NOKHEM SHTIF the Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19
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The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19 N Prelude to the Holocaust OKHEM S NOKHEM SHTIF HTIF Translated and annotated, OKHEM HTIF with an introduction by Maurice Wolfthal N S Between 1918 and 1921 an es� mated 100,000 Jewish people were killed, maimed or tortured in pogroms in Ukraine. Hundreds of Jewish communi� es were burned to the ground and hundreds of thousands of people were le� homeless and des� tute, including The Pogroms in Ukraine, orphaned children. A number of groups were responsible for these brutal a� acks, including the Volunteer Army, a fac� on of the Russian White Army. 1918-19 The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19 is a vivid and horrifying account of the atroci� es commi� ed by the Volunteer Army, wri� en by Nokhem Sh� f, an eminent Yiddish linguist and social ac� vist who joined the relief eff orts on behalf of the pogrom survivors in Kiev. T Prelude to the Holocaust Sh� f’s tes� mony, published in 1923, was born from his encounters there and from the HE weighty archive of documenta� on amassed by the relief workers. This was one of the P earliest eff orts to systema� cally record human rights atroci� es on a mass scale. OGROMS Originally wri� en in Yiddish and here skillfully translated and introduced by Maurice Wol� hal, The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918-19 brings to light a terrible and historically IN neglected series of persecu� ons that foreshadowed the Holocaust by twenty years. It is U essen� al reading for academics and students in the fi elds of human rights, Jewish studies, KRAINE Russian and Soviet studies, and Ukraine studies. , 1918-19 , Maurice Wol� hal has also wri� en the award-winning transla� on of Bernard Weinstein’s The Jewish Unions in America, also published by Open Book Publishers. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Cover image: Abraham Manievich, Destructi on of the Ghett o, Kiev (1919). Jewish Museum, New York. Public Domain, h� ps://thejewishmuseum.org/collec� on/3474-destruc� on-of-the-ghe� o- kiev. Cover design: Anna Ga� . book RANSLATED AND ANNOTATED WITH AN ebooke and OA edi� ons T , also available INTRODUCTION BY AURICE OLFTHAL M W OPEN ACCESS www.openbookpublishers.com OBP THE POGROMS IN UKRAINE, 1918–19 The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19 Prelude to the Holocaust By Nokhem Shtif, translated and introduced by Maurice Wolfthal https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2019 Maurice Wolfthal. Preface © 2019 Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Nokhem Shtif, The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19: Prelude to the Holocaust. Translated and annotated by Maurice Wolfthal. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2019, https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0176 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1012#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1012#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-744-3 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-745-0 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-746-7 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-747-4 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-748-1 ISBN XML: 978-1-78374-749-8 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0176 Cover image: Abraham Manievich, Destruction of the Ghetto, Kiev (1919). Jewish Museum, New York. Public Domain, https://thejewishmuseum.org/collection/3474-destruction-of- the-ghetto-kiev Cover design: Anna Gatti. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is sourced from SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) accredited mills and the waste is disposed of in an environmentally friendly way Contents Preface vii Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe Introduction 1 Maurice Wolfthal Further Reading 11 The Pogroms in Ukraine: The Period of the Volunteer Army 15 Nokhem Shtif Preface 15 I. The Situation of the Jews in Ukraine before the Arrival of 22 Denikin’s Volunteer Army Anarchy and Pogroms 22 The Economic Pogrom 26 Hopes for the Volunteer Army 27 II. Before the Pogroms and During the Pogroms 29 The Pogrom Road 29 The Ebb and Flow of the Wave of Pogroms 30 Types of Pogroms 30 Hostages 33 The Welcome 34 Pogroms 35 III. The Volunteer Army’s Own Style of Pogrom 40 The Military Character of the Pogroms. Relations with the Local 40 Population. The Mass Rape of Women 42 vi The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19 Humiliation and Torture 43 The Extermination of Jewish Communities 45 The Officers 49 “Contributions” Legal Robbery 50 Self-defense 53 IV. The Causes of the Pogroms. Pogroms as Part of the Military and 55 Political Program. The Connection to the High Command. Opportunities for Pogroms 55 The Volunteer Army 58 Pogrom Agitation 68 The Volunteer Army and its Program on the Jewish Question 73 The Struggle against Pogroms 77 List of Jewish Communities That Were Destroyed 89 Sources 93 Index 97 Preface Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe It is as Bolsheviks that the Jews of South Russia have been massacred by the armies of [the Ukrainian leader Simon] Petliura, though the armies of Sokolov have massacred them as partisans of Petliura, the armies of Makhno as bourgeois capitalists, the armies of Gregoriev as Communists, and the armies of Denikin at once as Bolsheviks, capitalists, and Ukrainian nationalists. It is Aesop’s old fable. Israel Zangwill, Jewish Chronicle, 23 January 1920 The pogroms in Ukraine between 1917 and 1921 represent the largest and bloodiest anti-Jewish massacres prior to the Holocaust. The estimated number of Jews murdered in Ukraine in the aftermaths of World War I ranges from 50,000 to 200,000,1 with many more Jews suffering violence, rape,2 and loss of property. Altogether 1.6 million Jews were affected by these violent events. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of these pogroms, there is no doubt that this was the largest outbreak of anti-Jewish violence before the Shoah, the genocide during World War II in which 6 million European Jews, around two-thirds of the Jewish population of the continent, were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. 1 The early pogrom researcher Nokhem Gergel estimated 50,000 to 60,000 victims. See Nokhem Gergel, “The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–21,” Yivo Annual of Jewish Science 6 (1951), 237–52 (p. 249). 2 On this topic see Irina Astashkevich, Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in the Pogroms of 1917 to 1921 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018), http://www.oapen.org/dow nload?type=document&docid=1001750 © 2019 Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0176.01 viii The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19 Being overshadowed by the Holocaust, the pogroms in Ukraine are still not widely known. This unfortunate state of affairs is due to a number of factors. Firstly, the complex nature of the anti-Semitic violence perpetrated in 1917–1921 Ukraine. As hinted in Zangwill’s quote above, the Jews were attacked by a number of different groups of perpetrators including Anton Denikin’s Russian White Army, Simon Petliura’s Army of the Ukrainian Republic, various peasant units, hoodlums, anarchists, and the Bolshevik Red Army. These attacks stemmed from a number of grievances: accusations of supporting the enemy side, the chaos following the collapse of the old order, the aftermath of World War I and of the Russian Revolution, and a widespread anti-Semitism, after the dissolution of the Russian and Habsburg Empire. Furthermore, the perpetrators could easily locate their victims, as the areas affected were situated within the old Pale of Settlement, a region designated for Jews within today’s Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova.3 The relative lack of research on these events provides a further explanation of why the Ukrainian pogroms are much less known than the persecution the Jews suffered at the hand of the Nazis and other perpetrators during the Shoah. If, over the last 70 years, research on the Holocaust has resulted in several thousand publications, which can be housed only in the library of a large institute such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the publications relating to the pogroms of 1917−1921 would fill no more than two or three shelves. It is however hoped that the anti-Semitic campaigns taking place in early-twentieth- century Ukraine will in the future be recognized as an important chapter in the history of genocide studies. Among the many perpetrators of the pogroms, it was Petliura who became the symbol of these massacres. Scholars have long debated whether Petliura was an anti-Semite who deliberately targeted the Jews, or a weak leader who could not stop their aggressors.