One hundred years ago in the month of April, during the Passover/Easter season, men and women of good will the world over were shocked by news of a devastating three-day murderous attack against the civilian Jewish population of the Romanian town of Kishinev, territory that had been under the control of Czarist Russia since 1812. Such mass assaults upon a Russian Jewish community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, perpetrated with the connivance of government officials, if not executed by government forces themselves, gave the world the ugly gift of the Russian word “pogrom.” The word has since become universalized to include mass attacks against any other religious, racial, or ethnic group.
That the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 took place during the Easter season was not in itself a surprise. Jews of that era did not dare to show themselves in the streets of their shtetls during the week of Easter. The dangers to life and limb were always palpable. That the government seemed to be involved in the Kishinev massacre was also no great surprise. Plehve, the minister of the interior in Russia at that time, who controlled all such actions rather closely, was a notorious public antisemite of the first rank.
Pogroms had surged insidiously in 1881 in Russia after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. They continued after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, replicated there in 1905 by forces of the Black Hundreds (in Russian, Chornaya Sotnya), the militant right-wing gangs that arose to suppress liberal tendencies after the revolution of 1905. The scapegoating of Jews for supposedly adverse national events combined with longstanding inbred religious hatred was, alas, an old story in Jewish life all over Europe. These Russian pogroms carried out against Jewish men, women, and children in the cities and shtetls of Eastern Europe continued relentlessly in the 20th century after Kishinev — up to, during, and even after the First World War. In 1919-21, the Galician section of southeastern Poland and the Ukraine suffered a similar fate at the hands of forces led by a Ukrainian thug named Petlura who was responsible for instigating almost 500 pogroms. Thousands upon thousands of Jewish refugees immigrated to America each year from 1881 to 1924 to escape these widespread atrocities. The awful nightmarish vision in their minds of Cossack horsemen riding into the shtetl with swords flashing death would remain with them forever.
The Kishinev pogrom stood out in its time by its ruthlessness and by the number of casualties — 47 Jews killed, 92 severely wounded. Tragic totals at any time. But readers may possibly react with a reverse kind of astonishment to these figures because they pale by comparison to the horrific number of victims of murder perpetrated later in the century by the Nazis in the Holocaust, by Stalin, and by other tyrants and villainous groups. Kristallnacht alone, November 9, 1938, a pre- Second World War date before the engine of the Holocaust was in full gear, produced unimaginable horrors against the Jews of Germany and Austria that outdid Kishinev in numbers, if not in fiendishness. But the Kishinev pogrom just after the turn of the century was world-shaking enough to elicit protests from many governments to the Czarist regime, including a stern protest by President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States. Such heartfelt public protests were not so immediately forthcoming, if at all, in the later events of the century of genocide and death.
Kishinev — the very name of the town in Bessarabia resonates among Jews as the paradigm of persecution and sorrow at the beginning of the modern era. It goes without saying that the previous one thousand years were no Garden of Eden for Jewish life. We can easily cite a very long list of earlier notorious names of places in European Jewish history drenched in blood — York, England, for example, where Jews were cornered and besieged in a castle by a bloodthirsty mob in 1189 and where they died, or the Ukraine in 1648-49 where the Cossack leader Chmielnicki (Khmelnitsky, in the transliteration from the Yiddish) wiped out more than 700 Jewish communities, a national disaster that led to the rise of messianic yearnings among the Jews of Europe. But Kishinev, in a manner of speaking, introduced an unprecedented calamitous 20th century.
The Kishinev pogrom elicited literary and political responses of an unusual nature for its time. Perhaps the most emotionally moving were two poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik, Al ha-Shechitah (“On the Slaughter”) and B’Ir ha-Haregah (“In the City of Murder”). Not only did the national poet of the Jewish people cry lamentation in the face of the horrible event, but he even excoriated the Jewish populace for not fighting back, a not-wholly-just accusation that was to be heard countless times in the future, in the wake of the Holocaust. There apparently was some resistance in Kishinev, and ultimately as a consequence perhaps of the publication of the latter poem, Jewish defense forces began to organize against such future assaults.
The Yiddish playwright S. Ansky, later famous for writing the drama The Dybbuk, was also overwhelmed by the enormity of the Kishinev pogrom. As a consequence, he became active in the defense effort and subsequently in another related sphere. Ansky toured Eastern Europe during the First World War to chronicle the pogroms afflicting shtetl life at that particular time. This quasi-literary effort of Ansky’s prefigured future Jewish response that has not yet come to an end — the commitment to record the total history of genocide in the Holocaust so that future generations would know the truth and would never forget. Kishinev was the initial tragic catalyst of all these sacred responses that are being carried out to this very day by poets, novelists, Yad Va-Shem in Jerusalem, and by individuals like Stephen Spielberg in his films and in his recording of the personal histories of survivors of the Holocaust. It is almost a given that Israel itself is the ultimate defender against future pogromists.
“Remember what Amalek did to you,” the Jewish Bible decrees to Jews for all generations to come. (Deuteronomy 25:17) Of late, there has arisen controversy among Jews in particular, but also among intellectuals of many other groups, on the value, the wisdom, even the essential goodness of perpetuating stories of victimhood that also can perpetuate hatred and perhaps feelings of revenge. A young scholar with a famous family name in the Jewish world of Orthodox religious thought, Meir Soloveichik, recently wrote a magazine article called “The Virtue of Hate” justifying “hatred” when directed against the unrepentant Hitlers of the world. Other Jews recoiled at the notion, damning it as a primitive concept, or fearing that it would concede the field of religious superiority to Christianity that claims to be the religion of love for friend and foe alike, or worse yet, that it would provoke antisemitism.
At much the same time, a Jewish professor, Solomon Schimmel, has published a groundbreaking work under the imprint of Oxford University Press called Wounds Not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness, defending the traditional Jewish point of view that refuses to turn the other cheek to murderers or to forgive the unrepentant killer. In the words of Jonathan Groner who reviewed the book in the English Forward (February 14, 2003) and summarized Professor Schimmel’s thought, “Justice by itself leads to an endless cycle of retaliation, while forgiveness alone often fails to provide closure for the victim and does not deter future violence.”
And finally, and perhaps what may be a bit of a surprise to most people, comes the following newspaper report by Alana Newhouse in the same February 14 issue of the Forward. A rabbi of the Reform movement, Sue Levi Elwell, in editing Reform’s new version of the Passover Haggadah, their first updating in some 30 years, has decided to restore the poignant lament and powerful cri de coeur at the Seder table of “Sh’foch Chamatcha...” (“Pour out Thy wrath on the nations that have not known Thee ... that have laid waste to Jacob ...”). This awesome prayer from Psalms and Lamentations had been recited by countless generations of persecuted Jews but had subsequently been excised from some previous modern editions of the Haggadot of both Reform and other ostensibly progressive movements.
One may prefer not to add to the controversy in this memorial essay except to say that April 2003 minimally requires that we do not forget the victims of Kishinev of April 1903. One hundred years have passed, and the world is no wiser. There are still powerful lessons to be learned. Even if we abjure the word “hatred” and set notions of revenge aside as useless and irrelevant, if not pernicious, or even if we take another view because we find it difficult to forgive, we can still rely on the ancient source of wisdom encapsulated in the word “Remember,” culled from the Biblical verse “Remember what Amalek did to you.” We can also rely upon the much more recent advice, however oft-repeated and therefore clichéd, inherent in George Santayana’s remark that those who forget the lesson of history are doomed to repeat it.
In sum, we forget Kishinev at our own peril, and at the peril of all men and women of good will. At the very least, the anonymous Jewish victims of 1903 in Kishinev, who cry out not to be forgotten, deserve a candle. Therefore, this little rumination as a fit memorial to the korbanot of the Kishinev pogrom on the hundredth anniversary of an unmitigated tragedy. May their memory be blessed and bring blessings.•
About the author

Yehuda Khaver is the pen name of a teacher and writer whose poetry has appeared frequently in the pages of Midstream.