The Jewish Chronicle
On this day: the Kishinev pogrom
In the aftermath of the terrible events on Easter Sunday in Kishinev poet Chaim Bialik wrote his notorious verse "In the City of Slaughter".
April 6, 2011 08:43
In the aftermath of the terrible events on Easter Sunday in Kishinev poet Chaim Bialik wrote his notorious verse "In the City of Slaughter".
April 6, 2011 08:43In the aftermath of the terrible events on Easter Sunday in Kishinev, in modern-day Moldova – then the capital of Bessarabia - poet Chaim Bialik wrote his notorious verse "In the City of Slaughter".
In the poem, completed after a visit to meet Kishinev survivors, he lamented that the Jews "said nothing, you choked back the roar in your throat… Why do you cry, son of man, why hide…Your face in your hand?".
The Kishinev pogrom, in which 49 people were killed in two days, some 500 wounded and almost 2,000 left without homes in a city of which half the population of100,000 was Jewish, was a shocking, but not unusual, bout of antisemitic violence.
The pogrom was not a spontaneous uprising, but a medieval-type blood libel, sparked by the death on a non-Jewish patient in a Jewish hospital – his demise was later discovered to be from suicide - and the murder of another non-Jewish child by a relative.
