Mukachevo

The city is a rail terminus and highway junction, and has beer, wine, tobacco, food, textile, timber, and furniture industries.

Mukachevo lies close to the borders of four neighbouring countries: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.

[3] The city is a traditional stronghold of the Rusyn language, and the population of Mukachevo is officially reported as 77.1% ethnic Ukrainian.

The name of the city in other languages include: Archaeological excavation suggest that early settlements existed here before the Middle Ages.

For example, a Celtic oppidum and metal works center that existed in the 3rd-1st century BC were found between the Halish and Lovachka mountains.

In 895 the Hungarian tribes entered the Carpathian Basin through the Veretskyi Pass, about 60 km (37 mi) north of present-day Mukachevo.

After the defeat of Francis II Rákóczi the city came under Austrian control in the mid-18th century as part of the Kingdom of Hungary and was made a key fortress of the Habsburg monarchy.

[8] Even so, Mukachevo's population still held an important Jewish component, up until 1944 when all remaining Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp by Adolf Eichmann.

The 128th Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Ground Forces has been based in Mukachevo since World War II.

The firm benefits from provisional application on January 1, 2016 of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area provisions of the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.

[13] There are documents in the Berehove (Beregszász) State Archives which indicate that Ashkenazi Jews lived in Munkács and the surrounding villages as early as the second half of the seventeenth century.

The Jewish community of Munkács was an amalgam of Galician and Hungarian Hasidic Jewry, Orthodox Jews, and Zionists.

Materially impoverished, yet wealthy in ideological debate, the Jews of interwar Munkács constituted almost half of the town's population.

[14] The Chief Rabbi of Munkács, Chaim Elazar Spira (who led the community from 1913 until his death in 1937) was the most outspoken voice of religious anti-Zionism.

Zionist activism along with Hasidic pietism contributed to a community percolating with excitement, intrigue and at times internecine conflict.

I strongly wish to protest any attempt to blame the poverty of the Subcarpathian Ruthenian peasantry on the Jews" [14][15] (Kugel later got to Mandatory Palestine and eventually became mayor of the Israeli city of Holon).

Government policies were covertly directed against Jews, who bore a heavy share of taxes and had difficulty getting high civil service positions.

This ended on May 30, 1944, when the city was pronounced Judenrein (free of Jews after ghettoization and a series of deportations to Auschwitz).

[citation needed] The main soccer team is MFA Mukachevo, which play in Ukrainian Second League.

St Nicholas Monastery (1772-1806)
The Scala cinema in the centre of Mukachevo, 1942. Fortepan archive
Railway station
Latorica