Zinkiv, Khmelnytskyi Oblast

Early history

Between the 15th and 17th centuries Zinkiv served as a fortified town. A castle was established there in the 16th century, and the stone Trinity Church, established in 1521, became the first three-nave religious building in Ukraine. A Catholic church existed in the city from 1450, and a synagogue in a transitional Gothic-Renaissance style was erected.^[1]

Jews had resettled in Zinkiv by the early 18th century, but were murdered by the haidamaks, anti-Polish Ukrainian insurgents, in 1734. The arrival of Polish rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heshel and his son Yitzchak Meir in the second half of the 18th century reinvigorated the Jewish presence, and Zinkiv became a leading center of Hasidic Judaism in the Podolia area.^[2]

In 1897, the city's population was 7,017, 53 percent of whom were Jews.^[2]

20th century

After the establishment of the Soviet Union, a kolkhoz collective farm was established in the city. Many of the city's Jews, who comprised 35 percent of the population, worked as artisans and craftsmen in state-owned cooperatives.^[2]

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the city was home to 2,248 Jews.^[2]

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies invaded the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa. By July 10, the Nazis had occupied Zinkiv. In August, the Nazis established a Judenrat, an administrative body that would oversee affairs of the city's Jews and coordinate dealings with the Nazi authorities.^[2]

One of the Judenrat's responsibilities was to coordinate the Jews' sequestration into a ghetto, which in Zinkiv consisted only of a single house.^[3] The Nazi authorities imposed a series of discriminatory measures against the Jewish population. Jews were also forced to pay ransoms and systematically dispossessed of their belongings and gold. Those over the age of 10 were required to wear a yellow badge on their chest and backs and were forbidden to walk on sidewalks. To humiliate the Jews, the Germans and their Ukrainian collaborators cut the beards and payos of religious Jews, including the city's rabbi, in a practice reportedly called "taking the Jews to the barber."^[2]

In 1942, the Nazis ramped up their killing operations against Zinkiv's Jews. On May 9, 1942, approximately 600 Jews, many infirm, elderly, and women with children, were shot to death and buried in a mass grave approximately 1.5 kilometers outside the city.^[2][4] On August 4, an additional 1,882 Jews were shot to death at the same site. Able-bodied men were sent to forced labor camps at Proskurov and Leznyevo, leaving 150 Jewish workers in the ghetto.^[2]

The Soviet Red Army liberated Zinkov in March 1944, ending the Nazi occupation of Zinkiv.^[2] Only approximately 30 Jews in Zinkiv survived the war.^[4]

Under the Soviet rule, Zinkiv belonged to the Vinkivtsi Raion.^[1] Following its abolition in 2020 the village was incorporated into Khmelnytskyi Raion.

Languages

According to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, the following languages were spoken in Zinkiv: