Jacob Paperna were among the students who later became famous in the Jewish world.
The teachers' institutes which were substituted for the rabbinical schools were, in the words of the Jewish Encyclopedia "scarcely more satisfactory" (The JE refers to the teachers' institute at Zhytomyr as "probably the worst-managed Jewish institution in Russia of which there is any record", citing Prelooker, Under the Czar and Queen Victoria, pp. 8�21, London, 1895). It was closed in 1885, succeeded by a Talmud Torah, a "government school" for boys, a girls' school, and several private schools for both sexes that the JE describes as "admirable", with comparable praise for other Jewish institutions of Zhytomyr circa 1900.
While "never a center of rabbinical learning" (JE) Zhytomyr boasted a few rabbis of some note: Rabbi Wolf (died 1800), author of the Or ha-Me�r (Koretz, 1795), a pupil of B�r of Meseritz and one of the leaders of early Hasidism, and Abraham B�r Mavruch, rosh bet din or acting rabbi of Zhytomyr in the first half of the nineteenth century and author of the Bat 'Ayin (Zhytomyr, 1850).
The Jewish community of Zhytomyr suffered pogroms: 1) on May 7�8, 1905, when the section of the city known as "Podol" was devastated, 20 were killed within the city, 10 young Jewish neighbors were killed when they came to defend, and the Christian student Nicholas Blinov, also attempting to defend, likewise lost his life; on January 7�10, 1919; 3) and beginning on March 22, 1919, when, according to witnesses, the 317 deaths were a lesser number, due to both Christian sheltering efforts and the return of the Bolshevik troops within a few days.
The Jewish community of the region was largely destroyed in the Holocaust. In the four months beginning with Himmler's 25 July 1942 orders, "all of Ukraine's shtetls and ghettos lay in ruins; tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children were brutally murdered by stationary and mobile SS-police units and
