Les Juifs de Vitebsk

Vitebsk, in Belarus, was the heart of a rich Yiddish-speaking community in which Jews constituted a significant proportion of the urban population. Merchants, craftsmen, and workers, they animated synagogues, houses of study, and communal institutions, and the city became, in the early twentieth century, a notable artistic center, birthplace of the painter Marc Chagall and seat of an avant-garde art school. Under the Soviet regime, religious life was suppressed while a secularized Jewish culture persisted. During the German occupation, the community was confined to a ghetto and almost entirely exterminated in 1941.

Sources & resources

• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe ↗
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan