Tetiev and the Ukrainian Pogroms of 1919-1920

Tetiev, Ukraine
26 March, 1920

My great-grandmother's family, the Spivaks, were from the shtetl of Tetiev. Hardly any Jews from Tetiev were killed in the Holocaust for the simple reason that the community had been wiped out twenty years earlier, during the pogroms of 1919-1920.

While hundreds of communities in Ukraine were affected by the pogroms of 1919-1920, no place was hit harder than Tetiev. An estimated 4,000 Jews were killed, about 2/3 of the overall community. Survivors left to join neighboring towns like Pogrebishche. Of the 4,000 Jews slaughtered, a large number met their end inside the Tetiev synagogue:
"In one synagogue, 2,000 persons sought safety. The bandits set fire to it and nearly all perished, a very few only escaped death...whenever anybody jumped out of the window, he was instantly shot at." (The Massacres of Tetiev in Pogroms in the Ukraine Under the Ukrainian Government, 1917-1920)
The rabbi of the synagogue, Simon Rabinovitch, hid in the loft.
"When the building was already in flames the Rabbi left the loft and placing himself by the reading desk recited psalms until he lost his reason, and began dancing and shouting incoherent words. At that moment some bandits entered the synagogue. Some of them were of opinion that he should be left alone, but others insisted that he was anyhow the head of the community and that he must be put to death, and so they dispatched him."
A separate account tells that:
"All those who took refuge in the synagogue were burnt alive. Those who attempted to escape were killed with sabers, with rifles, with pitchforks or clubs. Infants were tossed up into the air and their bodies dashing against the pavement squirted blood on the murderers...To this day hundreds of corpses are lying about in an advanced stage of decomposition in the neighborhood of Tetiev."
So many of the Tetiever Jews were killed that there was no one left to bury the dead. The synagogue was never rebuilt, and the community never recovered.
Tetiev refugees in Odessa


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