Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:51, 5 June 2007

Template:Noncompliant The Kiev pogrom of 1919 refers to a series of Jewish pogroms in various places in and around Kiev carried out by Cossacks and the White Armies.

• Skvira, June 23, 1919: a pogrom in which 45 Jews were massacred, many were severely wounded, and 35 Jewish women were raped by army insurgents.

• Justingrad: In August, 1919, a pogrom made its way through the shtetl named in honor of Justina, wife of a Russian nobleman. An unspecified number of Jewish men were murdered and Jewish women raped.

• Ivankov district of Kiev: Between 18 and 20 October 1919, in the pogrom carried out by Cossack and Volunteer Army troops, 14 Jews were massacred, 9 wounded, and 15 Jewish women and girls were raped by units under the command of Struk, ally of Symon Petliura in three days of carnage.

Reactions

Leaders of the White Army issued orders condemning the pogroms, but these were largely left unenacted due to the widespread anti-Jewish feeling.

Lenin had spoken out against pogroms in March, and in June, the Bolsheviks assigned some funds for victims of pogroms. However, the events received little coverage in the Bolshevik press.

Aftermath

The Kiev pogrom of 1919 proved the first of many such events. It is estimated that a total of 1,326 - or up to 2,000 - pogroms took place in the Ukraine alone, in which between 30,000 and 70,000 Jews were massacred. The pogroms were marked by utmost cruelty and face-to-face brutality. Thousands of women were raped. Hundreds of shtetlekh were pillaged, and Jewish neighborhoods were left in ruins. According to some estimates, overall, in the pogroms of 1918-1921, half a million Jews were left homeless; and together with those who died of wounds or as a result of illnesses contracted during the pogroms, a total of about 150,000 Jews perished.

Apparently, the new communist ideology of tolerance (see: Lenin, "On Anti-Jewish Pogroms") was very short-lived, and as early as 1918 the Russian Jews became victims of vicious attacks. The scourge of pogroms which erupted in January 1919 in the northwest province of Volhynia spread during February and March to the cities, towns, and villages of many other regions of Ukraine. After Sarny it was the turn of Ovruc, northwest of Kiev. In Tetiev on March 25, approximately 4,000 Jews were murdered, half in a synagogue set ablaze by Cossacks. Then Vashilkov (April 6 and 7). In Dubovo (June 17) 800 Jews were decapitated in assembly-line fashion. According to David A. Chapin, the town of Proskurov (later Khmelnitsky), near the city of Sudilkov, “was the site of the worst atrocity committed against Jews this century before the Nazis.” In 1919, during the Russian Civil War, Petliura and his band of nationalists under Hetman Semossenko exterminated a large percentage of the Jewish district of Proskurov, where more than 10,000 Jews were massacred on Shabbat (parashah Tesaveh) from three p.m. till next Sunday. Massive pogroms continued until 1921.

See also

• Kiev Pogrom (1905)
• Kiev Pogrom (1881)
• Kishinev pogrom

Footnotes

1. ^ Benjamin Frankel, A Restless Mind: Essays in Honor of Amos Perlmutter. Published by Routledge, pg. 272
2. Michael L. Brown, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood. "More Tears". Published by Destiny Image, Inc. Pg. 105.
3. Harry James Cargas, Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian. On meeting Kurt Waldheim. Pg. 136
4. Fannie Fern Andrews, The Holy Land Under Mandate. Published 1931, Houghton Mifflin, pg. 295
5. Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain, and the Russian Revolution. Published by Routledge, pg. 87
6. Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Pg. 70.
7. Lenin's March 1919 speech On Anti-Jewish Pogroms («О погромной травле евреев»: text, audio)
8. Arnold Davidovich Margolin, Ukraine and Policy of the Entente. Published 1977 L. A. Margolena, pg. 195
9. Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science. Published 1983 by Yiddish Scientific Institute, pg. 241
10. ^ Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: genocide in the twentieth century. Published by Cambridge University Press, pg. 46-47.
11. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, The Jews and Other Minor Nationalities Under the Soviets. Published 1928 by Vanguard Press, pg. 54
12. Elias Tcherikower, "The Pogroms in Ukraine in 1919" originally in Yiddish, YIVO Institute, 1965
13. Grossmanproject.net: The Pogroms
14. For more information on the Russian pogroms against the Jews: I. Michael Aronson’s book, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
15. Й.Петровский, ОБЩЕСТВО "ЕВРЕЙСКОЕ НАСЛЕДИЕ". Серия "Еврейский Архив": Выпуск 5, Москва, 1996 г.
16. Arno Joseph Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Published by Princeton University Press, pg. 516

References

• Sokolievka/Justingrad: A Century of Struggle and Suffering in a Ukrainian Shtetl, pg. 78
• Harold Henry Fisher: The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919-1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration
• R. Weaver, etc., The Tamarack Review. Published 1982,
• Meyer Wolfe Weisgal, Zionist Organization of America: Theodor Herzl, a Memorial, Published 1929, New Palestine, pg. 289
• William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921. Published 1935 by Macmillan company pg. 230
• David J. Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage. Published 1970, Cape, 249
• Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Pg. 67.

• Pogroms
• Massacres
• History of Kiev city
• History of Russia
• Jewish Ukrainian history