The Jews of Ukraine and Moldova

Nearly a thousand years ago, Moldova was populated by a Romanian-speaking people, descended from Romans, who intermarried with the indigenous Dacians. A principality was established in the territory in the fourteenth century, but it did not last long. Moldova then became a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire, which lost parts of it to the Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, part of Moldova lay within the borders of Romania. Eventually part of it became the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) of Moldavia, a unit within the larger Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In August 1940, as Eastern Europe was being carved up between the Germans and the Soviets, Bessarabia—the historic designation of the region between the Prut and Dniester Rivers—was seized by the Soviet Union and was joined with the Autonomous SSR of Moldavia to form the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia. That republic, occupied by Nazi Germany and its allies from July 1941 until August 1944, was one of the smallest republics in the Soviet Union. When the latter collapsed in late 1991, the Soviet Moldavia became independent Moldova.