Often, when the descendants of Jews who fled a European city imagine what life was like there, we picture mob violence (pogroms), ghettoization, and overt hatred of Jewish people. While pogroms did happen in Yekaterinoslav and they were catastrophic, the city leaders sought to stop the violence and tried to find justice and restitution for the Jews.
Based on an (erroneous) perception that “the Jews” were to blame for their economic woes, mobs attacked Jewish people and property throughout Ukraine with some regularity in the early 1880s. Yekaterinoslav was fortunately spared in 1881 and 1882 when pogroms broke out in nearby cities. But violence struck Yekaterinoslav the following year. The city’s Yizkor Book describes the pogroms of 1883 this way:
The disturbances began on 20 July (by the Julian calendar) 1883. As a parade passed through the streets, … a rumor was spread that [a] boy was killed by [a] Jew. Immediately the workers who participated in the parade, joined by many of the town residents, began attacking the shops and stands of the Jews, and the Jewish apartments along the streets of the town, robbing and destroying anything that was in their way. The police were not strong enough to stop them and the army arrived only late afternoon and began acting. However, the pogrom continued the next day, and only by the end of the second day, after the army used guns and several hooligans (about 15 people) were killed and several were wounded the pogrom stopped.
Soon after, authorities were able to restore order, and Goldbrot writes in the Yizkor Book that “the situation calmed down, the economic life recovered and the Jewish community returned to normal.”
The Pogroms of 1905 can be described as backlash during a time of social and political upheaval. The January 1905 Russian Revolution and Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese war led to a time of optimism for Jews concerning equal rights under the law. At the same time, they knew that some elements of Russian society were vehemently opposed to the reforms and were likely to scapegoat Jews. Jewish Yekaterinoslav residents began organizing for their community’s self-defense.
In July 1905, a violent mob attacked the city’s Jewish neighborhoods, and the community defended itself successfully before the authorities stopped the riots. But a few months later the Czar published the October Manifesto, granting every citizen (including Jews) more rights. Consequently, antisemitic anti-reform groups organized parades and set their violent intentions. Four days later, on October 21, 1905, pogroms began in Yekaterinoslav. Goldbrot writes in the Yizkor Book,
Following the “patriotic” parade through the central streets of the town, the rioters attacked Jewish homes and shops, robbed and destroyed, and murdered Jews. The defense forces … were more-or-less ready. They organized groups armed with light arms (revolvers), who immediately began chasing the rioters from the streets. Later, however, as the army intervened and began to shoot at the members of the defense groups, they had to stop their activity, giving the rioters a free hand to continue destroying and killing on 22 and 23 October. Only when the army received a clear order to stop the riots, the pogrom was stopped.
The number of casualties is unclear, as accounts of survivors and city documents differ. Encyclopedia Judaica records 67 dead and 100 wounded. Alexander Bystryakov’s exhaustive resource, Chronicle of the Life of the Jews of Ekaterinoslav - Dnipropetrovsk (translated from Ukrainian by Google Translate) offers great detail of the events before, during, and after the 1905 pogroms.
These events inspired many Ekaterinoslav Jews to emigrate to the Americas and to Palestine, seeking safety. Those who stayed in the city were able to recover economically, but their relationship to Russian authorities was perhaps forever damaged by these incidents, especially when Czar Nicolai II overturned the conviction of the people who had been arrested and charged with conducting the pogroms. In 1905’s aftermath, Goldbrot describes ongoing anti-Jewish hostility in the city and lower-level violence toward Jews: “The conflict with the authorities and the fight for equal rights in Ekaterinoslav continued until the breakout of World War II.”