Bessarabia Geographical Dictionary

The Geographical Dictionary is one of the most important projects our SIG did. This is the most comprehensive list of towns, shtetlekh, villages were Jews used to live and/or conduct business.

We have collected most of the local places, put them together in a list with the information about the Jewish population from the 1897 Russian census, the Bessarabia Business directory from 1924 and the 1930 census cited in 'Yizkor Bessarabia'

Dictionary includes the current name of the place with close by official center (rayon) and country (Moldova or Ukraine); other historical names in Romanian, Russian, Yiddish, other languages. It also has the name of the place in 1924, uezd(district) in 1930.

While some of the information is now compiled on the town pages, the population information is available only here. Also there are places in the dictionary were only handful of Jews lived or had their business.

You can download the Geographical dictionary in EXCEL table or PDF formats.