Germans arrived in trucks, loaded the men, and drove them away. These men, another group of about 200, were also shot. This shooting appears to have been carried out at the end of August. It is believed that they were also shot at Ladyva Vilshana.

The shootings of Jewish men emboldened the local police. Not only did the beatings and humiliation continue, but the acts of theft also grew increasingly brazen. Policemen broke into homes, often in the middle of the night, and took what they wanted: valuables and warm clothing for the coming winter. The ghetto was cleared in the early hours of September 13. The Jews were concentrated first in the school building, then in the orphanage, which was located in a former monastery. At the orphanage, the Jews were deprived of whatever belongings and warm clothing they had with them and searched thoroughly. From there, they were taken by truck to a sand quarry due north of the town near a hamlet called Kazenna Hromada (now a part of the village Hromada), where German and local police shot them. More than 1,000 Jews perished that day. Only a group of craftsmen was spared.

In the days and weeks that followed, local peasants, as well as German and Ukrainian policemen, captured Jews found in the countryside and took them to back to Liubar. When the police had accumulated about 50 Jews, they sent them to the orphanage, where the workers were also housed. Village Jews were also sent to the orphanage at this time. Other Jews, seeking safety in numbers, emerged from hiding and slipped into the ghetto. This group continued to grow until it comprised over 250 Jews. It was not until October 20, almost three and a half months after its seizure, that Liubar was transferred to civil administration. Not long after the handover, policemen from Chudniv showed up where the Jews were working. Papers were confiscated. There was talk that the Jews were going to be sent to Palestine. Escorted back to the orphanage, the Jews were crammed into one room, held overnight. The policemen drank throughout the evening, and teased and humiliated girls and young women. Some of the females were led away and raped. At least one man was disfigured. Early in the morning, the Jews were taken to the sand quarry. According to the postwar testimony of a former local policeman, at the killing site, the Jews were confined to a ditch. About 25 men were selected to dig a pit. When the men were finished, and the German shooters had arrived, the Jews were led in small groups – a dozen or more.

Slutch River in Liubar:

Family of Boris Degtyar, who were executed in Liubar:

In each – to within a few meters of the pit. They were ordered to undress and lie down on the ground. Germans then shot the Jews. The next group of Jews was then chased to the pit. They had to throw the corpses into the pit, undress, and lie on the ground. Then they were shot. The death toll for this shooting is usually given as 250. It is likely higher. Local policemen from Chudniv and Liubar secured the perimeter to prevent the Jews from fleeing. The shooters were from the newly established regional command of the Security Police based in Zhytomyr. With the conclusion of this operation, Jewish life in Liubar had been all but eradicated. The only Jews in the vicinity of Liubar from this point on were in hiding. Over the next two years, the local police diligently hunted them down.60 The number of Jews who survived the German occupation is very small.

One survivor was able to name only six who survived the Liubar ghetto with him. Among those to survive was Perl Kantor.

She fled Liubar on the morning of September 13 1941, amid the chaos of the ghetto clearance operation. She headed southeast, wandering through various villages until she found herself in the Ulanivka ghetto. In the spring of 1942, the Germans sent a group of Jews, including Perl, from theUlanivka ghetto to Kordelivka, north of Kalynivka, and put them to work on building an airfield. Perl slipped away from Kordelivka in the summer of 1942 and made her way to Zhmerynka, located in Transnistria, the Romanian occupation zone. In Zhmerynka, she was adopted by a local Jewish family by the name of Kaushanskii so that she could enter the ghetto. From there, Perl moved with a group of Jews to Mohyliv-Podilsky, which is where she was when the Red Army returned.62 The night before the mass shooting on October 29, Efim Zaidenberg slipped out of the orphanage under the cover of darkness and made his way to the village of Hlezne. A Ukrainian family, friends of his parents, took him in, cleaned him up, and gave him fresh clothes, but they hinted that he should leave for fear of their neighbors. Efim wandered east to Kyiv, then, in light of the famine there, back west. He hoped to get to an aunt in the town of Varkovychi in western Ukraine. He had heard (correctly) that Jews were still living there, but he did not find his aunt. In the village of Zhorniv, a Ukrainian couple offered to let him live with them in exchange for help around the house. For some 20 months, starting in January 1942, Efim lived with this family as Fedir Zakaharov, a fugitive Ukrainian who had fled a roundup for forced labourers. From this vantage point, he witnessed the “rampages” of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the spring and summer of 1943. He also survived the reprisals of German anti-partisan forces. When Soviet partisans passed through the village that September, he headed east again. When he reached Kiev, the Red Army had driven out the Germans. Buzia Shmaiger’s family had relocated to Velyka Volytsia from Liubar in 1933. She seems to have been among those sent to the orphanage in Liubar after the mass shooting of September 13. At the end of October, like Zakharov, she and her brother also escaped through a window before the Jews in the orphanage were taken to the sand quarry. A Ukrainian woman from Yurivka with four children of her own found them near the river a few days later.

Anna Sanevich sheltered the two children for several months until false papers could be arranged. Buzia Shmaiger became Anna Il’chuk and moved to a distant village with her brother. In the summer of 1943, Anna was called up for forced labour in Germany. She spent the rest of the war in Sacksdorf in Finsterwalde, about 100 km south of Berlin. Her brother survived the German occupation of Ukraine. The only other Liubar Jews documented as surviving the German occupation to date are Fira Goltsman and Boria Shrarer and a certain Sofiia Makhnovskaia. Further afield from the immediate vicinity of Liubar but still within Liubar Rayon, there are three Ukrainians who have received the title of “Righteous among the Nations” from Yad Vashem, the Israeli government authority for the memorialization and study of the Holocaust. Khristya Rudiuk from Velyka Brataliv rescued Genia Hertz and repeatedly provided shelter to her brother Yaakov, a young partisan. The Hertz family originally came from Zamość, Poland.

All six fled to Dzerzhynsk (now Romaniv) after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Genia’s oldest brother left Ukraine to study in Moscow. Her father Avraham, and brother Hirsh fell victim to a shooting in August 1941. Before her own death, the mother, Rachel found refuge for Genia and Yaakov, but the children were uncomfortable with this arrangement and opted for the forest. Yaakov made contact with partisans and guided Genia to Khrystia Rudiuk, whose husband was also a partisan. Despite having eight children of her own, Khrystia took Genia in and arranged false papers for her that helped Genia make it through the occupation. Several families from different villages in the rayons of Dzerzhynsk (today Romaniv) and Liubar contributed to the survival of Klara Vaisman, a 16-year-old girl native to Dzerzhynsk. Klara lost most of her family in a mass shooting in her hometown in August 1941. At the outset of another shooting in October, Klara was visiting the couple Pavel and Nina Filippovich. She returned to the ghetto to learn her sister’s fate but was assaulted by drunks and jumped in a river to get away. Mariya Ilinskaya, a peasant from the village of Vrublivka, found her under a bridge the following day. Mariya and her husband Ivan took Klara in despite having four children of their own. When police carried out a search for Jews in hiding in Vrublivka, Klara decided to move on. In Horopai, an impoverished widow and mother of five then took her in. Even though this woman, Mokryna Botsaniuk, knew that Klara was Jewish, she provided her with a place to stay in the spring of 1942. In 1943, Mokryna arranged another hiding place in Horopai at the home of Teklia Nazarevych, a mother of two.

Righteous among the Nations:

Aftermath The Germans were driven out of Liubar on January 8 1944. Within ten days, the first published account of the Holocaust in Liubar appeared in two articles on the pages of a Red Army newspaper. One article was an official statement signed by witnesses and two officers, while the second was a feature describing events based on eyewitness statements. The main shooting was dated to an unspecified day in August, but the death toll was estimated at “more than 2,000 people”.

The military prosecutor of the 4th Guard Tank Corps of Kantormirovka also concluded his internal report in January. Here, the date of the main shooting was given as August 11 1941 and the number of deaths as “more than 1,000 Jewish people”. The rayon branch of the Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices did not issue its findings until late May 1945. A report (Akt) dated May 20 recorded the results of an exhumation of one of five pits at the sand quarry. This document’s authors estimated the site’s death toll in September 1941 to be 1,526. On May 30, another report placed the death toll at 1,199Jews from Liubar plus another 180 refugees from towns outside Liubar Rayon. In addition, this second report made reference to 147 POWs whose names were unknown.70 The file for Liubar Rayon included only a few witness statements. None of these reports and statements made any mention of the shooting of men outside Yurivka. Even before the end of the war, the Soviet authorities initiated criminal investigations against numerous former members of the local police and town administration who had worked for the Germans. The outcome of such investigations was rarely if ever, made public. Throughout the Soviet era, the murder of the Jews of Liubar could not be discussed in the public sphere beyond generalities concerning “peaceful Soviet citizens”. Survivors and rescuers discussed their experiences among themselves in private. Historical texts that explicitly addressed the fate of the Jews only began to be published in the final years of the Soviet Union’s existence or after the country’s collapse in 1991.

Opening of memorial, 1990:

The earliest recorded memorial ceremony known was held in 1958, when 10 people gathered at the sand quarry.Around 1970, some of the survivors – Yakov Kaper, a native of Liubar serving in the Red Army at the time of the German invasion, Efim Zakharov-Zaidenberg, and others – launched an initiative to have a memorial built at the sand quarry killing site. The red granite stone was only erected in 1972. The inscription read: “To Soviet people, victims of fascism, 1941- 1945.”75 In the decades that followed, the remaining Jews of Liubar – those who survived behind German lines, the Red Army veterans, and the evacuees – met every second Sunday in September to remember their family members and friends. In the mid-1970s, they were over 100 in number. In 1995, only Efim Zakharov-Zaidenberg attended. In the early 1990s, a Star of David was carved into the stone above the inscription. A similar ceremony was held in Be’er Sheva, Israel, every September 13.77 The killing site outside Yurivka was never memorialized although its existence was known.

In 1974, a literary account of events in Liubar by Itsak Falikman, a Yiddish writer native to the town, was published in Russian.78 It recalled the mass graves at the sand quarry and Ladyva Vilshana: And the men from both places – they just call them New and Old Liubar – all of the men, starting with the adolescents and ending with the elderly, all those who could snatch an axe, an iron rod, or a stake… the Germans shot them a few days earlier in another place, in Yurivka, on the eastern edge of New Liubar, near a windmill with a single sail. The artillerymen went there, to the one-sailed windmill, to look at the two elongated mounds, barely protruding beneath a layer of snow that was still deep and fluffy. It is to date not known how many Jews returned to Liubar permanently after the war. In July 1999, there were at least two Jewish families still living in Liubar. In 2015, the memorial site at the sand quarry was renovated on the initiative of citizens from Liubar and nearby villages. In West Germany, prosecutor’s offices in several German cities investigated the crimes of the police formations involved in the mass shootings in Liubar. In the 1960s, Regensburg investigators oversaw the criminal cases involving members of police battalions 45 and 303. Despite the telegram describing the presence of Police Reserve Battalion 45 in Liubar for “mopping up operations”, the town was not specifically mentioned throughout the investigation. Former members of these battalions tended to recall the initial shootings or the huge ones such as Berdychiv or Kiev. In two separate trials, two former members of Police Reserve Battalion 45 were found guilty of shooting Jews in places such as Berdychiv, Vinnytsia, and Shepetivka. Only one received a prison term – seven years.81 The investigation into the county commissar in Chudniv also failed to result in an indictment. This investigation was formally suspended in May 1980.

Rebuilded PreRevolution houses in modern Liubar:

Within the framework of the “Protecting Memory” project, in April 2017, a team of archaeologists from Staffordshire University carried out a non-invasive investigation of a dog-leg-shaped grove outside Yurivka. Witnesses have repeatedly claimed that the Germans carried out a shooting there, with some having been able to provide details about structures that once stood nearby. In addition, aerial photography showed markings on the ground surface that invited scanning.

Memoris of Yacob Shmunik:

The discreet Soviet-era practice of protecting mass graves by allowing a grove to grow over a killing site lent further credence to witness statements. However, no conclusive evidence of a mass grave in the current grove could be found. A memorial stone for the Holocaust victims killed at Yurivka was produced by local Ukrainians – A. A. Horobets and V. V. Yuryk – in 2016. There are plans to place that memorial stone near the killing site. Within the framework of the “Protecting Memory” project, an information stele was erected near the killing site in the summer of 2019. An information stele was also put up at the site of the sand quarry.

After the liberation, the names of Jews and non-Jews who died during the occupation were meticulously collected and recorded. One hundred forty pages of victims of the Germans in Lyubar were entered into the Memorial Book of the Zhytomyr region.

Annual memorial meetings were conducted every 13 September:

After the WWII

Many Jews who returned and saw that their relatives had died and their property had been looted left to live in other cities of the USSR. After the war, about 10 Jewish families returned to Lyubar.
Here are some:
– Shamis Marina Zinovievna – a doctor who moved to her sons in Voronezh,
– Berger – a school principal, Zhuk.

In the 1960s, about 50 Jews were living in the former shtetl.

In 1994, a historian from Zvyahyl, Leonid Kogan, visited Lyubar.
He was a guest of Klara Rakhmilyevna Rakhmelyuk, and she named 14 Jews who were living in the town at that time.

During my visit in 2020, only 2 Jews were living in Lyubar.

Famous Jews from Liubar

Ikhil Shmulevich Falikman (1911, Liubar – 1977, Kyiv) was a Jewish writer.

 

Aaron Vergelis (1918, Liubar –1999, Moscow), Yiddish poet, novelist, and editor of Yiddish Sovetish heymland magazine.

Jewish cemetery

Part of the cemetery was build up after the WWII.

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