Pogrom

by Steven J. Zipperstein

  In these cramped quarters Jews and non-Jews, mostly Moldavians, occupied apartments in the same building. The Russian short-story writer and essayist Vladimir Korolenko, in his stirring work “Dom nomer 13” (“The House at Number 13”), gave worldwide notoriety to the neighborhood and especially one of its modest dwellings at Aziatskaia, or Asia Street 13: “Stones, tiles, and bricks and mortar choke the growth of trees. . . . The houses are small, and stone walls hide the entrances to the courtyards.”32

  Synagogue in Lower Kishinev.

  Most of the dwellings in the area were flimsy, their belongings sparse; in the hot, humid months of spring and summer, residents spent much time outdoors in the courtyards or on the dusty unpaved streets. One Jewish home inventoried after the pogrom included only cabinets, beds, tables, and two photographs: one of the Anglo-Jewish grandee Moses Montefiore, which had been ripped into shreds, and the second of the late Tsar Alexander III and his family, which had been left alone. A Jewish woman living at Aziatskaia 13 would insist that, once the pogrom ended, all that remained of her possessions was a single pillow.33

  With horror and puzzlement, Jews here would speak of the friendly, at least benign, relations between Jews and non-Jews that had existed prior to the violence; interactions, they said, had been more casual and less encumbered here than elsewhere in the city. In this neighborhood, with few pretensions and where workaday relationships—Jews often hired non-Jewish laborers as well as maids or artisans—were more likely to slide into friendships, it was more typical than elsewhere in Kishinev for gentile neighbors to take dangerous risks to save Jews. Hence it was not rare for Jews fleeing rioters to run into the courtyards or homes of non-Jewish neighbors, with the expectation of being hidden.34

  Then again, it was also not uncommon for neighbors to slaughter or rape neighbors, and frequently with an astonishing indifference to suffering. This interplay between familiarity and ferocity was replicated in grim incident after incident. Victims of rape or beating were known to call out the names of their assailants. One raped woman spoke afterward of having held her rapist as a baby in her arms. The sons of a local shoemaker—the two boys hid behind a stove while their father was beaten and murdered—recognized the killer as a neighbor whose shoes they had recently repaired.35

  Time and again familiar faces would come crashing into Jewish houses—this starting late Monday morning—often justifying their actions with the declaration that Jews had killed a local priest or demolished a church. The wine-shop owner Yeshaya Sirota described how the riot in the neighborhood had started, predictably enough, with children tossing rocks at the windows of his store and adjacent house; this was soon joined by older men, who began crashing against his front door. Once inside, they spent no less than an hour and a half ransacking his modest house, breaking nearly everything that they did not steal. Once all of Sirota’s clothes and furniture were gone, the mob turned on his wine shop next door with at least sixty people—according to one report as many as four hundred—somehow squeezing themselves into this small space and stealing nearly all his stock until police finally intervened. No marauders were arrested; the police merely persuaded them to leave the building and move on. Sirota survived the onslaught, as he later told Bialik, because when rioters burst into his house and one was poised to kill him and his family, the assailant spotted his youngest child, five months old, and declared that only Turks slaughtered small children. Sirota then hid himself and his family—together with eight other families living in the same building—in the house of a neighboring non-Jew, a wagoner whom he described as a friend.36

  The mob engulfing Lower Kishinev included villagers from outside the city, or peasants living at its edge; many brought wagons in which to pack stolen goods. Neighbors joined in along with, it seems, much of the same group of antisemites and seminary students spotted elsewhere. That morning one of the students encountered a Jew standing in front of his house with a terrified look on his face, and the student stopped to say, “Why weep? Tomorrow we’ll murder all of you.”37

  Immediately after sacking Sirota’s shop down the street, the mob converged on No. 13. It was a modest building wrapped around a courtyard with seven apartments housing eight families, all Jews. In one corner lived Naftoli Serebrenick, who ran a store located in the same small complex, selling candles, soap, matches, oil, calico, and sweets. The landlord lived elsewhere, in a better part of town, but his divorced daughter and family were in the building. The other residents included a bookkeeper, a glazier, a shop assistant, and a hospital orderly. Eight men were in the building when it was attacked by as many as a hundred rioters. Korolenko acknowledged that, under such circumstances, self-defense was inconceivable.38

  The first casualty was the glazier, Mordecai Mottel Greenschopin, who was discovered hiding with his family in a shed and dragged by rioters—including at least one whose name he knew—to the roof of an outhouse, where he was beaten with poles until dead. Fearing a similar fate, Jews witnessing the attack made their way to an attic that was soon so crowded and intolerably hot that most found it impossible to remain. They were spotted and pursued while escaping, several fleeing to a roof within view, as later reported, of police on the street below. One after another, they were beaten to death, some smashed on the head with an enamel sink and others literally torn apart with crowbars. Their bodies were tossed onto the street, some covered—to further humiliate them—with chicken feathers. Corpses lay there for hours until the streets were cleared by the army late that afternoon; many lay in water puddles or were covered by the wine that had spilled from Sirota’s store.39

  Even two months later, when Urussov visited the street in late June—on his first day as governor general—“rough boards covered the broken windows and shattered doors of many houses. Here and there were damaged roofs and partly destroyed chimneys.” Dried blood could be seen on some of the walls, and many residents in the neighborhood occupied houses that had no roofs or, in some instances, were in a state bordering on destruction.40

  Nearly everything that would come to be associated with the pogrom was drawn from the events in Lower Kishinev on late Monday morning and early that afternoon.

  The pogrom’s lingering impact would also remain the most visible for locals, who were the least able to cover the cost of repairs. Not infrequently the violence in this neighborhood was the work of neighbors themselves living side by side with Jews in the same cluster of flats and sharing the same courtyard. The dense and deadly concentration of these attacks, the frequency with which they involved acquaintances, and the simple fact that the area remained in disrepair long after other parts of the city were rebuilt all contributed to making it the focal point for the pogrom’s horrors. Perhaps the preponderance of traditional Jews in classic Jewish garb among its residents—and victims—also helped to consolidate Lower Kishinev as the pogrom’s epicenter. Elsewhere in the city many Jews had by now abandoned Jewish dress, or at least modified it, with many here, as in Odessa, less fixated on the minutiae of Jewish practice.

  Soon enough the best known of all faces linked to the tragedy would be Moshe Kigel, described as the devout sexton of one of Lower Kishinev’s numerous, mostly tiny synagogues. He was said to have lost his life in an effort to save the Torah scrolls of his beloved house of worship from desecration at the hands of hoodlums. Kigel’s martyrdom would soon constitute the most enduring of all portraits from the pogrom—indeed, arguably the most memorable of all moments of Jewish life in late-imperial Russia. Portraits of Kigel would be reprinted widely; prayers and poems devoted to him would be recited in synagogues, especially in the United States; and plays would be written in his honor. His martyrdom was made into a medieval-like tale, particularly once Ephraim Moses Lilien produced his evocative poem, “To the Martyrs of Kishinev,” describing Kigel wrapped in a traditional tallith, wearing phylacteries, his arms outstretched in an effort to save the holy scrolls, his body enveloped by angelic wings.41

  Kigel—bearded, age sixty, and pio
us—resided in a building around the corner from the synagogue whose Torah scrolls had been desecrated. Contrary to the later accounts, however, he was murdered right outside the door of his home, not in front of the house of worship. He was not a synagogue sexton (he owned a tiny shop adjacent to the synagogue), and there is no evidence that he attempted to protect its sacred objects. Nevertheless, once his body was found near shredded scrolls on the street, stories of his martyrdom quickly coalesced. His prominence deflected talk of Kishinev’s rapes and the town’s cowardly men. It focused attention on Kishinev’s poor, thus reinforcing a theme pushed by the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, especially in the weeks after the pogrom, namely that it was a catastrophe of the poor, not the rich, who abandoned Kishinev’s most vulnerable while protecting themselves and their possessions.42

  A similar interplay between intimacy—at least familiarity—and ferocious violence was evident in the slice of Kishinev’s Muncheshtskii, or Manchester Way. There at the city’s eastern edge the pogrom arrived late, much as in Lower Kishinev, and was all the more shocking because its Jews could recall years of peaceful coexistence. Technically a suburb, it was little better than a tumbledown row of houses, artisan shops, cattle slaughterers, and dealers in grains, hides, farm animals, and the like running alongside the railway tracks near the Byk, with the city’s Botanical Gardens nearby. It was a neighborhood with perhaps a hundred Moldavian families and approximately thirty Jewish ones, mostly small peddlers. A Jewish-owned leather factory employed many locals, and the area’s doctor was a converted Jew married to a Catholic.43

  Muncheshtskii’s Jews were so confident that they were safe, and so ignorant of what was transpiring only a few miles away, that the first reliable word of the pogrom came only because one of them—hoping to have his newborn circumcised on Monday morning—set off in a wagon for the city to pick up the mohel to perform the ritual circumcision, only to be informed that such travel was too dangerous. Soon afterward, outside a Jewish-owned grain store, a crowd gathered. Its young proprietor overheard talk in the crowd of the killing of a Christian child in a nearby town, and that it was the practice of Jews to use gentile blood for their rituals. Joining the mob were seminary students and others from outside the neighborhood, with the word now spreading that a Jewish house at the street’s end had already been ransacked.44

  Soon some two hundred people were outside the grain store, arguing about whether to attack Jewish homes and businesses; some of them tried to stop the riot before it erupted. Like elsewhere, however, violence took off when free drinks were demanded from the owner of a Jewish wine store, who, once he refused—at least he was rumored to have done so—was attacked. A large wagon now appeared outside the store, with the bulk of the Jew’s stock loaded onto it. The grain-store owner was approached by a gentile acquaintance and offered the use of a cross to fool the crowd. He correctly figured it would do no good. The store was now ransacked together with all the Jewish houses on the street. Women were raped amid a fury inconceivable just an hour or two earlier.45

  Pogrom victims.

  “Jews did not fight for their lives, but fled to wherever they could.” This was in the testimony of Melekh Kaufman, as told to Bialik.46

  Such accusations would soon be seen—and in no small measure because of how Bialik built the charge into the heart of his famous poem—as an assault on little less than thousands of years of Jewish history. Kishinev was said to have cut wide open a web of wretched, cowardly compromises stretching as far back as the last of the Maccabees, a welter of congealed terrors cleverly disguised that had over the centuries made Jews into who they now were: an overly cautious people who knew well how to negotiate but were incapable of fighting for their own lives or, for that matter, defending the honor of their kinfolk. The first stirrings of the Israeli army, the self-defense force known as the Haganah, launched in Palestine soon after the Kishinev pogrom, was the by-product of such shame. So were a multitude of other well-charted efforts at Jewish self-defense brandished as militant responses to Kishinev, with Jewish fighters in Gomel that September, for example, managing to leave more pogromists dead than Jews.47

  Bialik’s anguished cry had a particularly powerful impact on Jewish fighters once the poem was translated in 1904 into Russian and recited widely (and brilliantly) by the young, restless Vladimir Jabotinsky.48 Bialik’s work left little doubt that the response of Kishinev Jews to violence had been gutless. Curiously enough, however, Bialik recorded in the transcripts of the interviews he conducted during his Kishinev stay, often in copious detail, many efforts at Jewish self-defense, including one so notorious—in the minds of local antisemites and their sympathizers, at least—that they would credit it, not their own actions, as the main cause for Monday’s violence.

  When rioters broke into the shop of Mordecai ben Aaron Litvak, he and his family told them that they would be shot if they did not leave immediately, which they did. Jews elsewhere fought with kitchen knives and clubs until, as often as not, they were overwhelmed by the sheer number or physical strength of the attackers. Trying to protect his father in their house on that Monday morning, Mordecai Zvi Lis found himself pinned down by rioters who pushed against a door. Then, amid calls of “Christ has risen!” the mob jumped both father and son, beating both senseless. When fifty-seven-year-old Yehiel Kiserman fought off four attackers, throwing several of them to the ground, a rumor rapidly spread that a Jew had murdered Christians. This news further enraged the mobs, which now attacked with heightened fury. Elsewhere four Jewish teenagers—all of them employed as servants—tried unsuccessfully to stop the beating of a tailor threatened by a large and angry crowd by beating them first.49

  Yehiel Pesker, the owner of a glass store at the New Market who, like Yisrael Rossman, went to inspect his shop early Monday for damage, encountered on the way home a large group of Jews—he recalled that they numbered at least two hundred—gathered in the wine courtyard, armed and prepared to fight. He saw the clubs in their arms; it turned out that several were carrying guns as well. Returning home inspired by what he had seen, Pesker set in motion plans to protect his building. He armed himself with a club, too, and instructed his neighbors to join him in battling the mob. This they did until they were overwhelmed. Fugitives from Kishinev arriving in Vienna and interviewed by the local press insisted that they, too, would have defended themselves had the authorities not intervened.50

  Hence, after the pogrom’s end, alongside talk of Jewish passivity were fierce denunciations of Jewish anti-Russian aggression. In arguments made by defense attorneys at the trials of pogrom-related crimes, Sunday’s rioting was dismissed as a ruckus that would quickly have come to an end—much as the governor general assured the Jewish delegation on Monday morning—had Jews not overreacted. In this version it was the all-but-unprovoked aggression of Jews and subsequent rumors of attacks on a church and the killing of a priest that set in motion the unfortunate but, under the circumstances, understandable violence.51

  The instance of Jewish militancy most frequently cited in descriptions inimical to Jews—yet sidelined in Jewish accounts—was the one whose start was witnessed by Pesker at the wine courtyard early Monday morning. Gathered were likely more than 250 Jews, armed with clubs, poles, and some guns. This crowd soon attacked a few dozen would-be rioters nearby, overwhelming them at first. Most of the Jews were laborers at the New Market, with a sprinkling also from Lower Kishinev—a medley of husky wagon drivers and others engaged in manual labor eager to fight back. One of the group gave Bialik a lengthy description:

  We decided to arm ourselves, not to be the first to start to fight. Many who had returned to their houses to hide their weapons, to fill the breaches, and to close the doors and shutters came back with poles and with some pistols. Chaim Kazioshner armed himself with an old rifle as a threat. At eight o’clock in the morning, gangs of gentiles arrived via the market. A battle broke out between the two groups, and we pushed back twice. On Bolgarskaia Street the Jews who did not have a chan
ce to arm themselves fled, and the rest joined the Jews who were armed in the wine courtyard. As this was happening, the number of gentiles in the gang grew, and nearly a hundred of them attacked us—and there was no police or patrol in sight. We decided to strengthen our fortification so that not even one gentile could approach us, as other Jews joined our ranks—wine transporters, residents of the old settlement . . . who heard about the defensive war and came to help us so we numbered about 250 (others said that there were even more). Gentile passersby received light blows to scare them off. Some police came to the area and ordered Jews to put down their arms, but we did not heed their orders, and they returned to report this to the headquarters. Immediately, patrols and police came to the yard from all directions. . . . In this manner, the gangs gathered and many stood behind the patrols and threw stones at us from there. We threw the very same stones [back] at them, but the patrols that tolerated the gang’s deeds acted against the Jews.52

  Before the outbreak of violence, preparations had been made to store arms at the home of Jacob Bernstein-Kogan, whose apartment had for years been the main office of the Zionist movement’s correspondence bureau and was equipped with a telephone. It was designated as a headquarters of sorts. But Bernstein-Kogan and his family fled their residence on the first day of the pogrom—soon afterward it was looted—and whether the arms stored there were used or not is unclear. By and large self-defense at the New Market and elsewhere seems to have been cobbled together without assistance from the likes of Bernstein-Kogan. It was apparently organized more or less on the spot, with little if any coordination with Jewish political groups, whether socialist or Zionist—perhaps a significant reason why instances of self-defense were quickly erased from subsequent Jewish accounts. With little if any institutional underpinning, they were an outgrowth of exasperation with the indifference or incapacity of authorities, the density of able-bodied Jews accustomed to arduous labor, and simple fury.53