Until World War II, the region was also home to a significant number of Jews, a portion of whom were killed in the Holocaust along with other Bessarabian Jews. Still, Jews remained a sizeable minority in several towns, first of all in Bilhorod-Dnistrovs'kyi until mass emigration to Israel in the 1980s and 1990s. Budjak was the only region within the former Russian Empire where a significant number of Sephardic Ladino-speaking Jews could be found as late as the second half of the 19th century. These Sephardim later assimilated with the majority of local Ashkenazic Jewry, but many retained surnames of either Turkic origin or otherwise suggestive of Sephardic descent.