Kishinev קישינב
The chief city of Bessarabia, where by the start of the twentieth century Jews were nearly half the population; the pogrom of 1903 made its name a byword.
Jews settled at Kishinev from the eighteenth century, and after Bessarabia was joined to Russia the city became one of the chief Jewish cities of the Pale: by 1897 there were about fifty thousand Jews here—nearly half the inhabitants—with dozens of synagogues, schools, a hospital and a press.
At Passover 1903 a pogrom took place here of which the whole world learned: forty-nine killed, hundreds wounded, houses wrecked. Bialik wrote of it "In the City of Slaughter", and from that day Kishinev became the name by which every massacre was called. Five years later the community called Rabbi Yehuda Leib Tsirelson, who led it for thirty years—under Romanian rule as chief rabbi of Bessarabia.
In the summer of 1941 German and Romanian troops took the city; the community was destroyed in the ghetto and in the camps of Transnistria. After the war Jews returned, and in our days a small community lives in Kishinev.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Scholarship
- The records of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 — the numbers killed and wounded
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the census of 1897, Rabbi Tsirelson, the ghetto of 1941
Basis: documents and evidence.