History
Jewish families in eastern Kazakhstan before the war
The history of local communities did not begin with the evacuation trains of 1941.
Published
This is a translation. The original is Русский. Language review: not performed by a native speaker.
A study by Tatyana Svakhina, a staff member of the East Kazakhstan Museum, records information about Jews in Semipalatinsk in 1825. A description of Ust-Kamenogorsk from 1861 also mentions the presence of Jews. These are dates of surviving references, not precise dates when the first families arrived.
Material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gives a view of Jewish life within everyday urban life. It included trade, crafts, professional work, family ties and a religious community. Settlement conditions depended on the laws of the Russian Empire, so even a brief entry in a city document may conceal a long history of obtaining permits and moving from place to place.
The information about Semipalatinsk, now Semey, and Ust-Kamenogorsk concerns the cities’ pre-war life. People who arrived during the war already had predecessors in the local communities.