In June and July within the framework of the fellowship project Moscow visited Yulia Oreshina, PhD candidate at the University of Regensburg (Germany), lecturer at the Georgian-American University (Tbilisi, Georgia). Yulia Oreshina worked on a project Life at the home front: evacuated Jews in the Georgian SSR (1941–1945).
During the Second World War, the Georgian SSR was an important hub in evacuation of the population and enterprises from the Crimea and the North Caucasus, as well as in further evacuation of those who were originally evacuated from the west of the USSR to the North Caucasus. In addition, the republic has become a place of temporary resettlement of refugees from other parts of the USSR. According to the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR, among the evacuees were Polish citizens, mainly in large cities, Tbilisi and Kutaisi.
In 1942, more than 50,000 evacuees were located in the Georgian SSR. Even though this figure does not seem significant on the scale of the entire USSR, it is significant within the scale of the Georgian SSR with a population of about 4 million people, about 30,000 of whom were Jewish. Archival materials on this topic, available in Georgia, are very fragmentary and allow to reconstruct only part of the history of this period.
During the fellowship Yulia collected additional materials that would help restore the history of the evacuation in the Georgian SSR. This research is a part of her doctoral dissertation on Jewish communities in Soviet Georgia between the beginning of World War II and the beginning of Aliya in the 1970s.