Beginning with that period they conducted the trade between Ruthenia, Lithuania, and the Baltic, especially with Danzig, Julin (Vineta or Wollin, in Pomerania), and other cities on the Vistula, Oder, and Elbe.

[12] The peculiar conditions that prevailed in Belarus compelled the first Jewish settlers to adopt a different mode of life from that followed by their western ethnic brethren.

[citation needed] With the campaign of Gediminas and his subjection of Kiev and Volhynia (1320–1321) the Jewish inhabitants of these territories were induced to spread throughout the northern provinces of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

"[13] This sympathy and the record thereof would seem to indicate that long before the event in question the Jews had enjoyed considerable prosperity and influence, and this gave them a certain standing under the new régime.

[citation needed] The gathering together of the scattered Jewish settlers in sufficient numbers and with enough power to form such an organization and to obtain privileges from their Lithuanian rulers implies the lapse of considerable time.

Benjamin Slonik [pl] states in his Mas'at Binyamin (end of sixteenth and beginning of 17th century) that "the Christians borrow clothes and jewelry from the Jews when they go to church."

[14] Solomon Luria gives an account (Responsa, § 20) of a quarrel that occurred in a Lithuanian community concerning a cantor whom some of the members wished to dismiss.

The matter was thereupon carried to the local lord, who ordered the reopening of the building, saying that the house of God might not be closed, and that the cantor's claims should be decided by the learned rabbis of Lithuania.

Joseph Katz mentions (She'erit Yosef, § 70) a Jewish community which was forbidden by the local authorities to kill cattle and to sell meat—an occupation which provided a livelihood for a large portion of the Lithuanian Jews.

For the period of a year following this prohibition the Jewish community was on several occasions assessed at the rate of three gulden per head of cattle in order to furnish funds with which to induce the officials to grant a hearing of the case.

The Jews finally reached an agreement with the town magistrates under which they were to pay forty gulden annually for the right to slaughter cattle.

According to Hillel ben Naphtali Herz (Bet Hillel, Yoreh De'ah, § 157), Naphtali says the Jews of Vilna had been compelled to uncover when taking an oath in court, but later purchased from the tribunal the privilege to swear with covered head, a practise subsequently made unnecessary by a decision of one of their rabbis to the effect that an oath might be taken with uncovered head.

On the expulsion of the Jews from Silesia, when the Jewish inhabitants of Silz had the privilege of remaining on condition that they would pay the sum of 2,000 gulden, the Lithuanian communities contributed one-fifth of the amount.

[22] Belarus was a relatively unimportant and uninfluential area of the jewish world during this era; while it was renown for its yeshivot in Minsk, Mir, and Volozhin it was overshadowed by Vilna the so called "Jerusalem of Lithuania".

[22] The Soviet Union in the early years of its rule over Belarus underwent a nationwide effort to get rid of racism and animosity between racial groups.

The parties goal at this time was the assimilate the jews and to eliminate antisemitism as part of a wider project of destroying the remnants of capitalism uniting the country under socialism.

Even though many in the communist government stressed the need for Jewish inclusion and modernization many Jews were relegated to lower class position in society.

Yakov Gamarnik, a Ukrainian Jew, was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Belorussia (i.e. the de facto head of state) from December 1928 to October 1929.

[22] Atrocities against the Jewish population in the German-conquered areas began almost immediately, with the dispatch of Einsatzgruppen (task groups) to round up Jews and shoot them.

The gradual industrialization of killing led to adoption of the Final Solution and the establishment of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps: the machinery of the Holocaust.

[25] In the second half of the 20th century, there was a large wave of Belarusian Jews immigrating to Israel (see Aliyah from the Soviet Union in the 1970s), as well as to the United States.

[24] The 1999 census estimated that there were only 27,798 Jews left in the country, which further declined to 12,926 in 2009 and marginally rose to 13,705 in 2019, although oddly in that year, 10,269 men but only 3,436 women identified as Jewish.