Dzhuryn, Ukraine

The Jewish Community of Dzhuryn, Vinnytsia

Prior to World War I, Dzhuryn was one of 96 shtetls in the Province of Podolia.  A total of about 400,000 Jews  lived in the Podolia shtetls with Jewish populations ranging from 750-16,000.  Dzhuryn was a relatively small shtetl but well-positioned on a trade route. 

The earliest mention of the village was in the 1547 Royal Charter when the settlement was referred to as Churylov under the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Researchers believe that the  first Jews arrived in the Dzhuryn area in the year 1699, after Dzhuryn was returned to the Polish governorate from the Ottoman Empire.  In 1765 the Jewish population was 84. 

By 1897, Dzhuryn's Jews numbered 1,585, at or near the highest number reached.  The population dropped to 1,027 by 1939 as a result of pogroms and emigration.   In 1944, at the end of the second world war, about 800 local Jews remained in what had been the Romanian administered Djurin Ghetto during the war years.  

In 1998, there were 8 Jews in Dzhuryn. By 2020, there were no Jews in Dzhuryn which that year had a total population of 3,150.   But remnants of the shtetl and its residents remain as reminders - the synagogue and closely built house foundations and partial stone walls, the traditional shtetl layout with a market square, the cemetery with 18th - 20th century stones.