In the 1920s, somewhere around 3000 Jews lived in the town.[3] By the eve of World War II however, the Jewish population had decreased to around 2000 people.[4]
From 27 June 1941 until 7 July 1944, Mir was occupied by Nazi Germany and administered as a part of the Generalbezirk Weißruthenien of the Reichskommissariat Ostland. With the city being occupied only 35 days after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, there was little time to escape, and Jews who had fled nearby settlements and western Poland had accumulated in Mir alongside the existing Jewish community.[5] Three months after the occupation began, a ghetto was formally established within the city by German authorities, and all Jews living within the town – the amount of which had by then swollen to over 3,000 people – were forcibly resettled within it.[6]
It was finally liquidated on 13 August 1942 – in the final days before its liquidation, a resistance group of around 80 people, under the leadership of Oswald Rufeisen, operated in it. The group organised a plan that managed to help a group of 150 to 300 of the ghetto's inhabitants escape into the forest, where they joined the Bielski and Soviet partisans.[7]
It has been estimated that in total, approximately 2,900 Jews were killed in Mir during the German occupation.[8]
Mir was the site of two very famous horse fairs associated with Saint Nikolaus feast days, first held on May 9 and the second fair on December 6 each year. Both fairs lasted four weeks each and were very popular and well known throughout the country until 1939. Roma practically dominated the fairs as horse traders, and numerous Roma community thrived in the town until 1939. The fairs collapsed in 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Belorussian Soviet Republic and murdered the Roma people of Mir.
Mir's claim to fame in Jewish diaspora history is that it was the original home of the Mir Yeshiva which operated there intermittently from 1815 until the fall of Poland in 1939, when the invading communist Soviet Red Army and security forces pressured the school to close and relocate to then still free Lithuania. (Current incarnations of the yeshiva are located in Brooklyn, New York, Jerusalem and Modi'in Illit.)
Today, Mir has little industry and is no longer an internationally renowned center of Jewish learning or Roma horse trade. Home to about 2,500 people, virtually none of whom are descended from the once thriving Jewish and Roma communities, its primary attraction is the Mir Castle as well as memorials erected by the Soviet government and various Jewish groups over the past half century. On the eve of World War II, some 2,400 Jews lived in Mir, about half of the town's population.[9] All of them, except about 150-300 escapees, were murdered by the Germans in 1941. One of the escapees, Elia Miranski, reported in an interview given in 2013 that entire neighborhoods had been destroyed by the Germans and the town today is significantly smaller than it was;[10] outlines of the former neighborhood streets can be seen on Google Earth to the northeast of the castle along the river.
Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (1816–1893), commonly known by the acronym Netziv, orthodox rabbi, rosh yeshiva and author of several works of rabbinic literature
Zalman Shazar (1889–1974), Israeli author, poet, and third President of Israel from 1963 to 1973
Jan Zaprudnik (1926–2022), American-Belarusian historian and publicist[11]
^Basin, Yakov; Ruzhansky, Sam. "Where does reality end and mysticism begin?". All-Israeli Association "Survivors of concentration camps and ghettos". Archived from the original on 9 March 2017. Retrieved 24 April 2022.
^Basin, Yakov; Ruzhansky, Sam. "Where does reality end and mysticism begin?". All-Israeli Association "Survivors of concentration camps and ghettos". Archived from the original on 9 March 2017. Retrieved 24 April 2022.
