Gomel

Gomel is the administrative center of Homiel Voblast and the second-largest city in Belarus. It has a population of 479,935 . Gomel is situated in the southeastern part of the country, on the right bank of Sozh river, close to the border with Ukraine, in close proximity to Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Although it has been heavily contaminated with radioactive debris following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, residents were never evacuated from Gomel and general population continued to grow. The city is serviced by Gomel Airport.

The exact date when Gomel was founded is not known. Gomel was first mentioned in the chronicles in the first half of the 12th century; the officially accepted date is 1142. In 1854 Gomel merged with the neighbouring town of Bielica located across Sozh, on the left bank of the river. Now Bielica is one of four boroughs of Gomel.

In the 19th century Jewish residents comprised more than 50% of the city's total population and had twenty-four synagogues. On the eve of World War II about fifty thousand Jews lived in Gomel . Some Jewish residents escaped in the early months of the war but those who remained were later confined to ghettos and were eventually executed by the Nazis, suffering the fate of millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust.