Sincere thanks to Faina Balk
for informational assistance to the project.
A three-year pogrom
Jewish pogroms in Russia 1918-1921.
Am haZikaron Institute Project
The tragedy of the Holocaust has been preserved in the cultural memory of humanity. But few people remember that the horror of the Holocaust was preceded by an equally terrible tragedy. Inhuman torment fell on people guilty only of having had the misfortune to be born Jews in Russia. From Polish Kielce through all of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to Mongolian Urga, where Baron Ungern ordered “the extermination of all the Jews of the town together with their families.”
The hatred poured over the edge and spilled out onto the localities and cities frozen in horror. Three hundred thousand dead, hundreds of thousands raped, a quarter of a million orphans.
Jews were killed just for being Jews, regardless of gender, age, beliefs… It was a grand rehearsal for the Holocaust. It was an endless, unending disaster. Not random tragedies, but a three-year inexorable, continuous “pogrom movement.”
The pogroms involved Whites and Reds, atamans and Petliurovtsy, peasants and urbanites – united by a common hatred.
“Jews! The terrible curse of pogroms has fallen upon our cities and towns, and the world knows nothing of it.”
No more than 19 years would pass and 6 million Jews would be exterminated in the same places, by the same hands, under the leadership of the Germans, and more often on their own initiative.
May the ashes of the slaughtered, burned, sunk, raped – all the murdered – resound always in our hearts, in the hearts of our children, their children’s children – and so in all generations… Almost every family has victims in the horror of this massacre.
The project “Russia. Three-Year Pogrom” was created in their memory. To date, information about the victims of the Jewish pogroms is only fragmentarily presented to the public.
The Am haZikaron Institute has created a resource to bring together all information about the Jewish pogroms of the Civil War:
1. Eyewitness accounts and lists of known victims
2. Website and visual catalog of localities with descriptions of pogroms (over 1500 localities):
– dates
– names
– testimonials
– photos
3. Jewish self-defense and its heroes
4. Lectures on the emergence of the pogrom movement and its consequences
5. Seminars for international student groups
6. Educational course for teachers
7. Publication of the book “Russia. Three-Year Pogrom” about the events of those years
Create a documentary about the Jewish pogroms based on the chronicles of those years.