A Modern Pogrom Through History's Lens

September 25, 2024

JNS

By Phyllis Chesler
 

Can anyone really evaluate Oct. 7—the genocidal pogrom that took place barely a year ago and is not yet over?

After all, scholars are still analyzing pogroms that took place thousands of years ago all over the pagan, Christian and Muslim worlds. Only recently has the scholar Irina Astashkevich documented, in her 2018 work Gendered Violence: Jewish Women in Pogroms: 1917-1921, the terrifying but typical details of the rape and femicide of Jewish women during pogroms that took place more than a century ago.

More than 1,000 pogroms took place in 500 locales. Lives, as well as minds, were lost. Entire communities were erased. In the aftermath, some women attempted suicide, others succeeded, some women stopped menstruating and others had to be psychiatrically hospitalized, most were afraid to go outside forever afterward.

In Astashkevich’s words: “The carnival of violence, complete with scenes of torture, rape and murder, played out on the second day of the pogrom as ‘celebratory street theater.’ Pogrom perpetrators purposefully drove Jews into the streets and hunted down their victims … acts of torture took place in front of an audience of pogrom perpetrators, the local population and frightened Jews. The ritualized violence reiterated the previous pogroms, but often in a more grotesque and horrifying form … . Pogromschiki bayoneted their victims, careful not to kill them, but to leave the wounded to suffer and bleed to death in agony that sometimes lasted for several days … . Pogromschiki made sure that all the apothecaries were wrecked, and there was no medical assistance.”

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