Goloskovo

Goloskovo is a village in Kryve Ozero district, Nikolaev region.

In the XIX– early XX centuries, it was a shtetl of Balta uyezd, Podolia gubernia.

Nowadays Goloskovo has completely merged with the neighboring village of Oniskove wiith one common village council. However, ini 1917 they had been two separate villages inhabited by people of different nationalities, the Jewish shtetl of Goloskovo and the Ukrainian village of Oniskove.

Information about Jews of Goloskovo was collected during our ethnographic expedition in the summer 2018.
More information can be provided by local former teacher of history Valentina Volodimirivna Granovska +38(096)544-91-77

Goloskovo entrepreneurs list from Russian Empire Business Directories by 1913

In 1863 there was a synagogue in Goloskovo and in 1889 there were two synagogues there. In 1909, after Yakov-Elia Shapiro’s death, his son Khaim Shapiro (1867-?) became a rabbi of Goloskovo.
In June 1919, a pogrom was conducted by parts of the Volunteer Army.

Information about the pogrom was recorded from the words of a local in 2018. “ A band entered the shtetl and announced that all the Jews would be resettled to Goloskovo. A column of Jews was taken outside the village where two machine guns had been waiting for them. 74 Jews were killed that day. They were buried at the Jewish cemetery in separate graves which were marked with a circle of stones. After the Second World War, these graves could still be seen. “
During the revolution a Jewish self-defense detachment was organized in the shtetl.

Site of the synagogue in the former center of the shtetl

In the 1920’s, Jewish organizations from the USA helped the Jews who had suffered from the pogroms.

In the 1930’s, there were two collective farms in the village – a Jewish collective farm named after Vorovsky and a Ukrainian one named after Stalin. Before the war they had been merged.

Before the Great World War and after it, Shimon Naftulovich Kropchansky was a head of the collective farm. His father emmigrated to US before Revolution and helped to son’s collective farm by money.

The exact amount of the Jews living in the village before the war is unknown but we can assume that there were 200-300 people.
Information about the Holocaust in Goloskovo was taken from different sources.
According to Soviet Archives, 241 Jews were shot in September 1941 in Goloskovo.
In 2018, local inhabitants claimed that the Jews were gathered in column and taken to Vradiyevka where they were shot together with all Jews of Krive Ozero district. There were about 370 people in the column, mostly elders, women and children.
Shimon Koropchansky remembers that a part of the Jews was shot outside the village on the bank of the river Yuzhny Bug. The majority of the Jews was taken to Vradiyevka and killed there.
In the early 1950’s, the families of participants of nationalist underground from Western Ukraine were forced to settle in empty Jewish houses in Goloskovo.

List of killed in action Soviet Army soldiers from Goloskovo:

After the war a few Jews returned to the former shtetl. In 2018, locals recalled some of their former neighbors:
– Mikhail Yosipovich Garber, a head of the local collective farm. The collective farm was very successful under his leadership. He moved to his children to Donetsk and died there.
– Buksman who sewed jackets moved to Savran.
– Shteynman was a supplier in the village.
The majority of post-war Jews of Gooloskov moved to Savran, Pervomaysk, and Odessa in the 1960’s-1970.
Roman Yefimovich Kosoy was the last Jew in the shtetl. He used to work as a head of a club. He died in 1983 and was buried in Savran. That was the end of 200 year old history of the Jews from Goloskovo.
Before the revolution there were two synagogues standing side by side in the shtetl. On the place of one of them there is a wasteland where locals used to keep hay. However, lightning struck it and it caught fire. Now there is only grass there.
After the synagogue had been closed it was turned into a club which was preserved till the 1970’s. At that time a new club was built in the village and the building of the synagogue was destroyed completely.

Famous Jews from Goloskovo

Leyb Moiseyevich Kvitko (1890, Goloskovo – 1952, Moscow) was a prominent Yiddish poet, an author of well-known children’s poems and a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC). He was one of the editors of Eynikayt (the JAC’s newspaper) and of the Heymland, a literary magazine. He was executed in Moscow on August 12, 1952 together with twelve other members of the JAC, a massacre known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. Kvitko was rehabilitated in 1955.

Small exhibition to Leib Kvitko in Goloskovo school museum

Monument to Leib Kvitko near the school in Goloskovo:

Leib Kvitko uncle’s house in Goloskovo, 1990’s

Oyzer Zaborovsky (1869, Goloskovo – ?) – a publicist, a prose writer. Since 1891 he lived in London, worked in various newspapers and magazines. He used to publish the reports of Jewish life in London in newspaper “ Yiddish Express”, was an author of weekly paper “Der Idischer Telephon” .

Jewish cemetery

The territory of a cemetery covers several hectares.

Holocaust memorial in local Jewish cemetery, 2018

After the Great World War only three Jews were buried there: Dovgonos, Tevel Kilman, and an eight-year old girl who had died of disease. Others were buried at the Jewish cemetery in Savran.
In the 1960’s, a former head of the collective farm Shimon Naftulovich Koropchansky, who lived in Pervomaysk organized the establishment of the monument dedicated to Holocaust victims at the local Jewish cemetery. Jewish natives of Goloskovo collected money, Shimon bought materials, hired two local Ukrainians and they built the monument in 1967.
I’ve managed to talk with one of them in 2018. 24 bags of cement, 500 bricks and stones were spent on it. 120 roubles was paid for the work.
There was a sign “To the Jews who died during the Second World War” on the monument and a star – on top of it. In 2018, there was neither a sign nor a star on the monument. I suppose they were stolen.When the monument was ready Shimon took a picture of it and sent it to the Jews who had donated money. One of those photos was given to me by Aleksandr Kozlenko in 2018.

Holocaust memorial in local Jewish cemetery, photo by Shimon Koropchansky, 1967

Shoa Foundation interviewed Shimon Koropchansky in the 1990’s, but it is not on-line.
In the 1960’s or 1970’s Ivan Moldovan, a director of a local collective farm surrounded a Jewish cemetery with a fence, but in 2018 there was almost nothing left from it.
In the 1980’s, Jews of Savran hired local inhabitants to repair the tombstones at the cemetery.

In 2006, tourists from the USA paid locals to tidy up the cemetery from the bushes. Then there were about 100 tombstones at the cemetery. In 2018, the cemetery was so overgrown with the bushes that we couldn’t enter it to take pictures of the graves.