The Kishinev pogrom took place on April 6-7, 1903 in the capital of the Bessarabia province of the Russian Empire (now the capital of Moldova). What made the pogrom special was a Hebrew poem written by Chaim Nachman Bialik, considered the national poet of the Jewish people, in which he disparaged the Jewish passivity in the face of pogrom violence.

(Lithograph above is of US President Theodore Roosevelt saying to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia: "Stop your cruel oppression of the Jews" in relation to the first Kishinev pogrom.)

Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky made the Bialik poem accessible to the Jewish community by translating it into Russian. The poem highlighted the defenselessness of Jews in the diaspora. Jabotinsky, while encouraging self-defense as necessary for Jewish self-respect, understood that the only way to end attacks on vulnerable Jews was to establish a Jewish State with its own army.

The Jewish Museum Westphalia, Dorsten is publishing the first part of the memoires of its former manager, Johanna Eichmann. Published under the title "You nix Jew, you blond, you German!" (Memories 1926-1952), the book describes her childhood and youth in Westphalia, mainly during the Nazi period.

In the fall of 1337*, the inhabitants of the Bavarian Town of Deggendorf butchered the entire local Jewish community in order to avoid paying debts. Later, they justified their pogrom by an absurd tale of Host Desecration, creating an annual pilgrimage franchise which netted the town hefty revenues over the next centuries.

 In 'law and order' loving Germany, the participation of the police forces in violent atacks on the nation's Jewish citizens signaled the complete deligitimization of the Jews that had taken place within just five years of the election of the Nazi party to power.

 
The personal stories of two German girls, one Jewish and one non-Jewish, of how they experianced the November 1938 "Crystal Night" attack on the Jews of Germany and Austria.

The following are a photograph and a translation into English of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, one of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that were recently transferred to the U.S. National Archives.

 The original copy of the Nuremberg Laws, pilfered by General George S. Patton and kept at the Huntington Library in California, have been transferred to the U.S. National Archives this week. The four pages of 1935 legislation, signed by Adolph Hitler, deprived Jewish citizens of most of their legal rights and forbade non-Jews from relationships with Jews.

In 1834, the Jewish population of Safed faced a violent pogrom that lasted a painful 33 days. Taking place years before the birth of political Zionism and the mass immigration of Jews to Ottoman Palestine, it was just one example of the violence that the Jews often faced under Muslim rule.

The Shiraz Pogrom was a blood libel that took place in the Iranian city of Shiraz on October 30, 1910. The event took place even though no child had died.

During the Second World War, the Jews of Poland suffered the largest casualties out of any other group of Jews. About 3 million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust, with only about 300,000 surviving. After the fall of Nazi Germany, the Jewish refugees were instructed to go to their home counties.