THE JEWISH CITY THAT SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST

Historians find Jewish life perserved in Soviet Union's 'last Jewish city' (JTA)
MOGILEV-PODOLSKY, Ukraine (JTA) – On a sweltering summer day, the researchers fan out in this city’s historical center, its walls lined with photos of local Jews who went through the Holocaust.

The visiting scholars from St. Petersburg aren’t here to dwell on Jewish demise, however. They have come to document Jewish life in what expedition leader Valery Dymshits calls “the last Jewish city in the Soviet Union,” Mogilev-Podolsky.

As recently as the early 1990’s — before an exodus to the United States, Israel and Germany depleted the community — Yiddish was widely spoken on the streets here. Despite the community’s rapid contraction, the Jewish presence here perseveres.

With this rare continuity, Dymshits and his team of scholars have staked a claim as the first and only team in 70 years to conduct field research into the region’s Jewish folklore, recording scores of interviews along the way....

While Nazi mobile-killing units known as SS Einsatzgruppen and their local collaborators were decimating Jewish life across the Pale of Settlement, one exception was the historic region of Podolia, including Mogilev-Podolsky.

Podolia was under Romanian control. Though plenty cruel and bloody, especially for the hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews deported into the region, the Romanians were less methodical in destroying Podolian Jewry itself.

That enabled both Jewish communal infrastructure and spirit to survive.

“It’s natural that if you discover an island in the ocean, you try to investigate it,” says Dymshits, director of the Petersburg Judaica Center.