KALININDORF

KALININDORF (until 1927, Bolshaya Seidemenukha, from the Heb. שְׂדֵה מְנוּחָה), Jewish settlement in Ukraine; one of the first four Jewish agricultural colonies to be founded in the province of Kherson in 1807. After several decades of hardship caused by droughts and the distant attitude of Russian clerks nominated to help and supervise, the settlement became a Jewish village whose inhabitants engaged in agriculture. In 1897 there were 1,786 Jewish inhabitants (81% of the population), most of them farmers with a few being artisans. From 1924 there was an influx of settlers into the vicinity and many lived temporarily in the settlement. By 1926 there were 2,400 Jews (89.3% of the population) living in the locality, and by 1939 the numbers had dropped to 1,879 (of a total 3,126). On March 22, 1927, Kalinindorf became the center of the first autonomous Jewish region in the Soviet Union. It had 11 county councils, eight of them Jewish, and 49 settlements, 39 of them Jewish. In 1927 there were in the region 15,833 Jews (87% of the total population), with the figures dropping to 7,717 (40% of the total) in 1939. The main cause was the severe crisis during the process of collectivization (1930–32), and many of the settlers left. In 1932 it comprised over 72,000 hectares of land. The largest villages were then the settlements of Kalinindorf (population 902), bobrovy kut (832), Lvova (702), and Sterndorf (formerly called Malaya Seidemenukha, 503 inhabitants). During the 1920s a Jewish elementary school operated, enlarged later to a junior high, and in the 1930s there were a Jewish agricultural high school and a teachers' college. About 2,000 (in 1932), almost all Jewish children of the region, attended Jewish schools. During the 1930s a daily, Kolvirt Emes, was published in the area. Kalinindorf was occupied by the Germans on August 27, 1941. Some Jews succeeded in escaping. On September 17, 1,423 Jews were killed. A few days later Jews from neighboring villages, like Shterendorf and Judendorf, were brought there and murdered. More than 4,100 Jews were killed in the region during the Nazi occupation. After World War II Kalinindorf was rehabilitated, but most of its inhabitants were non-Jews; it was renamed Kalininskoye and the Jewish Autonomous Region was abolished. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Lezman, Fun Seydemenukhe biz Kalinindorf (1932); I. Sudarski, Kalinindorfer Rayon (1932); E. Gordon, In di Yidishe Kolvirth (1940), 21–29; O. Heller, Die Untergang des Judentums (1931), 298–300; Ḥakla'im Yehudim be-Arvot Rusyah (1965). (Yehuda Slutsky / Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)