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Brailov, near Zhitomir, near Vinnitsa
The origins of the Jewish community in Brailov date back to the seventeenth century. On July 10, 1919, during the Russian Civil War (1918-1920), a pogrom broke out in Brailov in which twenty-six Jews were murdered and some 100 Jewish women raped. During the Soviet period, a Yiddish school operated in the town. In 1926, 2,393 Jews lived in Brailov, accounting for 96 percent of its total population.
The Germans occupied Brailov on July 17, 1941. Only a portion of Brailov’s Jewish population managed to escape. On the first day of German rule, fifteen local Jews were killed. The Jews of Brailov were forced into a ghetto, and most were then shot in a series of operations carried out between February and August 1942, near the town’s Jewish cemetery. A number of Brailov’s Jews escaped to the Romanian occupation zone of Transnistria, but only some of them survived. The others were sent back to Brailov and shot. The Germans then declared the town “Judenrein.”