Timeline: Medzhybizh, 1146 to today
Nine centuries of a town, and the New York societies its emigrants founded. Entries marked with a grey bar happened in America.
- 1146Medzhybizh is first written down, as an estate in Kievan Rus.
- 1511Stone fortifications replace wooden palisades; a castle rises on the point between the two rivers.
- 1518Jews are first recorded in the town.
- 1555The date of the oldest burial in the old Jewish cemetery.
- 1571A census counts 35 Jews among the townspeople.
- 1648The Cossack uprising. On 20 July almost all of the town's Jews, about 2,500 people, are killed or taken captive.
- c.1740Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, settles in Medzhybizh. From here his teaching spreads and Hasidism is born.
- 1760The Baal Shem Tov dies and is buried in the old cemetery.
- 1765The community has rebuilt: 2,039 Jews live in the town.
- 1793Podolia, with Medzhybizh, passes from Poland to the Russian Empire.
- 1813Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel, the Apter Rav, comes to live in the town. He dies in 1825 and is buried near the Baal Shem Tov.
- 1894In New York, emigrants found the Meshbisher Untershtutzung Verein, the Medzhybizh Support Society.
- 1897The Russian census: 6,040 Jews, 74 per cent of the town.
- 19264,614 Jews, 58 per cent.
- 1938A Works Progress Administration survey counts 2,468 landsmanshaftn in New York City.
- 1939On the eve of the war, 2,347 Jews, 52 per cent.
- 1941German forces occupy Medzhybizh on 8 July. The Jews are confined to a ghetto.
- 1942On 22 September about a thousand people are shot in a ravine near Rusanovtsy. By 31 October some 2,580 have been killed.
- 1951The Meshbisher society dissolves; its remaining graves are divided among the members.
- 2003On 10 April a fire at the archive in Kamianets-Podilskyi damages about 100,000 files of Podolian records.
- TodayAbout 1,200 people live in Medzhybizh. Pilgrims come from all over the world to the Baal Shem Tov's grave. In Elmont and Maspeth the society stones still stand.
Read the full history of the town.