Feferman Kiril. “You will Sow but you will not Reap: The Flight of Jewish Peasants from Soviet Crimea, 1941”.
The article sheds light on a short, albeit important episode in the Crimean Jewish saga – the evacuation of Jews from the Crimean countryside in 1941. For a variety of reasons, hitherto it has not been tackled in scholarship as a topic in its own right. At most, it was embedded in general studies, not too numerous, dealing with the history of the Jews in the peninsula during the Second World War or the history of the Holocaust in the region.
It is beyond doubt that the subject of the article is intrinsically connected to two other “background” issues: the short-lived history of the Jewish agricultural colonization in the peninsula and in particular, the general Jewish evacuation from the Crimea. Yet, the article hypothesizes that the evacuation of Jews from the Crimean countryside differed dramatically from the “core” history of the Jewish evacuation from Crimea precisely because it took place in the countryside. These background issues are dealt with in an introductory section. The bulk of the article is devoted to the interaction between the government evacuation policy and the Jewish inhabitants of the Crimean countryside.
The article draws on a variety of primary sources kept in former Soviet archives, as well as in Yad Vashem, and secondary literature.
Source: MORESHET ISRAEL, Vol. 16, November 2018.