Kishinev Pogrom

On 19–20 April 1903, at Easter, mobs attacked the Jews of Kishinev, capital of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire. The violence was stirred up by Pavel Krushevan's antisemitic newspaper Bessarabets, which spread a blood libel over the murder of a Christian boy. In two days 49 Jews were killed, hundreds were injured, women were raped, and some 700 houses and 600 shops were looted or destroyed, while police and troops stood by for most of the first day.

Photographs and reports caused an outcry in Europe and the United States. Sent to collect testimony, the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote "In the City of Slaughter", which condemned the victims' passivity as well as the killers. The poem inspired Jewish self-defense groups across Russia, among them young people who later went on to the Second Aliyah. The pogrom also fed the urgency behind the 1903 Uganda proposal debated at the Sixth Zionist Congress.