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Tears Over Russia: A Search for Family and the Legacy of Ukraine’s Pogroms By Lisa Brahin Pegasus Books, 310 pages, $28.95 Ukrainian history is steeped in violence and tragedy. Long before the recent Russian invasion, Ukraine was part of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called “the Bloodlands” — the swath of Central and…
In April, 1915, as The Great War was raging in Europe, your favorite Yiddish newspaper had 176,125 daily readers, according to the masthead’s circulation figures. The United States had yet to enter the fight, but The Forverts covered it aggressively. And on April 9th, New York-based editors and publishers of foreign language newspapers who differed…
In a Europe where anti-Semitism is on the rise, a country Jews still associate with the pogrom of family horror stories looks like it’s about to elect a Jewish comedian as head of state. It’s Ukraine, a country of nearly 44 million people. More than one million Jews were murdered here by the Nazis and…
You know that awful nightmare you have where you’re stuck in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust and your family can’t get visas and you end up trapped in an attic, trying not to breath as SS soldiers march beneath you? Wild rumors are spreading throughout the Jewish world by ear and by Internet…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Although the sheer brutality of the pogroms has been largely overshadowed by the Holocaust, the massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire before WWI and especially in the postwar chaos surrounding its dissolution (1917-1922) were so well-orchestrated that some modern scholars consider them to have constituted a…
(JTA) — The mayor of a Polish town where locals killed and buried hundreds of Jews added his voice to a growing chorus of officials seeking to exhume the bodies to see if Germans killed the victims. Michael Chajewski, the mayor of the town of in northeastern Poland, told Gazeta Wyborcza late last week that he…
WASHINGTON — The author of a work on the Nazi-era massacre in Baghdad believed to have precipitated the Jewish exodus from Iraq is commemorating its 75th anniversary with candle lightings in four cities. Edwin Black, who in 2010 published “The Farhud,” about the June 1-2, 1941 massacre of at least 180 Jews in Baghdad, will…
I’ve just returned to Berlin from a journey to Lodz and several other cities in Poland that are currently in German hands. The trip was eventful. I was in the apex of the area where Russian barbarians were raging not long ago and that currently breathes freely under German rule. Earlier I sought out the…
