NOVGOROD-SEVERSK

NOVGOROD-SEVERSK, city in Chernigov district, Ukraine. During the 14th century, Novgorod-Seversk was conquered by the princes of Lithuania; in the 16th and 17th centuries it was alternately in the hands of the Poles and the Russians; and in 1667 it was definitively annexed by Russia. A Jewish settlement is mentioned for the first time in a residence permit granted to the townspeople by King Sigismund III Vasa (1587–1632) of Poland. According to the permit Jews were forbidden to sell meat in the town, except in the courtyard of the synagogue. Also included were several tax levies which Jews were ordered to pay. During the chmielnicki persecutions of 1648 many Jews in Novgorod-Seversk were massacred by the Cossacks. The community was renewed only in the late 18th century. In 1847 1,336 Jews were registered in the community; by 1897 the number had risen to 1,956 (32% of the total population). The community suffered in the wave of pogroms which swept over Russia in 1905. On April 6, 1918, units of the Red Army retreating before the German army savagely attacked the Jews of Novgorod-Seversk and 88 Jews (including the author A.J. Slutzky) lost their lives. In 1926 there were 2,089 Jews (22.8%   of the total population) in the town, and in 1939 it dropped to 982 (8.56% of the total population). The Germans arrived there on August 26, 1941, and they found 200 Jews in the town. On November 7, 174 were murdered; others were executed some days later. There is no information on a Jewish community after World War II. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Die Judenpogrome in Russland, 2 (1910), 295–300; E. Tcherikower, Yehudim be-Ittot Mahpekhah (1957), 529–31. (Yehuda Slutsky)