The first record of Ilya was in 1473, where it is mentioned as belonging to
Bogdan Sakovich, governor of
Braslaw for the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1564, Ilya is first mentioned as a town. According to the 1650 inventory, the location included a market square and three streets, 93 yards and 10 public houses. There was also a newly built church, as the previous church burned down shortly before the inventory. According to the 1882
Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland, the town began as a manor of a
Radziwiłł prince, and as early as 1634, there was both a Christian church and Jewish synagogue. According to folklore, the prince named his manor and a nearby
rivulet "Ilya" after a dream in which the prophet
Elijah (Ilya) came to him. , By the 19th century, there was also a
yeshiva in Ilya. There is a prominent Catholic church in the village, Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was designed by
August Klein and completed in 1909. It was used as a dairy in the
Soviet era, but was restored in 1993. Citizens of the town participated in the
January Uprising, rebelling against the Russian Empire. A monument was erected to honor the participants in the 1920s following the restoration of independent Poland. According to the 1921 Polish census, the town had a population of 1,457, 36.5%
Belarusian, 32.2%
Polish and 31.3%
Jewish.
Holocaust After the Soviet
invasion of Poland in
World War II, the town was annexed to the Soviet Union. The town fell to the Germans after
Operation Barbarossa, and the Jews of Ilya were forced into a
ghetto. On 17 March 1942, 750 to 900 Jews were murdered by Nazi soldiers. The village was burned to the ground in 1944, just before the area was recaptured by the Soviets. This episode of Ilya's history was featured in the
American adaptation of the TV series
Who Do You Think You Are? in 2010. American actress
Lisa Kudrow (best known for her role as
Phoebe Buffay on the sitcom
Friends) traces her family roots to Ilya, where her paternal grandmother, Gertrude "Grunia" Farbermann, had emigrated from. Her paternal great-grandmother (Grunia's mother), Mera Mordechowicz (Мера Мордехович), however, stayed, and was among the citizens murdered. In the episode, Kudrow goes to the market square, where the Jews of Ilya had been marched to a pit in the middle of the town. There, German soldiers lined them up two or three at a time at the edge of the pit and shot them, resulting in them falling into it. According to a witness statement which she reads from during the programme, oil was then poured over the stricken victims and a fire was ignited. Locals were said to have heard the screams from those who survived shooting dying in the flames for hours afterwards. In 1962, the Association of Ilya Descendants in Israel published a
Yizkor Book,
The Book of Ilya, on the history of the shtetl. ==References==