Follow
This project seeks to collect all of the families from the town of Krasnostav (Volhynia) in Ukraine.
Today Krasnostav is a small village in Northwestern part of Ukraine. The village is located in Slavuta district of Khmelnitsky region, 20 kilometers from Slavuta and its real road station. Details about this shtetl you can find on JewishGen Jewishgen link and TKFoundation [https://www.tkfgen.org/krasnostav.html] websites
Jewish settlement in Krasnostav began in the 18th century. In 1897 there were 1,222 Jews, who comprised 55.7 percent of the total population. Most Jews lived near the town center, where there were two synagogues.[1] During an episode during the Russian Civil War, 31 Jews were wounded.
Throughout the Soviet-Polish War and World War I, Jewish civilians were attacked by combatants on all sides of the conflict. This led to the town forming an armed self-defense group to try to protect the shtetl from attack.[1] From the early 1920s a Yiddish school operated in the town.
Conditions stabilized for a time, but economic depression led many Jews living in shtetls to seek out better opportunities in larger cities. Most of those who remained declined to leave during World War II when they learned that the German army would be invading. They thought the rumors of rampant antisemitism among German forces were merely propaganda, as many remembered the German soldiers of the previous World War somewhat positively.[2] In 1941, invading German forces opened fire on the Jews of Krasnostav,[3] leaving only two survivors, one of whom later wrote a memoir about her experience.[2]