OLGOPOL

OLGOPOL, townlet in Vinnitsa district, Ukraine. Before the 1917 Revolution, Olgopol was a county capital in the province of Podolia. Jews are mentioned in 1799, and by 1847 the Jewish population was 247; by 1897 the number had increased to 2,473 (30% of the total population). Olgopol suffered heavily in 1919 at the hands of the Ukrainian bands which were active in the surroundings. Jews were also attacked by the armies of denikin . In 1926 the Jewish population numbered 1,660 (76.4% of the total), and it dropped to 660 in 1939. In the Soviet period there was a kolkhoz most of whose members were Jews. Yiddish was the official language (beside Ukrainian) in the local council in the 1920s. Olgopol was taken by the Germans on July 26, 1941, and later attached to Romanian Transnistria. A ghetto was set up with a few dozen local families who remained,   plus hundreds of people expelled from Bessarabia and Bukovina. The fate of the local Jews is unknown, but on the day of liberation (March 22, 1944) there were still 164 Jews from Bessarabia and 27 from Bukovina there. There was no information on the presence of Jews in Olgopol in 1971. (Yehuda Slutsky / Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)