LITIN

LITIN, town in Vinnitsa district, Ukraine. In 1578 the king of Poland, Stephen Bathory, permitted the owner of the estate of Litin to establish a town on his land and to hold two annual fairs which "all the citizens of the land, Christians, Jews, and merchants from foreign countries," would be permitted to attend. In 1616 there were 88 houses in the town; 12 belonged to Jews. In 1765 there were 481 Jews; in 1847, 1,804; and in 1897, 3,874 (41% of the total population). Schools for Jewish boys and girls existed there in 1910. On May 14, 1919, a Ukrainian gang conducted pogroms in Litin and 180 Jews were killed and Jewish property looted. Other riots were in late May and July of that year. A Yiddish school operated in Litin from the early 1920s, and a Jewish woman headed the town council for many years. In 1926, 2,487 Jews lived in the town (30% of the total); by 1939 the number had dropped to 1,410 (27.8% of the total). The Germans occupied Litin on July 17, 1941. They executed 56 young Jews on August 20, and on December 19 they   murdered 1,800 Jews. In a labor camp in town the Germans kept a couple of hundred skilled artisans who were killed off gradually in mid-1942, the last dozen being murdered that fall. About 1,000 Jews from Bukovina, who were deported there, were also murdered. All together 3,353 were killed according to Soviet sources. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ẓe'irei Ẓion Rusyah, Naftulei Dor, 2 (1955), 142. (Yehuda Slutsky / Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)