Tyvriv Old Jewish Cemetery

According to Community on the Preservation of Jewish Heritage, the cemetery was demolished in the 1950s and a marketplace was built on the site. In the 1990s garages were constructed.

Tyvriv was first mentioned in 1505 as a border town of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. From 1569 the region belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tyvriv was granted Magdeburg rights in 1744. In 1765, in Tyvriv and its surroundings there lived 353 Jews. Until the late 18th century the Jewish community of Tyvriv consisted of only a few hundred people. In the 1760s Tyvriv’s Jews suffered from attacks by the Haidamaks. In the late 18th century, after Tyvriv became part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, the Jewish community began to grow.
In 1793, after the Second partition of Poland, it came under the control of the Russian Empire, and became a part of the Podolia Governorate (Podolskaya Gubernia). In 1845 Tyvriv’s Jews rebelled against the tax policies of the Russian authorities and beat a Jewish tax-collector to death. This revolt was quelled by the Russian army. In 1847, the Jewish society of Tyvriv consisted of 628 Jews. In 1897 Tyvriv’s 1051 Jews comprised one third of the town’s total population of 3153. At the time Tyvriv had two synagogues. Most of Tyvriv’s Jews were small-scale merchants or artisans. On the eve of World War I Jews figured prominently in the economic life of Tyvriv, owning most of the shops and warehouses and playing a major role in the export of peas.
The Jewish community of Tyvriv suffered greatly during the calamities of World War I, the revolutionary years, and the civil war in Russia.
After 1922, Tyvriv became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the USSR. Jewish life in Tyvriv underwent profound changes under the Soviet rule. Initially artisans continued to work privately, but later were compelled to unite in cooperatives. Private shops also gradually closed and the town’s merchants began to be employed in municipal or government economic bodies or had to find other occupations. In the 1920s and 1930s many Jews, particularly the younger ones, left Tyvriv for larger towns and cities, either searching for educational or vocational opportunities or because of collectivization and famine in the area. The Jewish population had fallen to 397 Jews by 1939, comprising only around 12% of the total population.
In the 1920s and 1930s Tyvriv had a four-year Yiddish school and an Jewish evening school for adults that mainly provided vocational training. There was an active Yiddish cultural life in the town, with a library, a reading room, and various cultural events.
German troops occupied Tyvriv on July 18, 1941. Only a few Jewish families managed to flee in time. From September 1941 Tyvriv was part of the Romanian occupation zone of Transnistria. A short time after the start of the occupation about 30 Jewish men from Tyvriv were murdered in the vicinity of the town by Einsatzkommando 6 of Einsatzgruppe C and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen. The rest Tyvriv’s Jews, around 400 people, were murdered in November 1941. The perpetrators of this massacre were members of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C, assisted by local auxiliaries. In 1942-1943, the Romanian authorities sent to Tyvriv, hundreds of Jews they had deported from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. On September 1st 1943, 458 Jews, mostly from Bucovina, were all that had survived. Tyvriv was liberated by the Red Army on March 16, 1944.
In 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tyvriv became a part of the independent Ukraine.
The old Jewish cemetery of Tyvriv was demolished in the 1950s and its land has been built over with a number of garages.