[⭘] History of the Jews in Poland and Russia (Putnams), 1915, conclusion.
[⭘] Past and Present: A Collection of Jewish Essays, chap. xvi, Ark Publishing Co., Cincinnati, 1919.
[⭘] ‘What is a pogrom? Better than any abstract definition is a concrete record taken haphazard of an actual pogrom. Orscha is a town of 14,000 inhabitants, half of them Jews. On October 18, 1905, the news of the proclamation of the Constitution reached Orscha. On the 19th the general strike stopped; Jew and Christian embraced; the houses were hung with flags, a service of thanksgiving was held; processions filled the streets. In the evening the Mohilev police officer Misgaib entered the town, and the rumour ran round that a patriotic demonstration was to take place and the Jews to be beaten. On the 20th, drunken men gathered to take the official’s orders. On the morning of the 21st, the peasants entered the town armed with axes and guns. “The village authorities have sent us; whoever does not come will be punished. We are to do whatever is ordered.” At one o’clock a priest exhorted the crowds of the faithful to purge their city of the aliens, and the cry arose, “Long live absolutism! Down with the mayor, who has sold the town to the Jews”. The first murders followed.The house of a rich Jew was stormed. Without the soldiers fired, a priest held service, and a band played the national anthem; while within eight men, women and children were tortured to death. The appetite was only whetted. At six o’clock the peasants begged the police for more orders, more work. They were told to wait till daylight; the darkness might encourage the Jews to resist. On the same day twelve Jewish youths came from Shklov to help their brethren. They were met at the station and murdered, and for seven hours every man that passed mutilated or insulted their dead bodies. The massacre became general. The 23rd was given up to plunder. At mid-day the Vice-Governor spoke to the crowds: “Children, it is enough. You have had three days’ amusement, now go home and sing ‘God save the Czar’”. The pogrom at Orscha was typical of the 690 greater and lesser pogroms which took place that October.’ (H. Sacher on ‘Die Judenpogromme in Russland’. Jewish Review, i.)
[⭘] Wolf: ‘The Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia.’
[⭘] Lazarus: First appeared in ‘Songs of a Semite’, New York, 1882.
Each crime that wakes in man the beast,
Is visited upon his kind.
The lines, written in 1882, apply with hundredfold force to the uninterrupted pogroms that have been raging in the Ukraine throughout 1919. More than 100,000 Jews—men, women, and children—have been butchered in cold blood by the hordes under Generals Denikin and Petlura. The soldiery, intoxicated with blood, invented the most diabolical tortures. See the Report on Jewish Pogroms by Kieff Pogrom Relief Committee, controlled by the Russian Red Cross, London, 1920. ‘Our masses in Eastern Europe have been facing death in seven circles of hell. It is sufficient to remember the multi-massacresof Ukrainia. For this cold murder of whole communities not Heaven itself nor all the mercy of the angels could find palliation. There is no instance that shows so much as this the ghastly descent of human character into primitive brutality and cannibalism. This is a deed which in its horror and wicked purposelessness should have stunned the world.’ (Nahum Sokolow, Opening Address of London Zionist Conference, July 7, 1920.) The following stanzas are from Mr. Zangwill’s appeal to American Jewry on behalf of the victims:—
OUR OWN
By devastated dwellings,