Six young girls who are known to have undergone similar violence were ashamed to come to the Rabbi’s house to tell their tale of wrong and ruin.
The foregoing list does not exhaust the number of women who were subjected to the greatest wrong that can be done to their sex.
All house-breaking and robbery were suspended in the night-time during the outbreak, and the younger men of the thirty or forty gangs of rioters went in search of the hidden girls and married women. Those who can do so naturally hide the narrative of their wrong, and suffer in silence. The actual number of the mob’s victims in the most ruffianly of their crimes will therefore never be fully known.
Apart from the desperate and hopeless efforts of the forty murdered men to save wives and daughters, and the solitary attempt at organised resistance described in a previous letter, the 10,000 or 12,000 Jewish men of Kishineff offered little or no resistance to the 1500 or 2000 Moldavian and Russian assailants of their women, homes, and property. Ninety per cent. of them hid themselves, or fled to safer parts in and out of the city for refuge.
A thousand determined men, even in spite of the action of the Chief of Police in virtually protecting the mob, could have saved many lives and averted most of the outrages on the women and girls. One plucky little Jew, Leon Koulberg by name, a member of the Kishineff Fire Brigade, with only a few helpers, faced a band of fifty-six Moldavians and drove them from his district.
Many Russians of both sexes nobly exerted themselves to protect the women from the mob. But from no quarter in the city, and from no source, did I learn of any attempt being made by Russian or Moldavian clergymen (with one solitary exception) to perform a similar Christian duty.
Instances of incredible baseness on the part of the Moldavians were given me by various witnesses.
Mordka Mynduik was escaping from a gang of ruffians in the Skulanska Rogatka suburb. He was invited into a Moldavian neighbour’s house, and murdered by those who had offered him hospitality and protection.
Israel Ullman fell a victim to a similar act of Moldavian perfidy.
Three men and a woman with a child were fleeing from pursuers, and were directed to take a certain course over a field towards the railway station. They ran into an ambush, and two of the men were killed, the woman and child, however, escaping.