BOBROVY KUT, Jewish agricultural settlement in Nikolayev district, Ukraine. It was established in 1807 with private funds and settled by families from Mogilev, Belorussia. The settlement numbered 406 Jews in 1810, and 165 families in 1815 (416 men and 327 women). Additional families were transferred there in 1825, 1837, and 1841, and the settlement numbered 1,184 in 1849, 1,248 in 1897, and over 2,000 in 1926, but dropped to 600 (136 families) in 1936. Under the Soviet government, Bobrovy Kut was incorporated in the autonomous Jewish district of Kalinindorf and like the other Jewish agricultural settlements traversed many vicissitudes. It suffered years of hunger, was changed into a kolkhoz, and underwent "internationalization" (i.e., admission of non-Jews). The Jewish settlers were often accused of being "petit-bourgeois," nationalists, or Zionists. Many of the younger settlers were arrested and deported, while most of the older ones left. A Yiddish school was in operation in the 1930s. Bobrovy Kut was occupied by the Germans on August 27, 1941. They soon murdered 850 Jews from the village and its environs, and in September 300 from the surrounding kolkhozes. Bobrozy Kut was the birthplace of the poet S. *Frug .
V.N. Nikitin, Yevrei Zemledeltsy 1807–1887 (1887); J. Lestschinsky, Ha-Yehudim be-Rusyah ha-Sovyetit (1943), 163–72; Gurshtein, in: Ḥakla'im Yehudim be-Arvot Rusyah (1965), 383–6. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: PK Ukrainah, S.V.
[Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)]
Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.