On October 7th, 2023, when I started to see media reports of the Hamas attack on southern Israel, I was at a loss – I had no frame of reference for what I was seeing. I knew this was something different from previous terrorist attacks or rocket strikes, but I didn’t know what to compare it to. Early on, I heard some people reference the surprise of the Yom Kippur War, because the fiftieth anniversary of that war had just passed, but those comparisons faded quickly. Then there were the voices calling October 7th Israel’s version of September 11th, but 9/11 didn’t involve hand to hand combat, or rape, or children, and, fundamentally, the world wasn’t as horrified by October 7th as they were by 9/11. And then people said, over and over again, that this was the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust, as a way to capture the overwhelming shock and grief of the attack; but comparing October 7th to the prolonged and systematic killing of six million Jews (and many millions of others), over the course of years, and across many borders, just didn’t seem helpful to me, and didn’t offer me any idea for how to cope with the horror, or how to respond to it.
And then the word pogrom started to be used, but it didn’t resonate for me at first, either. The word pogrom came originally from Russian, meaning “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently,” but historically it has referred to acts of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by civilians and supported by the military, in Eastern Europe, between about 1880 and 1920. And, at least in my mind, a pogrom was supposed to be about the dangers of being a minority in a world where the majority hates you. Except, for a lot of Jewish people, and not just Israelis, this did feel like a pogrom, and I wanted to understand why.
The thing is, while Jews are the clear majority population in Israel, they are surrounded by an Arab world that is majority Muslim, and the Palestinian cause has often been supported financially, politically and militarily by the surrounding Muslim countries, so the question of who is in the minority and who is in the majority depends on how closely you focus in or how widely you zoom out.
Some Jewish media outlets mentioned the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in particular, early on in the coverage of October 7th, so I decided to do more research to see if I could understand the comparisons.
The Kishinev pogrom took place on April 19-21, 1903, Easter day, in Kishinev, then the capital of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire (now Moldova). The attacks began after church services on Easter Day, which was also, maybe more significantly, the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. During the pogrom, 47 to 49 Jews were killed, 92 were severely injured, 700 houses were damaged, hundreds of stores were pillaged, and 600 women were raped; while the police and army did nothing.
Leading up to the attacks, the most popular Russian language newspaper in Kishinev was regularly publishing headlines like: “Death to the Jews!” and “Crusade against the hated race!” So that when a boy was found murdered in a town twenty-five miles away, and a girl committed suicide by poison and was declared dead at a Jewish hospital, the newspaper had a ready audience for its insinuations that both children had been murdered by the Jews so that their blood could be used to make matzo for the coming Jewish holiday of Passover (a bizarre blood libel that keeps coming up throughout history to incite violence against Jews, despite the fact that matzo is made of only water and flour, and blood is strictly forbidden in Jewish dietary laws).
On April 28th, the New York Times reprinted a Yiddish Daily News report smuggled out of Russia that described the pogrom:
“The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, ‘kill the Jews’ was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep…babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded.”
Many pogroms had taken place before this one, but the graphic descriptions, and especially the photographs, of the Kishinev pogrom were sent around the world and made a deep impression, especially on American Jews who began organizing financial help for the Jews of Kishinev to emigrate to America and Palestine. The danger to the Jewish population of Europe was convincing to most people, though the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time tried to deny that the attacks had anything to do with anti-Semitism, blaming it on Jewish moneylenders upsetting the local peasants with their corrupt business practices.
But even more than the news reports and the photographs, the biggest impact the Kishinev pogrom would have on Jewish history came in the form of a poem.
Chaim Nachman Bialik, a journalist, poet, and publisher, was commissioned by the Odessa Jewish Historical Commission to travel to Kishinev and collect testimonies from the survivors of the pogrom. Bialik, who later came to be seen as Israel’s national poet, with his poems taught across the Israeli school system, was an early advocate for Zionism and the need for a new kind of Jew, a stronger, bolder Jew who wouldn’t be so vulnerable to antisemitism.
As he walked through Kishinev and listened to the survivors of the pogrom he began to form an idea for a long poem in Hebrew that would be published in 1904, meant to wake Jews up to the impossibility of life in the diaspora, called “In the City of Slaughter.”
“Do not fail to note, (he wrote)
In that dark corner and behind that cask,
Crouching husbands, bridegrooms, brothers peering through the cracks,
Watching their wives, sisters, daughters struggling beneath their bestial defilers,
Suffocating in their own blood,
Their flesh portioned out as booty.”
Bialik’s vision of the diaspora Jew’s weakness, and his willingness to blame the Jewish men for the rapes of their wives and daughters, became a rallying cry to find a place where Jews could be in the majority and therefore able to defend themselves. He, significantly, left out any references in the poem to the fact that local Jews had tried to defend themselves, but had failed because police dispersed those Jews attempting to defend Jewish homes and businesses, while allowing the rioters to go unchecked (Russian courts later used those attempts at self-defense to suggest that it was actually the Jews who struck first, and were therefore responsible for the riots that killed them).
But even if Bialik had acknowledged those attempts at self-defense, the lesson would still have been the same: life in the diaspora, in the minority, isn’t safe.
“Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother’s cold and milkless breast;
Of how a dagger halved an infant’s word,
Its ma was heard, its mama never heard.”
As a modern day Jew living in America, when I read this poem I got really angry, at Bialik, for the way he blamed the victims of the atrocity. It felt like identification with the abuser, in today’s therapy speak, but at the time it was galvanizing and convinced a lot of people that Zionism was the only answer for Jewish survival.
The word diaspora is often used as a stand-in for the Hebrew word Galut, which means “exile.” The idea is that after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem, in 70 CE, God exiled the Jews from the land of our ancestors, for our sins. This is how we are supposed to see our lives in the diaspora, as outside of God’s favor. But we don’t, or, I don’t. (This belief that we are in exile because that’s how God wants it, is why certain Chasidic groups are anti-Zionist. They believe we have no right to return to Israel until God brings us back there, in the time of the messiah). The Zionist cry was, let’s not wait for God’s permission to go home anymore, let’s not wait for the messiah, because if we wait too long we will be annihilated.
There was actually a second pogrom in Kishinev two years later, killing nineteen Jews, as part of a huge wave of pogroms across the Russian Empire during which 200,000 Jews were murdered in an estimated 600 different attacks on Jewish communities. But it was the first Kishinev pogrom that was remembered, and Bialik’s interpretation that lingered.
Interestingly, at the same time that Bialik was teaching the Jews about the power of a poem to inspire action, Pavel Krushevan, the publisher of that Russian newspaper in Kishinev that had incited the pogrom in the first place, had also learned an important lesson: incitement works. Within months he had published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fictional account of Jewish leaders plotting to control the world, presented as if it were true. This book later spread around the world, teaching anti-Semitism to an ever wider audience. Hamas even refers to elements of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their charter.
As I continued to read Bialik’s poem, and the details of the Kishinev pogrom itself, it became clear that even though some of the circumstances of a pogrom didn’t fit what happened on October 7th, many of the victims of October 7th felt the same powerlessness of the Jews in Kishinev, in large part because of the failure of the Israeli government to prevent the attacks, or to intervene to protect them in time, and, all over again, the lessons of Kishinev, especially the need for muscular self-defense, were back in the forefront of people’s minds.
The most penetrating message of the poem, for me, is Bialik’s anger at the Jews of Kishinev for not being angry enough.
“Turn, then, thy gaze from the dead, and I will lead
Thee from the graveyard to thy living brothers,
And thou wilt come, with those of thine own breed,
Into the synagogue, and on a day of fasting,
To hear the cry of their agony,
Their weeping everlasting.
Thy skin will grow cold, the hair on thy skin stand up,
And thou wilt be by fear and trembling tossed;
Thus groans a people which is lost.
Look in their hearts, behold a dreary waste,
Where even vengeance can revive no growth,
And yet upon their lips no mighty malediction
Rises, no blasphemous oath.”
The story of Kishinev, and the shame of it, had largely faded from the minds of American Jews by October 7th 2023, to the point that I don’t think it was even mentioned at my orthodox Jewish high school, where we studied Jewish history as part of our daily coursework, because it didn’t resonate for us, here, where, even now, despite growing antisemitism, and incidents of horrific violence, we feel at home in the diaspora. We feel safe. But in Israel, where the philosophies of Bialik and the other early Zionists are well-known, and where the population is largely the descendants of refugees from the diaspora, or the relatives of those who did not survive, feeling safe is more elusive.
To many, and maybe most, Israelis, the horror of October 7th was that even the new, strong, brave, well-armed Jew couldn’t prevent a Kishinev. And if the New Jew wasn’t enough, what would be?
Interestingly, while many Jews continue to see Israel through the lens of the Holocaust, and the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Arab world has been taught to believe that these things never actually happened. Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” President of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has consistently misrepresented, minimized and even denied the Holocaust. He has said that Hitler killed European Jews not because of anti-Semitism but because of the Jews’ “social functions” in society, such as money lending (just as the Russian Ambassador to the United States had said about the Jewish victims in Kishinev). In his doctoral thesis, written at a Russian University, Abbas argued that the Zionists had even colluded with the Nazis, agreeing to the extermination of the Jews of Europe in order to convince the world of the necessity for a Jewish state in the land of Israel. He has said that it’s possible that 6 million Jews were killed, but it’s also possible that it was less than a million. And, while he’s denying and minimizing the Holocaust on one hand, he’s also accusing Israel of committing “fifty holocausts” against the Palestinians on the other hand. And he’s not alone. Holocaust denial is rampant and normalized in the Arab world, where Mein Kempf and Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been widely published, and using the language of the Holocaust against Israel (calling them Nazis, accusing them of genocide, etc.) continues to be a common rhetorical tool.
And the thing is, if you’ve been raised to believe that the Holocaust was at the very least exaggerated, if not created from whole cloth, for the sole purpose of stealing Palestinian land in 1948, no wonder you would hate the Jews and think Israel has no right to exist. The fact that these ideas are so easily disproven is maddening. The Holocaust was minutely catalogued by the Germans themselves, similar to how Hamas documented the October 7th massacre with their Go-pros, and yet many Palestinians, and some of their supporters in the Arab world and in Europe and America, have even said they believe that October 7th was not only not as bad as it has been portrayed, but that it was perpetrated by the Israeli army itself.
The Kishinev comparison has been helpful for me in a lot of ways, especially in understanding the Israeli certainty that the right response to the attacks was overwhelming force, but there’s one overriding reason why the analogy doesn’t fit: the hostages. When Hamas militants and their civilian supporters took hostages back to Gaza with them, specifically to instigate a bloody ground war with Israel in order to turn world opinion against the Jews, they also, intentionally or not, created a double bind for Israelis that would create a whole new kind of horror; the choice between saving the hostages, by ending the war now and releasing all terror suspects along with all of the other Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, versus continuing the war so as to prevent future attacks and to prevent future hostages from being taken, is an impossible one.
The horror of knowing that so many hostages are still being kept in the tunnels of Gaza, and that the world stopped thinking about them a long time ago, is unbearable. It can’t be understood by a comparison to any other event; it refuses to be categorized or contained or ignored.
So here we stand, with the Palestinians in a constant state of Nakba, or catastrophe, ever since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, believing that their land was stolen by vicious invaders who constantly lie about their origins and intentions, and Israelis constantly afraid of another Kishinev and, inevitably, another Holocaust.
I don’t know how we move past these narratives to help us see a new way forward, but maybe a new poem could be written, one that addresses the narratives of both peoples, or rather of the many different people within the larger mosaic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and maybe that new poem could imagine a future where something other than violence prevails. I wouldn’t know how to write that poem, or who might have the skill and perspective and confidence to try, but I’d like to believe it will be possible. One day.
The City of Slaughter https://faculty.history.umd.edu/BCooperman/NewCity/Slaughter.html
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 
Thank you for teaching me something today.
Thank you for reading!
RELEASE THE HOSTAGES! Man’s inhumanity to man, and, woman, has always been disgusting and vile. Stop it!
How horrible. Anyone who can commit those kind of crimes should not be calling themselves Christians. True Christianity is about love and forgiveness, not hate. I apologize for the entire Christian population.
I don’t think it’s about Christianity as a set of beliefs, it’s more about how religion becomes part of the institutions of state and society, and is used as a tool for human frailties. Just as I love Judaism and Jews but can see how some people misuse their beliefs or power to cause harm, the same is true in every other religion.
Yes, you’re so right. And how the politicians and people of power get the people to believe that it is God’s will.
This was very difficult but important reading. What horrible events. The anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab world, which I’ve come across, is so bizarre.
When I first heard about the protocols of the elders of Zion I was sure it was a joke, and that everyone else would see through it just as easily. I was wrong. People believe a lot of things that make no sense, and do horrible things as a result. I wish I could say I understand it, but I don’t.
Yes that’s one of things I’ve heard from some Arabs. How anyone can believe such a nonsensical and silly fraud is beyond me too. However, a lot of people believe what they want to believe rather than what is rational.
We’ve seen a lot of that in the US in recent years. I can’t make it make sense.
Having visited Yad Vashem, in person, and crying so hard my nose bled it is unfathomable how people can be so easily fooled that it never happened. And Gaza has always belonged to Israel. Except for the devastating pain it might bring, I believe you could write that poem.
I’m not a good enough poet to even try, honestly. But I also can’t yet imagine the future that needs to be created. I hope someone else has the empathy and the imagination to get us there.
Hi Rachel,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, impressions, and insights in The Kishinev pogrom.
I have trouble comprehending such acts against other humans. Human history is littered with so much hate and violence.
Thank you for teaching me much today and reminding your readers of the hostages.
I heard recently that the hostages’ families have been told that at least 31 of the remaining 100 plus hostages have died since October 7th. I can’t even imagine what the families are going through.
That is awful
It is.
A new poem is absolutely what is necessary. There’s no safety for anyone as long as Hamas holds all of Gaza hostage. But the killing of Palestinian civilians only strengthens Hamas as well. It’s a terrible bind with horrific suffering on all sides and the only way out is to tell a new story.
Agreed.
I hated to click on”Like”, since everything you’re describing is just so unfathomably evit. When will our humanity win out? Thank you, Rachel, for providing such complete and well-written background, as hard as it is to read.
Thank you! I think the deeper problem is that both good and evil, and everything in between, are deeply human qualities. We have to choose which parts of ourselves to nurture and which parts to fight.
You’re a special woman, Rachel. You are right, of course, but that has to be hard for the most deeply affected people to believe right now.
Absolutely.
Thank you for an important history lesson. I had not been taught anything about the horrors of the Kishinev Pogrom. I cannot help but feel a hollow pit in my gut about the extreme hatred that is generated against the Jewish people throughout history. My rational mind finds it difficult to understand how and why people get so carried away to the point of oppression and genocide. I can only shake my head at the monstrous acts of evil.
Unfortunately, there’s more than enough evil to go around in our world.
Exactly.
Rachael, a tour de force. Well presented and argued. Thank you for cogently presenting this historical tragedy.
Thank you so much!
Humans acting and reacting in a cycle of violence and vengeance has ripped humanity apart and murdered whole civilizations through the centuries. On and on it goes. Wish it were not so. Sending you love and hugs.
Thank you!
Taking hostages (never mind all the other atrocities) is primitive and uncivilized to say the least. And I keep wondering what kind of god (Allah) tells people to kill anyone who thinks differently? Or kill babies? If Muslims don’t want to follow Christian ways, then they should follow their own teachings, but couldn’t we have some human decency while each group follows their idea of a god?
More often than not, we are projecting our own qualities and wishes onto God (prophets who can speak directly to God are rare, to say the least). So it’s really people, and not their gods, or their professed religions, that need to be held responsible for the evil we do.
Of course, Rachel. We are all responsible for our own actions. Religion is so often used as an excuse. A promise of X number of virgins if you die killing some “infidels”? This god now promotes promiscuity too?
The “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is actually a religious war between Islam and Judaism.
The Quran teaches the Muslims to eliminate all Jews, anywhere, and the Muslims were and still are Nazi supporters (google Amin al-Husseini, among others).
The Muslim have committed many “pogroms” against the Jews in all Muslim countries, prior to the existence of state of Israel. One of the most notable was the “Farhud”, which happened in Iraq in 1941, where 175 Jews were murdered, 1000 injured and robbed and 900 Jewish homes were destroyed.
So the problem is not about land, and it cannot be solved by any territorial compromise.
It’s a shame that most Jews don’t even know this side of the story, and only focus on the European anti-semitism.
I appreciate your passion on this subject. Even though more than a third of my high school class were mizrachim it was still an Ashkenazi school and we learned very little about the history of Jewish life in the Muslim world. The first time I heard about the Farhud was while I was researching Kishinev and I wanted to understand more before trying to write about it. I also came across some of the comments made by Arab leaders leading up to the vote for the partition plan in 1947, which basically announced the violence against Jews that would come. I have a whole file of reading to do on the grand mufti of Jerusalem and his ties to Adolph Hitler. It’s a lot to process and I wish we had been given a more thorough education on the subject a long time ago, but I hope you know that it matters to me, and to many others. At the very least, there should be more attention given to the almost one million Jews living in Muslim countries who were forced to escape without much of anything and helped not at all by the UN in resettling either in Israel or other countries, while the Palestinian Arab refugees received their own refugee agency that has lasted to this day.
I appreciate your thorough answer, and your willingness to learn more.
It is indeed outrageous that Jews, who were forced to leave Muslim countries, were never recognized as refugees, while the so-called “Palestinians” were rewarded with their own special refugee agency – UNRWA – and are the only ones in the world who can inherit(!) a refugee status and benefits for 75+ years. They are rewarded all this solely because they are fighting the Jews.
I wasn’t aware of most of this information either, and in my case, it is even more devastating, as I come from a Sephardi family, was born and raised in Israel, and was always quite politically involved.
Only recently, people began to realize that learning this side of the Jewish history is crucial for understanding the full spectrum of the present problems.
No doubt there’s still a lot to learn, but we’re on the right path.
Rachel,
In a few days this email address will be gone. My new email address is now active. If you could change your files , that would be great as I would like to keep hearing from you. The new email address is: sargon0844@protonmail.com sargon0844@protonmail.com
Thank you
John McVey (Edgar 62)
Very true thank you God bless the Jewish people
Thank you!
Welcome
Best wishes ☺
I always learn so much from your posts, thank you Rachel
Thank you!
A pleasure Rachel
Nothing but mad respect to the continual education I get about the Jewish plight through your words, thank you for being a voice.
Thank you!
A very interesting and balanced read, thank you Rachel. I’m increasingly dubious that the safe return of the hostages is a priority for Netanyahu’s coalition though, the same bombs they rain on their enemies in Gaza will hit the hostages, and the hostages will starve alongside the Palestinians if they continue to block food, water and medicine at the checkpoints. Some of the comments here highlight the problem, we’ll never find a peaceful solution until we stop hating the other and learn to empathise with each other.
Thank you.
This made me cry and heartbroken; wish we live in a different world. As a Jordanian with some Palestinian roots in Jerusalem. I hope one day we live in a better world for the next generation 💔 ❤️. The inhumanity of humans beings to each other is indeed devastating. Praying for healing, peace, and justice for all.
❤️
♥️
I mean ❤️
Thanks Rachel, learned a lot today.
Thank you!
Thank you for such an informative post! Difficult reading, but that’s the subject matter, not the quality of writing, which is excellent. You give a thorough and balanced perspective that I wish more people understood.
Thank you so much!
“the failure of the Israeli government to prevent the attacks, ” is what is most puzzling to me. I get all the history of war, hatred, human nature, religion, and so on. But today, with all the sophistication and technology, etc., the actual geography and logistics of Gaza and Israel … how could a full-out military, ground invasion happen?
~ To expect humans to change our nature? “Can a leopard change its spots?” But the failure to protect your nation under the circumstances? “Heads should roll.” But then, Why is Dr. Fauci not in jail? Sorry.
~ Rachel, your thoughts and writing are a great service. Thank you.
Thank you!
Maybe it’s time to mention Kielce pogrom, which happened in 1946. After the WW II was officially over and holocaust was stopped. Maybe it’s time to look how Polish government treated jews most of the last century.
You have done such a good job of researching, and I have pondered this for days, and still can’t comprehend all of it and probably won’t be able to. I see opinions changing as we see more and more news of the slaughter of men, women and children in Gaza. I still hope for a solution that makes all on both sides a little more peaceful, a little more hopeful. I can’t help but ask, “What is God’s will in all of this?”
Thanks for the research, Rachel. I’ll come back to this. I wish I didn’t have to❣️💔
Thank you!
I just finished reading the book, Israel, by Daniel Gordis, and highly recommend it. Your post summarizes many of the things I leaned in the book, and helped me understand Israel’s response to the horrific invasion of Oct 7th more clearly. They are still fighting for their survival and existence.
Daniel Gordis is awesome! Very clear and thorough.
Yes! I found myself looking for more of his books to read and found some great podcasts, too!
Excellent and informative article. As for where to go next, I’d like to start with
Let My People Go.
The strangeness of how all of this is being covered on the news, with almost no mention of the hostages or of Hamas, makes my head spin. The way people were ripping down the hostage posters from the beginning, seeing any mention of the hostages as a crime somehow…
I Know. It’s tearing me up.
This is a typical case where the “Like” button is… shall we say “not very appropriate. Thank you for your post.
I must confess that though I am not Jewish, Oct 7th stays in my mind. Influences many of my posts since that terrible day. I’ve only recently begun to re-post on other subjects.
In a nutshell: I support Israel.
🙏🏻
Thank you!
PS, I try to “not advertise” or promote my posts on others’ blogs. Yet, if if you are curious, I can eventually indicate a few that might be of interest to you.
Take care.
Send me a link or two.
Glad to. First link is to a post I wrote in October, about “My friend Max”. (The Rabbi’s cat is the one before):
Second link is the first part of what I called “A Brittany trilogy”, stories my mother told me about WWII.
I hope you like the stories…
Take care.
These are awesome!!!!
Thank you Rachel. I do appreciate. I see it as my tiny contribution against the growing madness… (And Max in particular was a real… “mensch” as one would have said in Yiddish. Which I don’t think he spoke…)
Thanks for visiting and commenting.
🙏🏻
(🌹And since today is Friday: Shabbat Shalom!)
Rachel, this is an important piece to interrupt the growing world narrative. Would you consider sending it to a national publication?
I wouldn’t know where to send it, honestly. But, thank you!
I wonder if more awareness to the fact that Israel is feminine “God’s Bride” if that would help the world understand it’s oppressor? Radical religions who want to oppress her should be highlighted for their narcissistic intent. To me, it is obvious. The world is afraid to love the woman. But our love for her reveals Him. May we see that this war is spiritual and a long standing hatred against the feminine.
My husband’s family immigrated to the US in the very early 1900’s, and I am always struck how people do not realize that the Holocaust was not the only reason for the Jews to flee Europe. I knew about the pograms but not in the detail you shared here. Horror stacked upon horror. When people talk of reparations, who is offering reparations to the Jews? The very least the world can do is make sure Jewish people have a safe place to live.
I think the image of Jews as rich and powerful seems to knock out any memory of what really happened.
So many examples in history, including here in England. Simon de Montfort massacred hundreds, probably thousands of Jews in the 13th Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_de_Montfort,_6th_Earl_of_Leicester#:~:text=Five%20hundred%20Jews%20died.,in%20Derby%20in%20February%201262.
Wow!!!
I learned so much about jewish life from reading this, I now have a better understanding, of the October 7th attacks, thanks to you!
Thank you!