When visiting these little ones in their temporary shelter, and while learning from the girls and women, whom the Rabbi assembled in his house to meet me, the stories of the irreparable wrongs done them, and their fears of the future now before them, I could not help indulging in the hope that some wealthy Jewish merchant or banker in New York, London, or Paris might have the heart and head to bring himself a life’s happiness in the humane task of aiding these orphans and terribly wronged girls and women which all the wealth of all the Jews in any one of these cities could not purchase in palaces, banks, or pleasures.
A Warsaw paper having published an account of the appeal in behalf of the Kishineff sufferers, my hotel soon became a centre of attention and of supplication. Hundreds of poor creatures of both sexes came to beg to be enabled to emigrate. They had heard that the American was proposing to devote some of the money subscribed in New York and elsewhere to the task of taking a few thousand families away from the city of blood to the United States or to the Argentine. No matter what was the proposed destination, they were willing to go, if it were only to some country where Christians did not kill Jews. One petition, signed in behalf of 122 families, was presented to me to be forwarded to the American in the hope of having an early consideration of their claims.
No explanation by my most capable dragoman would disabuse the minds of these poor people of the forlorn belief that escape from a dreaded recurrence of the horrors of April might lie in such a petition.
Among my most persistent callers were two matronly-looking ladies, who also begged to be sent to America. On the first occasion they did not disclose the nature of their calling, or the extent of their losses. I pressed them on these points when they came again. One of them replied, “Our business has fallen off entirely since the riots.”
And what was the business, inquired my dragoman.
“We are midwives,” was the answer. The petition had, of course, to be refused.
Letter VI
London, June 6th.
A few facts concerning Kishineff will be essential to the right comprehension of the causes which led to the perpetration of the black deeds of April, and to a proper understanding of a story of deliberately plotted political crime.
The last census, that of 1897, gave to Kishineff a population of 108,296 souls. Of these over 50,000 were males. The present estimated population may be put down at or about 130,000. These are divided racially as follows: Jews, 50,000; Moldavians (Christians), 50,000; Russians, 8000, with the residue comprising Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, Macedonians, Albanians, and Germans. These figures and estimates are given me by Dr. Kohan-Bernstein, a leading physician of the city, and are confirmed by one of the Rabbis, who holds some kind of a government position in connection with the special taxes levied on the Jews.