I desire to appeal most urgently for assistance for the future of the girls and married women who were savagely violated during the riots at Easter. These girls have now no hope of marriage where the facts of their dishonour are publicly known. Under the rigorous moral law of Moses married women who are outraged must be divorced from their husbands. There are several such cases among the victims of the mob’s brutality, and their misfortunes, along with those of the young girls referred to, make a peculiarly pathetic appeal to the sympathy of those who may be blessed with the means by which the future of these unhappy creatures might be made less miserable and hopeless.
There are also from fifty to one hundred orphans, children of murdered fathers and mothers, who are to be provided for. Some of the money subscribed from abroad ought to be specially ear-marked for alleviating these three classes of exceptional suffering and wrong.
Letter IV
Berlin, June 3d.
Finding it impossible, on account of the Russian censorship of all telegraphic messages relating to the Kishineff outrages, to forward this despatch from that city, I do so from this point.
I have completed an investigation as to the origin, authors, and extent of the recent massacres and looting, while I have also traversed almost the whole of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, from Odessa to Warsaw, inquiring into the present state of anti-Semitic feeling arising out of the outbreak at Easter.
The origin of the sanguinary riots at Kishineff, on the 19th and 20th of April, was not, as reported in the Russian official press,[5] an assault by a Jew proprietor of a merry-go-round upon a Christian woman, whereby a mob of peasants were incited to attack the Jews. There is no truth in this account.
The real origin of the outbreak was this:
The only daily paper in Kishineff is the Bessarabetz. It is a violently anti-Semitic organ. Its chief editor is Pavolachi Kroushevan, of Moldavian origin. He has systematically inflamed the popular feeling against the Jews, as the foes of Russia, as the propagandists of Socialism, and as the enemies of the Christian religion. These attacks have been continuous for the last six years. Merchants and employers giving work to Jews were held up to public odium, and the expulsion or extermination of the race was openly urged. The Bessarabetz has a circulation of 20,000, chiefly among the police, municipal employés, and workmen generally.
Two events occurring shortly before Easter were seized upon by Kroushevan to incite the mob to murderous violence. One was the murder of a boy belonging to the village of Doubossar, situated between Kishineff and Odessa, by his relatives for gain. The other was the suicide of a girl and her death at the Jewish Hospital of Kishineff. The Bessarabetz declared them to be both ritual murders by the Jews, and summoned the Russian Christians to punish the authors of the alleged crimes.