lawless environment in the cities caused by the Soviet government. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland, the administrative center of the oblast was moved from the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi to the city of Khmelnytskyi. Kamianets-Podilskyi was occupied by the German troops on 11 July 1941 in the course of Operation Barbarossa. German, Ukrainian, and Hungarian police massacred 23,000 Jews 27–28 August 1941. On 26 March 1944 the town was freed from German occupation by the Red Army in the battle of the Kamenets-Podolsky pocket. Kamianets remained in Soviet Ukraine until the Dissolution of the Soviet Union. Post-Soviet times On 16 July 1990, the new Ukrainian parliament adopted a declaration of sovereignty. On 16 January 1991, Pope John Paul II re-established the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kamyanets-Podilskyi, which was dissolved under the Soviet rule. , Kamianets-Podilskyi was the third-largest city of Podolia after Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi. Until 18 July 2020, Kamianets-Podilskyi was incorporated as a city of oblast significance and served as the administrative center of Kamianets-Podilskyi Raion though it did not belong to the raion. In July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Khmelnytskyi Oblast to three, the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi was merged into Kamianets-Podilskyi Raion. Jewish history During the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648–58), the Jewish community of Kamianets-Podilskyi suffered much from Khmelnytsky's Cossacks on the one hand, and from the attacks of the Crimean Tatars (their main object being the extortion of ransoms) on the other. About the middle of the 18th century, Kamianets-Podilskyi became celebrated as the center of the furious conflict then raging between the Talmudic Jews and the Frankists. The city was the residence of Bishop Dembowski, who sided with the Frankists and ordered the public burning of the Talmud, a sentence which was carried into effect in the public streets in 1757. Kamianets-Podilskyi was also the residence of the wealthy Joseph Yozel Günzburg. During the latter half of the 19th century, many Jews from Kamianets-Podilskyi emigrated to the United States, especially to New York City, where they organized a number of societies. One of the first and largest Holocaust massacres carried out in the opening stages of war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, took place in Kamianets-Podilskyi on 27–28 August 1941. The killings were conducted by the Police Battalion 320 of the Order Police along with Friedrich Jeckeln's Einsatzgruppen, the Hungarian soldiers, and the