There was even a synagogue again in Obodovka when the next war broke out. Five weeks later the town’s decimated Jewish quarter was sealed off and declared a ghetto, marked for wrapping in German barbed wire. The surviving Jews inside wore the regulation yellow patches and began to cope with scarcity. Next arrived word that they’d changed hands again. Taking its victory reward in Ukrainian land, fascist Romania and its Transnistria Governorate had assumed control of some hundred German-built ghettos and concentration camps in the territory for its own uses.

A deep dive into the mysterious past of this word by Anatoly Liberman, the Oxford Etymologist.