Žagar? (Lithuania) in the Blood

by Roger Cohen in the NYTimes
From the Jewish Virtual Library: Latvian: Žagare, Polish: ?agory, Yiddish: Zhagar – Noted personalities born in Žagar? include R. Israel Salanter (Head of the Mussar movement), Senior Sachs, Raphael Nathan Rabbinovicz, the Mandelstamm family, K.Z. *Wissotzky, J. Dineson, and the bibliographer A.S. Freidus. The Jewish quarter in Žagar? was among those damaged in 1881 in the outbreak of conflagrations which swept the Lithuanian communities as an accompaniment to the pogroms in southern Russia. After World War I, during the existence of independent Lithuania, this community declined. The Jewish population of the two communities numbered 5,443 in 1897 (c. 68% of the total) and 1,928 in 1923 (41%). After the German occupation of Lithuania in 1941, a ghetto was set up in the town, in which Jews from the neighboring localities were also interned. At the beginning of October 1941, the inhabitants of the Žagar? ghetto were murdered.