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Copyright

Yankev Leshchinsky

Published On

2024-09-16

Page Range

pp. 75–82

Language

  • English
  • Yiddish

Print Length

8 pages

2. Pogrom gunpowder

  • Yankev Leshchinsky (author)
  • Robert Brym (translator)
  • Eli Jany (translator)
Chapter of: The Last Years of Polish Jewry: Volume 2: The Permanent Pogrom, 1935–37(pp. 75–82)
In this 1935 essay Leshchinsky is still reluctant to classify the episodic violence visited on Polish Jews as pogroms. He provides evidence that agitation in favour of pogroms and attacks on individual Jews are widespread, arguing that they are akin to gunpowder being amassed before a large explosion, with no group apart from organized workers standing in the way of pogrom agitation. He rails against the police and the government for doing little to quell the violence. Leshchinsky also calls on Jewish society to (1) explain to “the better parts of Polish society” that the violence is a danger to Polish society as a whole, (2) rally to compel the government to “stop the poison from spreading” and adopt severe measures against individuals attacks and small pogroms, and (3) organize itself to speak out against the pogroms and create a common front for self-defence. 13 November 1935.

Contributors

Yankev Leshchinsky

(author)

Robert Brym

(translator)
SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus at University of Toronto
Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at University of Toronto
https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Robert Brym, FRSC, is SD Clark Professor of Sociology Emeritus and an Associate of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His latest works include Robert Brym and Randal Schnoor, eds, The Ever-Dying People? Canada’s Jews in Comparative Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023) and “Jews and Israel 2024: Canadian Attitudes, Jewish Perceptions,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Études Juives Canadiennes (38: 2024), 6–89. For downloads of Brym’s published work, visit https://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertBrym

Eli Jany

(translator)
PhD student at University of Toronto

Eli Jany is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He has translated poems by Sarah Reisen (In geveb, 12 May 2020, https://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/three-poems-reisen) and, with Robert Brym, co-translated volume 1 of The Last Years of Polish Jewry and “Jewish Economic Life in Yiddish Literature: Yitskhok Ber Levinzon and Yisroel Aksenfeld,” East European Jewish Affairs (53, 1: 2024), both by Yankev Leshchinsky.