Rzhev

About This Area

Rzhev, located 120 kilometers southwest of Kalinin on the upper Volga River, was occupied by German forces from October 1941 to March 1943 during the Axis advance on Moscow.

The Jewish Community

According to the 1939 census, Rzhev was home to 457 Jews—approximately 0.85 percent of the town’s total population. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, many Jewish families were able to evacuate eastward before the occupation began on October 14, 1941. Those who remained were subjected to systematic persecution under German military administration.

The Ghetto

In the spring of 1942, the occupying authorities ordered all remaining Jews into a ghetto established in a former nursery school building. By July 1942, the Germans moved to liquidate the ghetto entirely. Members of Sonderkommando 7a—subordinated to Einsatzgruppe B—carried out the execution of 38 Jewish prisoners in a gully near the airfield, assisted by local auxiliary police. Two craftsmen (a watchmaker and a tailor) and their families were temporarily spared but subsequently killed in February 1943.

The Memorial

On September 24, 2015, the Tver Regional Jewish Community unveiled a monument at the Rzhev Memorial Cemetery honoring the victims of the ghetto’s destruction. The installation was supported by the Government of the Tver Region, the “Restore Dignity” initiative of the Russian Jewish Congress, the Holocaust Center, and the city administration. The monument bears the inscription “May their souls be bound in the bond of life” (Samuel I 25:29).

Sources: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos; Fedorov, E.S. Pravda o voennom Rzheve (Rzhev, 1995); Documentation from the Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) investigations.