# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## Pogroms

Pogrom is a Russian word for attack or disturbance. The historical connotations of the term include violent attacks by local populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and elsewhere around the world. In modern times, economic and political resentment against Jews, as well as an older tradition of religious antisemitism among some Christians, have been used as pretexts for these hate-incited violent riots.

In tsarist Russia, the Christian population carried out waves of pogroms between 1881 and 1917. Organized locally with government and police encouragement, the perpetrators of pogroms raped and murdered their Jewish victims and looted their property. During the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, tens of thousands of Jews were killed in pogrom violence in the Ukraine region and in eastern Poland (between 1918 and 1920).

After the 1933 Nazi party rise to power in Germany, Adolf Hitler discouraged what the Nazis considered "disorderly" acts of violence. Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), a night of violent disturbances that included the burning of synagogues throughout Germany on November 9-10, 1938, was the first act of mass violence against the German Jewish community.

During World War II, as the Einsatzgruppen (German mobile killing units) systematically massacred Jewish communities in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, Nazi police officials incited citizens to launch pogroms (with varying degrees of spontaneity) in towns such as Bialystok, Kovno, Lvov, and Riga. In Iasi, Romania, at least 8,000 Jews were killed during a 1941 pogrom, carried out with the support of the fascist military dictatorship.

Pogroms did not end with World War II. In Kielce, Poland, a pogrom was launched in 1946. Mobs of local residents attacked Jews after false rumors spread that Jews were using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes. Forty-two Jews were killed and about fifty were wounded in this attack, just one year after the end of the Holocaust.

The pogrom in Kielce was one of the factors prompting a mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived the Holocaust. Known as the Brihah, this movement brought Jews from Poland and other countries of eastern Europe to the displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy. A fear of violent pogroms was one motivation that led the vast majority of Jews to seek to leave postwar Europe.

Further Reading

Brass, Paul R., editor. Riots and Pogroms. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Gross, Jan T. Fear: Anti-semitism in Poland After Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation. New York: Random House, 2006.

Kielce, July 4, 1946: Background, Context and Events. Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 1996.

Klier, John D., and Shlomo Lambroza, editors. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Meducki, Stanislaw. "The Pogrom in Kielce on 4 July 1946." Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 9 (1996): 158-169.

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