ghetto was formally established within the city by German authorities, and all Jews living within the town – the amount of which had by then swollen to over 3,000 people – were forcibly resettled within it. It was finally liquidated on 13 August 1942 – in the final days before its liquidation, a resistance group of around 80 people, under the leadership of Oswald Rufeisen, operated in it. The group organised a plan that managed to help a group of 150 to 300 of the ghetto's inhabitants escape into the forest, where they joined the Bielski and Soviet partisans. It has been estimated that in total, approximately 2,900 Jews were killed in Mir during the German occupation. After the end of the war, it remained within the Byelorussian SSR until 1991, when it became part of the independent Republic of Belarus. Mir was the site of two very famous horse fairs associated with Saint Nikolaus feast days, first held on May 9 and the second fair on December 6 each year. Both fairs lasted four weeks each and were very popular and well known throughout the country until 1939. Roma practically dominated the fairs as horse traders, and numerous Roma community thrived in the town until 1939. The fairs collapsed in 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Belorussian Soviet Republic and murdered the Roma people of Mir. Mir's claim to fame in Jewish diaspora history is that it was the original home of the Mir Yeshiva which operated there intermittently from 1815 until the fall of Poland in 1939, when the invading communist Soviet Red Army and security forces pressured the school to close and relocate to then still free Lithuania. (Current incarnations of the yeshiva are located in Brooklyn, New York, Jerusalem and Modi'in Illit.) Today, Mir has little industry and is no longer an internationally renowned center of Jewish learning or Roma horse trade. Home to about 2,500 people, virtually none of whom are descended from the once thriving Jewish and Roma communities, its primary attraction is the Mir Castle as well as memorials erected by the Soviet government and various Jewish groups over the past half century. On the eve of World War II, some 2,400 Jews lived in Mir, about half of the town's population. All of them, except about 150-300 escapees, were murdered by the Germans in 1941. One of the escapees, Elia Miranski, reported