The Shargorod ghetto, the third largest (after Mogilev-Podolsky and Bershad) in Transnistria, was known as the most organized and reliable. Many Jews who fled from other places, including the German occupation zone, found refuge here.
By the time of the occupation, most of the Jewish population remained in Shargorod. Only men of draft age went to the front, and individual families managed to evacuate. In total, about 1,800 Jews ended up in occupied Shargorod. After German, Hungarian and Italian military units passed through the town , the occupation regime of the Romanian administration was established here: Shargorod ended up on the territory of Transnistria.
The Jews, gathered in an unfenced ghetto on Lenin and Marx Streets, were required to wear a yellow stripe on their clothes and mark their houses with metal shields depicting a six-pointed star. Jews were allocated 337 private houses for residence, which, according to official data, had 842 rooms.
During the autumn, about 700 more Jews from Bessarabia and several thousand from Romania were deported here and placed in private houses and several public buildings. A statistical survey conducted by Jews in Shargorod in December 1941 revealed that there were about 7,000 people living in the ghetto.
A council of the united Jewish community was created, headed by Meir Teich, the former chairman of the Suceava community; the Shargorod residents were represented on the council by the accountant Solomon Shmulevich, who enjoyed universal respect. The community council was able to provide assistance and protection to the ghetto prisoners: Jewish activists from Romania knew how to negotiate with the Romanian occupation administration, often resorting to bribes (Romanian Jews, deported mainly from Suceava, brought money and things with them). The community council saved many prisoners from forced labor and deportation to camps; it reported possible raids in advance, so that the Jews had time to hide in the Shargorod catacombs.
The community council (consisting of 25 people) had already carried out the most necessary measures in the fall of 1941: it opened a bakery that sold bread at a low price, a canteen that fed soup to the poor, and a grocery store. A Jewish militia was organized, which included 15 of the best young Zionists from Romanian Jews, headed by an officer, a lawyer by education, and two local Jews.
The extremely high population density, lack of food, soap, clean water (there were only four wells in the ghetto, from which everyone drew water with their own vessels), firewood, and the severe frosts of the winter of 1941/42 caused a typhus epidemic. Of the 27 doctors in the ghetto, 23 fell ill with typhus; 12 of them died. The community council made every effort to combat the epidemic: a pharmacy and a hospital were opened in the ghetto, a town sanitary and epidemiological station was established, soap production was established, wells were cleaned, and the power station and bathhouse were repaired. By April 1942, the typhus epidemic had died down.
During 1942-1944, the Jews of the Shargorod ghetto were used as labor for the construction of the Murafa-Yaroshenka and Sosnovka-Zhmerinka roads. The community council tried to provide all possible assistance to those sent to forced labor, providing them with transportation and housing. Among other functions of the community council were ensuring security in the town, contacts with the Romanian occupation administration, both local and central, maintaining contacts with the Aid Committee in Bucharest, with the partisans, and conducting reconnaissance. The ghetto had its own court, community treasury, and distribution system for food and essential goods. Craftsmen's cooperatives were created, food, medicine, clothing and firewood were procured.
The community council created an orphanage where 186 full orphans lived, it occupied a beautiful building with a garden outside the town. The territory where the district hospital (Maslivka) is now located preserves the memory of Jewish orphans. During the occupation, in the old merchant's building, which was later demolished in the 1970s to build a new hospital, there was a shelter for Jewish children whose parents died of hunger and disease or were killed by the Nazis. The children of this orphanage, when they were picked up from all over the area, were themselves on the verge of death, but they survived and grew stronger thanks to the care of the Jewish community of the town, as well as with the help sent by the Joint through Romania. Professor Rosa Loevy became the director of the orphanage. Its pupils received a general education, learned crafts, celebrated holidays. After the liberation of Shargorod in the spring of 1944, the children were taken to Romania, and from there to Israel.
The Shargorod Jewish community survived the occupation; after the war, more than a thousand Jews remained here.