YEDINTSY

YEDINTSY (Rom. Edineţi), town in N. Moldova in the region of Bessarabia. Yedintsy developed in the first half of the 19th century from a village into an urban settlement as a result of the settlement of Jews who were then coming to Bessarabia. In 1897 the Jews numbered 7,379 (72 percent of the total population) and in 1930 5,341 (90.4 percent). The writer Judah steinberg lived there at the end of the 19th century. The institutions of the community included a hospital, established in 1930, and a tarbut school . (Eliyahu Feldman) -Holocaust Period The town was occupied by Germans and Romanians on July 5, 1941. Within two days 500 to 1,000 Jews were murdered. Women and young girls were raped and some of them committed suicide. The victims were buried in three large ditches and the Jewish gravediggers who had interred the bodies were in turn murdered and buried on the spot. Romanian gendarmes and troops were assisted in the massacre of the Jews by many of the peasants living in the area. In the middle of August a concentration camp was set up at Yedintsy, where all surviving Jews and those from different places in the north of Bessarabia, particularly from bukovina , were interned. In September there were about 12,000 Jews in the camp. Many of the inmates succumbed to disease, cold weather, hunger, and thirst; 70 to 100 persons died every day. On Sept. 16, 1941 all the inmates of the camp were deported to transnistria and only a few managed to survive. The few dozen families still alive at the end of the war settled either in Chernovtsy or in Israel. Only a handful chose to return to Yedintsy. In the late 1960s the Jewish population was estimated at about 200. There was no synagogue although the Jewish cemetery was still extant. (Jean Ancel) -BIBLIOGRAPHY: T. Fuks, A Vanderung Iber Okupirte Gebitn (1947), index; Eisenberger, in: Arbeter Vort (Nov. 29, 1946); M. Carp, Cartea neagrǎ, 3 (1947), index; BJCE.