This is a photograph of a Jewish home in Krasilov, Ukraine, taken in the 1970s. The home, shown in disrepair, was owned by Arkadi Milgrom’s family. The low, white house, located in the centre of town, has a triangular roof with wood that is peeling off the sides. The roof is somewhat sunken, and the house surrounded by a picket fence, looks abandoned. Arkadi Milgrom grew up in this house. His grandfather had turned it into an inn for local merchants and farmers in the early 1900s. The living quarters consisted of bedrooms and a kitchen; the other half of the house was designated for visitors with their wagons, horses, and belongings. Visitors were served meals prepared by Milgrom’s grandmother. During Milgrom’s childhood, before the Holocaust, the city had a population of 7,000, forty percent of whom were Jewish. Jewish life in Krasilov went through many changes due to the Russian Revolution and the introduction of communism. Small shops and inns were allowed to operate until the late 1920s when they were expropriated by the state. There had been two synagogues in Krasilov, one very large and the other small, and these were taken over by the Soviets in the 1930s. The large synagogue was destroyed, and the smaller synagogue was used for grain and vegetable storage.
Arkadi Milgrom’s grandparents were very religious. His grandfather prayed daily, and they had a kosher home and celebrated Shabbat and holidays. His father, born in 1898, wasn’t religious but observed traditions out of respect for his father. Arkadi was born in 1924 and given the name Avraam. He changed his name to Arkadi in 1972 at the height of state-sponsored anti-Semitism. He was sad about losing his name, especially since he was named after his grandfather, but he wanted to make life easier for his son and himself. Before the USSR entered World War II, Arkadi’s community didn’t believe that they would be attacked by Germany. They heard about the outbreak of the war on June 22, 1941 from an announcement on the radio. Arkadi and his sister tried to convince their family to leave, but their grandfather, remembering events from World War I, didn’t think that the Germans would harm Jews. Their mother sent her children to Kiev, and while on the train, they learned about the atrocities that were being perpetrated against Jews. They kept moving east to live with an aunt in Baku. In 1944, Krasilov was liberated, and Arkadi learned that his parents and grandfather had been killsed. After his marriage, Arkadi moved to his wife’s city, Kherson. In their old age, Arkadi and his wife returned to Jewish traditions including praying in synagogue, celebrating holidays, and studying Hebrew.
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Jewish Community of Ukraine – Jews first arrived in Ukraine in the ninth century seeking refuge from Byzantium, Persia, and Mesopotamia. Jews were allowed to practice Judaism openly and prospered during this period. In the 1500s, a large influx of Jews from Western Europe arrived in Ukraine, which became an important centre of Jewish life. However, in the ensuing periods, anti-Semitic sentiment grew in Ukraine, and the Cossack uprising of 1648 resulted in the murder of over 20,000 Jews and the departure of many others to more tolerant countries. At the end of the eighteenth century, Ukraine was made a part of the Russian Pale of Settlement. Although this was a difficult period for Ukrainian Jews, new ideas and organisations developed such as Hasidism, the Haskalah (the Jewish enlightenment), and Zionism. As a result of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Pale of Settlement was dissolved and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. Under communism, Jewish and Zionist activity moved underground as the party did not allow such activity. During the Holocaust, it is believed that a million Jews were killed in Ukraine, including those killed in a large massacre at Babi Yar and others murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. The Germans were joined by Ukrainian collaborators, and according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator.” After the war, Jews who returned to their former homes in Ukraine were met with hostility by the local population. In the 1980s and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many Ukrainian Jews emigrated to Israel and other countries. Currently, Ukrainian Jewish life is being rebuilt, with various Jewish denominations active. Today, the Jewish community of Ukraine is the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe and the eleventh in the world, with an estimated population of up to 140,000 people.
Jewish Community of Krasilov – There was a Jewish community in Krasilov from the eighteenth century. Krasilov was a typical town in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, famous for its leather mills and sugar factories. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish population of the town was over 2,500 and comprised more than a third of the population of the town. Krasilov was a town of Torah learning, with a number of synagogues and yeshivot. Most of the inhabitants were Hasidim of the Boyan, Sadigora, and Zinkov Hasidic courts. The town had a strong Zionist movement, an amateur Jewish theatre group, a large Jewish library, and held special events in aid of Zionist causes and Hebrew and Zionism classes. The Jews of Krasilov suffered from pogroms during the Russian Civil War. At the beginning of the twentieth century a Yiddish school was established in Krasilov. During World War II, the Germans occupied Krasilov and the Jews were rounded up in a ghetto that was located in one street and was surrounded by barbed wire. In July 1942 all of the inhabitants of the ghetto were taken to the nearby Manevtsy forest where they were shot to death. There are no longer any Jews living in the town.
