The Kishinev pogrom

The pretext was an old one: a murdered boy was found at Dubăsari, and Krushevan's Kishinev paper Bessarabets hinted that his blood had been wanted by the Jews for matzah. At the end of Passover 5663 the crowd came out into the streets.

The sources give the dead differently—from forty to forty-nine; ninety-two gravely injured, more than five hundred lightly, about seven hundred houses and shops wrecked. For two days the police did not intervene.

Then came what makes this pogrom remembered apart from the rest. Chaim Nachman Bialik went to Kishinev and spent weeks recording the testimony of survivors. Out of those notebooks came the poem "Be-ir ha-haregah"—"In the City of Slaughter", 1904; Jabotinsky translated it into Russian. The poem struck not at the rioters but at his own: at those who hid and kept silent. It was read as a verdict and as an order, and from that time self-defence units began to form in the towns of the Pale, while the stream of departures to America and to the Land of Israel swelled.

In the West Kishinev became a byword: relief funds came from America and England, and they taught American Jewry to raise money for European disaster—a habit out of which, twelve years later, the Joint would grow.