HISTORY of our ANCESTRAL HOME
For 800 years, the area around the Ukrainian town of Bar, in what is now southwestern Ukraine, was often in turmoil, subject to repeated invasions by Mongol tribes and efforts by Eastern European states to impose their rule, which made life there dangerous. Jewish people have lived there for 500 years.
Initially known as Rov because it lay on the Rov river, historians believe it started as a small trading settlement. It was attacked by Mongols in 1240 and again in 1452. Renamed Bar, meaning wetland, it was purchased in 1537 by a Polish queen. She built a castle there and in 1540 the first families, Armenians and Jews, settled in. In the earliest days, the town was divided into three parts, each separately governed. Russian Bar, Polish Bar, and Gorsky Bar. The word Shtetl, which means “street” was the street occupied by the Jewish residents.
In 1558, Mongols again destroyed the town but it was rebuilt in 1565 with a strengthened castle. In the mid-1600s there were widespread attacks on Jews and Catholics. In the 1660s, Ukraine was partitioned between Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. In the late 1600s, the town and fortress were again destroyed and never rebuilt.
In 1793, the area came under the rule of the Russian Empire and, in 1917, absorbed into the Soviet Union.
An 1875 census shows our families lived in Mikhalpol, one of the surrounding villages near Bar, in the province of Podolia. The attacks on Jews following the 1917 revolution led to our families emigration to the U.S.