Zbarazh זבארז'
A Galician town with a Jewish cemetery of 1510 that lived through the siege of Chmielnicki; in 1900 Jews were a third of the inhabitants, and of the five thousand of the war years about sixty survived.
Jews have been in Zbarazh since the end of the fifteenth century; the cemetery was laid out in 1510, and in 1593 the town with all its revenues was leased to Jews and Christians together. In the seventeenth century the community grew and built a synagogue. It also got every trouble of the region: the siege of Chmielnicki in 1648-1649, the Turks in 1676, the Haidamaks in 1708.
From Zbarazh came Rabbi Yeshaya, a follower of Rabbi Yehuda HeChasid, and, by the name of the town, one of the sons of the Maggid of Zlotchov, Rabbi Zeev Wolf of Zbarazh; here too was born the folk poet Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz, the Zbarazher.
In 1765 there were 910 Jews in Zbarazh, in 1900 2,896, thirty five percent of the inhabitants, in 1931 about three thousand. In the war, with refugees from western Poland, they numbered five thousand. From 1941 to 1943 they were taken to Belzec and other places of death; about sixty survived.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Population censuses: 1765, 1900 and 1931 — the size of the community by year
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, the numbers and the circumstances
Basis: documents and evidence.