Topic summary
Mountain Jew
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Mountain Jews.
Soviet times, Holocaust and modern history
During the Holocaust, some of the Mountain Jews’ settlements in Ciscaucasia, including in Kabardino-Balkaria, were occupied by the Wehrmacht at the end of 1942. During this period, they executed several hundred Mountain Jews. This process continued until Nazi forces retreated in early 1943. On 19 August 1942, Germans killed 472 Mountain Jews near the village of Bogdanovka, and on September 20 the Germans killed 378 Jews in the village of Menzhinskoe. A total of some 1000–1500 Mountain Jews were killed in mass executions. Many Mountain Jews survived, however, because German troops did not reach all their areas; in addition, attempts succeeded to convince local German authorities that this group were "religious" but not "racial" Jews.