The Jews in Bălți during the Holocaust

The History of Jews in Bălți

The existence of Jews in Bălți has been attested since 1768 when the Cossack rebels who arrived in the city asked the Turkish officials to hand over all the Jews from Ukraine and Poland. The refusal led to the killing of the Turks and the burning of the city. Three decades later, the Jews received permission to settle on the properties of the local boyars. Among the founders of the city were several Jews. In the 19th century, the number of Jews in Bălți increased, giving the town the appearance of a city inhabited mostly by Jews. If in 1847, 1,792 Jews lived in cities, in 1897 their number was 10,348, and in 1910 it reached 19,635, which meant 60% of the city’s population. However, the Jewish presence decreased in the interwar years, with many choosing to emigrate. In 1930, 14,229 Jews lived in the city, and by 1941 the Jewish population had declined sharply. In that year, 3,261 Jews still lived in Bălți.

With the growth of the Jewish population, the community built its own religious, educational, and social edifices. In 1861, there were a synagogue and 7 houses of prayer in Bălți. In the interwar period, the city had 28 synagogues and a vast network of Jewish institutions, including a seminary, two high schools, a business school, a vocational school for girls, a hospital, an asylum for the elderly. The occupations of the Jews were in the field of trade, craft and agriculture. As the town modernized, they also became involved in industry, becoming owners of sugar, alcohol, beer, and oil factories.

In the 1930s, several anti-Semitic incidents and violent incidents took place in Bălți, such as the arrest of Jews in 1920-1921 or the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in May 1930. In June of the same year, Jews were attacked by groups of hooligans, their houses being vandalized as well. At the same time, those found on the street were ill-treated. With the radicalization of society and the gradual adoption of anti-Semitic laws, Jewish students were expelled from schools, becoming the targets of violent acts committed by Christian students, and Jewish employees were fired. In some cases, anti-Semitic propaganda was maintained even by those elected to Parliament. Thus, in 1932, Vladimir Novicov, a senator from Bălți, promised the peasants the expulsion of the Jews and the division of the lands owned by them.

The year 1940 marked the beginning of a series of persecutions for the Jews of Bălți. With the occupation of the city by the Soviets, the wealthy Jews, for fear of the Russians, took refuge in Bukovina, abandoning their homes and properties. By the end of the year, several hundred Jews, categorized as “bourgeois” by Soviets, and Zionist leaders would be deported to Siberia.

On July 8th, 1941, Romanian and German troops entered the city. Initially, it was placed under German command. In a short time, the first repressive measures were taken against the Jews. The entire Jewish population, regardless of gender or age, was picked up by Germans and Romanians, being interned in two makeshift camps in the city. The first was arranged in the former Ismanschi sugar factory, and the second inside the former penitentiary. On July 12th, 1941, a number of 10 Jewish intellectuals were picked up by the German army, with the help of the Romanian gendarmerie, and transported to the city park. They were executed on the pretext that the Jewish population, already interned in the two camps at the time, had committed acts of sabotage against the army. A few days later, the Germans asked the Jewish Committee, set up on their own initiative, to hand them a list of 20 communist Jews. They were threatened that if they refused, they would be shot. Despite the threats, the requested list was not handed over and the committee members and other Jews were picked up by the Germans and transported to Flămânda, where they were executed. Only the president of this committee was saved, due to the personal intervention of the Romanian police chief. According to information from the archives, between July 10th and 12th, 1941, 76 Jews were executed, most of them men between the ages of 18 and 74.

In parallel with the assassinations committed by the Germans, the Romanian army initiated its own annihilation operations. 80 Jews interned at Ismanschi were taken out of the camp and taken to the “Aviation Mound”. Here, they were made to dig their own graves, after which they were placed on their knees and shot in groups of 10. On July 16th and 17th, the operations of arresting the Jews from the Bălți district began. About 3,500 of them were detained in three detention centres: Fălești, Bălți and Limbenii noi.

Due to a large number of Jews gathered in Bălți, about 5,000, Romanian officials decided to evacuate them to the Răuțel forest, located about 12 kilometers from the city, where a transit camp was set up. The camp was described as one of the most terrible in Bessarabia in those years. There were 10 ruined barracks in the camp, in which a maximum of 100 people entered, the number of those deported being several thousand. Outside, the camp was surrounded by barbed wire. Because there were no places to shelter, the Jews were forced to sit and sleep in the anti-tank trenches, covering themselves with dry branches. The lack of food, shelter to protect them from the inclement weather and medical care have turned the camp into a place of death. Every day, between 50 and 60 Jews died because of the conditions in which they were held.

On August 30th, 1941, the Răuțel camp was dismantled. All the inmates were transferred to Mărculești, and from there to Transnistria. During the Second World War, in Bălți, there was also a camp for Soviet prisoners of war.

  

Ovidiu Creangă, Diana Dumitru, Bălți, în Geoffrey P. Megargee (general editor), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 602-604.

**, Bălți, accessible online at 

Jean Ancel, Beltsy, accessible online at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/beltsy 

Wolf Moskovich, Bălţi, accessible online at  https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Balti