According to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, Repky had 3,049 Jews. Even during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Repky's Jewish population amounted to ~1,400-2,000 [estimated from the Civil War pogrom's records]. Many such records have been purposefully destroyed by the perpetrators of the Civil War atrocities.
The following pages is an attempt to shed some light on the lives of the actual families and their individual members.
From c. 1850 the majority of large scale retail and production enterprises in Gorodnia uezd have been in the hands of Ukrainian and Russian businessmen. Regional records show a large number of factories, river ports, and shipping lines. Very few of those were in the hands of Jewish merchants. The geographical concentration of the businesses was much higher along the Dnieper river bank. Jewish trade activities in Repki were mostly local. During the Tsar's time, the only information referring to merchants of Guild 1 and 2 was printed in the local business directories. This is why we do not see Jewish names in the Repky/Gorodnia business directories.
The first details of professional affiliations emerged from the recently published ДАЧгО, ДАКО, and YIVO archives. We used ДАЧгО Р-4533-1-1 and ДАЧгО Р-4533-1-14 as a baseline. Our assumption is that professions have not changed significantly over the 1890-1925 time period. In addition, Gimelberg and Volfson families offered event recollection from 1890-1921.
Repky was one of the centers of Jewish religious community. Between the 1890 and ~ 1921 town's cheder had 4 melameds. This indicates a school with a significant number of students. According to a 1904 report by J.C.A. (Jewish Colonization Association), there were 413 rabbis and 429 melameds serving Jewish community of the entire Chernigov gubernia [a data point from the rare book only available in Russian].
Some Jewish kids were also attending Russian "gymnasium" (Russian: гимназия, English transliteration: gymnasia). According to the Gimelberg family recollection, all boys and girls of the family were fluent in Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian.
From 1914-1917 Repky's younger families moved to the larger cities. Bolsheviks welcomed educated Jews to their professional organizations. For the first time in their lives Jews were able to participate in a variety of businesses, seemingly without quotas. For that reason, many former Repky residents moved to Chernigov, Kiev, Moscow and Petrograd. Their WW-II evacuation and Red Army military draft records show the new places of residence. With this data, one can track the movements of their family through the WW-II and post-war USSR.
WW-II effectively ended Jewish Repky. Yet from the WW-II evacuation and Red Army service records we can see that Repky residents lived on. The civilians acquired new professions. Good number of Jews have survived the WW-II battles. All of them moved elsewhere. The only memories of the old shtetl are those of our grandparents. We should retell it forward.