A monument on the Jewish cemetery in Dorohoi, which lies in the historical region of Moldavia on the border to south Bukovina, commemorates the victims of the Holocaust in Romania. In 1940, Romanian soldiers killed about 200 Jews during a pogrom in Dorohoi. Up to 12,000 Jews were deported from Dorohoi and surrounding areas to Transnistria in 1941.
Dorohoi lies in the region of Moldavia on the border to south Bukovina, a region that was ceded from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Romania after World War I. In 1930, Dorohoi had about 5,800 Jewish residents, representing nearly half of the population. The entire district of Dorohoi was home to approximately 15,000 Jews. Already during the 1920s and the 1930s, anti-Semitic attacks took place, reaching a peak in 1940: When the Soviet Union occupied Bessarabia and Bukovina in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in July 1940, Romanian soldiers and locals marched through the streets of Dorohoi looting Jewish property and killing numerous Jews, whom they blamed responsible for the loss of territory. Soldiers also shot some of their Jewish comrades during a Jewish soldier's funeral. Between 150 and 200 Jews were killed during the riots in Dorohoi, and similar pogroms took place in many other Romanian townships. In the summer of 1941, Romania became an ally of the German Reich and participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union, reoccupying Bessarabia and Bukovina. On November 7 (according to some sources on November 12/13), 1941, Romanian authorities began deporting Jews from the area of Dorohoi together with Jews from Bukovina to Transnistria. This region east of the river Dniester in southern Ukraine had been occupied by Romania since 1941. SS Einsatzgruppe D (mobile killing squad) had killed most of the Jews residing there - about 130,000 - already in the summer of 1941. The Jews who were deported there from the areas of Dorohoi, Bukovina and Bessarabia had to live in ghettos in Transnistria and conduct forced labour. Many were murdered by a paramilitary unit of local ethnic Germans and by SS-Sonderkommando R.
Romanian authorities deported between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews from Dorohoi and surrounding areas to Transnistria. Many died of exhaustion and thirst during the long journey. About 6,400 Dorohoi Jews returned to their home town in 1943, when the Red Army was advancing towards Transnistria.
A monument on the Jewish cemetery of Dorohoi commemorates the deported and murdered Jews of Dorohoi. It is also dedicated to the victims of the June 1941 pogrom.