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Monastyrishche (48° 59' N, 29° 49' E) is located 24 miles northwest of
Uman and 63 miles east southeast of Vinnitsa. In 1765 there
was a total of 107 Jews living in Monastyrishche.1
In 1863 this number increased to 1,165.2 By 1897
the Jews numbered 2,620, or 28%, of the total population of 9,404.3
Monastyrishche is on the banks of the Konela River in an area
consisting of hills and valleys. In the 1870s the farmers
supported their families by fruit farming, growing corn and bee
keeping. The farmers needed the bees to pollinate lime trees
in the nearby forests. The local economy supported an alcohol
distillery, a brickyard, a steam mill, four water mills and 150
craftsmen. Monastyrishche held a fair one day every two
weeks. The town also had a police station and a post
office. Monastyrishche had one Roman Catholic and four
Orthodox churches but the Polish source has no reference to any
synagogues.4
Monastyrishche began as a settlement about 1400 after departure of
the Mongols. The area came under Lithuanian control sometime
in the fifteenth century. Local tradition has the settlement
named after a monastery located near a castle.5
Monastyrishche became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until the
Union of Brest-Litovsk in 1569 when Poland annexed the areas of
Volhynia and Ukraine.6 There were three partitions
of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century. The
second partition in 1793 affected Monastyrishche by transferring the
area of Kiev to the Russian Empire. (The city of Kiev became
part of Russia in 1667.) Other areas transferred to the
Russian Empire in 1793 included Podolia and Minsk. The table
below shows the countries that controlled Monastyrishche from the
fifteenth century until today.
Polish magnate families owned Monastyrishche from the late sixteenth
century through the nineteenth century: the Wisznowiecki
family in the seventeenth century; the Tarlas and Lanckoronski
families in the eighteenth century; and the Kalm-Podolski family in
the nineteenth century.7
Jews first appeared in Monastyrishche in the first half of the
seventeenth century. Pogroms occurred there during the
Chmielnitsky Uprising in 1648-1649 and also during the Haidamak
revolt in the 1760s.8 The Jewish community created
a cemetery in Monastyrishche in the late eighteenth century.9
Birth, marriage and death records for the only year in which this
information is available show that there were 56 births, six
marriages and 14 deaths in 1851.10 Pinkhas Chernyi
was the spiritual rabbi of a congregation that had a synagogue with
two prayer houses. "The congregation had 580 (presumably males
over age 13) members." Shaya Abramovskii was the official
rabbi of the congregation.11 Monastyrishche had
three synagogues and Jewish schools in 1900.12
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Sources vary on the number of lives lost and date(s) the pogrom(s)
occurred in Monastyrishche during the Civil War that followed the
Russian Revolution.13 The number of Jews killed in
Monastyrishche ranges from 106 to only three.
A Yiddish-speaking school opened in 1920 while the traditional
primary schools continued to exist. Most Monastyrishche Jews
were craftsmen or workers in the Soviet Union during the period
between the two world wars. The Jewish population decreased to
1,398, or 74% of the total population by 1939,14 compared
to 2,620, or 28%, in the Russian census of 1897.
Following World War II approximately fifty Jews lived in
Monastyrishche. They did what they could to observe some
Jewish religious practices through an underground minyan. Most
of the Jews in Monastyrishche immigrated to Israel in the
1990s. There were eight Jews still living there in 2010.15
Endnotes
1 Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before
and during the Holocaust (New York, 2001), p. 844.
2 Lo Tishkach
Foundation, European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, Ukraine,
Cherkassy Oblast
3 Spector and Wigoder, pp. 844-5.
4 E. Rulikowski, Slownik
Geograficzny Krolestwa Polskiego (1880 - 1902), VI, pp. 654-658, "Monasterzyska".
trans. A. Kaniak, 2009.
5 Ibid.
6 Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Seattle,
2002), p. 46.
7 Rulikowski
8 Yadvashem.org
9 Lo Tishkach,
European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, Ukraine, Cherkassy Oblast
10 Central State
Historical Archives of Ukraine in Kiev. (English
translation by Alex Denisenko)
11 Message from Herbert Lazerow dated January 31, 2012.
12 Lo Tishkach
13 The Untold Stories
at Yad Vashem has 106 Jews killed in pogroms in
Monastyrishche by the White Army, Petlyura's Ukrainian Army and
local gangs during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920). The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before
and during the Holocaust (p. 844) reports three Jews
killed in a pogrom in Monastyrishche on November 19, 1917. Lo Tishkach agrees with the
Encyclopedia that three Jews were killed but the pogrom occurred in
1920 not 1917.
14 Yadvashem.org
15 Lo Tishkach
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