World War I's War Brought On Overt Anti-Semitism On Top Of Present Anti-Semitism

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

    More than a century after World War I, war continues to be the  same.....

Jews suffered significantly during World War I, experiencing a range of harms across different regions and in the context of their military service. 

Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement, a Russian holding by Catherine II in 1791.  It was made up of 25 provinces of Czarist Russia of Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and Crimea; the home of "Fiddler On The Roof." 

"Fiddler on the Roof" is set in 1905 in the fictional Jewish village of Anatevka, located in the Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire (now part of Ukraine). The story follows Tevye, a Jewish milkman, as he navigates the challenges of tradition, family, and societal changes amidst a backdrop of poverty and anti-Semitism.   World War I began in Ukraine when the Russian Empire invaded Galicia (part of modern-day western Ukraine) in August 1914.

The war on the eastern front between Russia and the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) was conducted on territories that were home to almost four million Jews. In the autumn of 1914 and the winter of 1915, Russian forces occupied Austrian Galicia, and in the spring and summer of 1915, Germany and Austria conquered Congress Poland (the duchy annexed by Russia according to the treaties of 1815), Volhynia, Lithua­nia, and western Belorussia. Under Russian rule, the Jews were suspected of collaboration with the enemy, and 600,000 of them were banished from the front by the czarist army, a traumatic experience and an economic catastrophe that was still felt long after the war

For instance;  

• Mass expulsions and forced resettlement: Between March and September 1915, the Russian army expelled over half a million Jews from frontline areas. For example, all 40,000 Jews in Kovno (Kaunas) were forcibly removed within 48 hours in May 1915. Similar expulsions occurred in Courland and northern Lithuania in 1915.
•  The Russian army expelled Jews from areas near the front lines, restricted their movements, and took hostages as a way of instilling fear and submission in the Jewish population.

1. Displacement and Persecution:

• Eastern Europe: As the reader now knows, the war on the Eastern Front, fought in territories with a large Jewish population, resulted in massive displacement.  Russian forces, suspecting collaboration with the enemy, expelled an estimated 600,000 Jews from frontline areas. This caused economic hardship and trauma that lingered long after the war. Many other Jews, fearing the violence, fled their homes voluntarily.
• Widespread Suspicion and Hostage-Taking: The Russian military command, in particular, displayed overt anti-Semitism, viewing the Jewish population as disloyal and involved in espionage. They implemented repressive measures, including mass deportations, expulsions, and the taking of hostages as a means of control and fear. These actions were justified as necessary to protect against perceived "enemy aliens".
• Pogroms: Following World War I, pogroms (violent attacks and riots against Jews) reignited in Eastern Europe, often instigated by soldiers. In Ukraine and Poland between 1918 and 1921, there were over 1,500 pogroms resulting in the deaths of over 100,000 Jews. 

2. Casualties and Military Service:

• Serving on All Sides: Jews fought in the armies of their respective countries, often finding themselves on opposing sides of the conflict.
• High Casualties: Over 1.5 million Jewish soldiers participated in the war, and an estimated 150,000 were killed.
• Antisemitic Claims and Discrimination: Despite their service, Jews in many countries faced harassment and false accusations of responsibility for the war or shirking duty. 

3. Long-Term Consequences:

• Eastern European Jewry Devastated: The war and subsequent violence led to the disruption or destruction of countless Jewish communities, a catastrophe from which East European Jewry never fully recovered.
• Radicalization and Political Change: The war's upheaval contributed to the radicalization of some Eastern European Jewish youth towards secular and Marxist ideologies. The Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent Soviet regime attempted to suppress the practice of Judaism.
• Continued Anti-Semitism: The war exacerbated existing anti-Semitism in various countries. In Germany, the "stab-in-the-back" myth, which blamed Jews for the country's defeat, contributed to a climate of hatred.
• Foundation for the Holocaust: The virulent unleashing of anti-Semitism during WWI is seen as having paved the way for the horrors of the Holocaust. 
  
  French Troops driving back the Germans in 1918 

During World War I, Jewish communities faced devastation, displacement, and persecution, especially in Eastern Europe. The war also contributed to a rise in antisemitism that had tragic consequences later. 

As the perennial scapegoat, the Jews were also blamed by many for the Bolshevik coup d’etat of October 1917; approximately 100,000 Jews were killed in the anti‑Bolshevik campaigns conducted by Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians.

 update:  6/29/25 8:44am:  The Pale of Settlement was a territory within the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to reside permanently, encompassing roughly 472,590 square miles (1,224,008 sq km). This area included parts or the whole of modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Moldova. 

• Jewish Service in WWI: Despite facing pervasive antisemitism and discrimination, many Jews served in World War I, including in the German and Allied armies. Some were even overrepresented on the front lines, according to a German "Jewish census" conducted in 1916. 

Resource:

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/wwi-and-the-jews/#:~:text=As%20the%20perennial%20scapegoat%2C%20the,map%20of%20the%20Jewish%20people.

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/antisemitism-and-pogromsin-the-military-russian-empire/

Dying on Tisha B'Av: Rabbi Yaakov Yizhak Halevi Horowitz, Seer of Lublin, Poland

 Nadene Goldfoot                                    

                              Rabbi Yaakov's Tombstone

Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak HaLevi Horowitz (1745-1815) – known as the Hozeh(Seer) of Lublin – was one of the famed hasidic masters who has captured the imagination. Hasidic collective memory remembers the Hozeh for his miraculous ability to look at a person’s face, peering deep into the soul and perceiving that person’s innermost struggles. Hasidic lore recounts his dramatic demise after mysteriously falling out of the window on Simhat Torah 1814.  He was injured in a fall from a window on Simchat Torah night, following the ritual hakafos dancing, and died almost a year later on Tisha B'av  (August 15, 1815) from injuries relating to this fall. He is buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery, Lublin. His great grandson was Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira of Piaseczna.  During his stay in Lublin, Horowitz was opposed by a prominent mitnaged rabbi, Azriel Horowitz. He established his synagogue there at Szeroka 28 in the Jewish Quarter of Lublin. Even after Horowitz's death the synagogue remained the heart and soul for the scholars of the city.

Horowitz was a descendant of Isaiah Horowitz, a prominent rabbi and mystic, and his maternal grandfather, Yaakov Koppel Likover, also a prominent rabbi and scholar, as well as a contemporary of the Ba'al Shem Tov.

The Hozeh’s mark has been indelible. His many disciples and their students should be credited with the emergence and flourishing of Hasidism in Poland during the nineteenth century – one of the golden periods of the movement.  Chelm was originally said to be a Polish town.  Jews lived there since the 15th century; at least after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492.  It was destroyed during the Cossack massacres of 1648  but later was re-founded.  The community numbered 7,615 before World War II.

Even today, the Hasidic group with the greatest political clout in Israel, Gur, traces its spiritual origins back to the Hozeh.

My Jewish Encyclopedia lists a Jacob Isaac as the Rabbi of Lublin who also died in 1815 and was a Hasidic rabbi  (same person as Yaakov).  He was originally from Galicia and then moved to Lublin in about 1800".  

It happens that some Germans were moved to Lublin, Russia's town of Chelm, center of Jewish folklore containing the fools.  Many Jews happened to also live here.  At the beginning of September 1939, Chełm was occupied by Nazi Germany, but on 25 September, the Germans withdrew in advance of Soviet forces. The Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement stipulated that Chełm should be under German control, and on 9 October the city was ceded back to Nazi Germany. During their brief period in Chełm, the Soviet authorities established a civil government under a Jewish major, who was a Soviet sympathizer. Fearing reprisals from the Polish residents in Chełm, hundreds of Jews fled together with the retreating Red Army. Immediately following the German occupation, the Jews who remained in Chełm were attacked and brutalized, in part because of their central role during the Communist occupation.  Some escaped to Russia in 1939 when Germany entered Poland.  The remainder, Jews,  were killed by the Nazis. 

"Jacob's saintliness was legendary and the Hasidim believed him to be possessed of the Holy Spirit, calling him Ha-Hozeh ("The Seer").  Jacob wrote works on the Bible and emphasized the importance of the tzaddik".  

 The naive inhabitants of Chelm figure in many anecdotes of Jewish folk-humor.  Because Jews have lived among so many and varied peoples with diverse culture, their humor has had a rich and versatile foundation and has enjoyed and continual stream of influences.   

Reference:

Book:  The Enneagram and Kabbalah;  Reading Your Soul by Rabbi Howard A. Addison; p.vii

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://elmad.pardes.org/history/early-hasidic-era/2018/11/the-tisch-disentangling-facts-from-myth/

https://www.yadvashem.org/communities/chelm/german-occupation.html

The Great Famine in Lebanon : Result of Ottoman Empire Hooking up with Germany

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

                                  Starving man and children in Mount Lebanon 1915-1918

Lebanon's population was made up of Muslim Arabs, Maronite Christians and a few Jews. Christians were once a majority inside Lebanon and are still a majority in the diaspora of the nearly 14 million Lebanese people living outside of Lebanon. The president of the country is traditionally a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. The majority are Muslims.  Jews lived in Beirut, Tyre and mainly in Aleppo.

The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) was a period of mass starvation during World War I that resulted in 200,000 deaths.  Allied forces--Great Britain, France, USA  Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States who blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean, as they had done with the German Empire in Europe, in order to strangle the economy with the knowledge that it might lead to a profound impact on civilians in the region. 

At the outbreak of war, the arid Mount Lebanon was a semi-autonomous area within the powerful Ottoman Empire. Its economy was based on the production of raw silk, which was woven by women in mills and exported to Europe.

But the Ottoman alliance with Germany caused the Allies to cut off international trade routes, damaging the silk trade and choking the economy. Food was scarce and prioritized for the soldiers of the Ottoman war effort.                                                      Turkish soldiers below

A Jewish community existed in Lebanon since King Solomon's days (961-920 BCE), when Solomon procured Cedars of Lebanon for the Temple, the population concentrating mainly in Beirut, the capital, but  also in Tripoli, Tyre and Sidon, and they  engaged in commerce.                                                                 

 The situation was exacerbated by Jamal-Djemal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army of the Ottoman Empire, who barred crops from neighbouring Syria from entering Mount Lebanon.          

Ahmed Djemal Pasha (1872-1922) was one of the leading members of the Young Turk administration prior to and throughout World War One, and one of few initially pro-Entente senior politicians.  Holding numerous wartime posts Djemal also served at the head of Fourth Army on the Palestine Front.  He further held the military governorship of Ottoman Syria, operating what was in effect a huge personal fiefdom encompassing Palestine and the majority of Arabia. He was known to be a cruel man.                         

        Registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon as of June 30, 2016. Source: UNHCR
    

 Additionally, a swarm of locusts devoured the remaining crops, creating a famine that led to the deaths of half of the population of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a semi-autonomous subdivision of the Ottoman Empire and the precursor of modern-day Lebanon.                   

Other areas in modern-day Lebanon, according to multiple sources, were also famine-stricken. However, due to poor documentation, casualties were never recorded. Some of the areas hit with no documentation include Tyre, Zahle, Akkar & Bint Jbeil.                                              

To counter the Allied blockade, the Ottomans adopted a severe policy of acquisition by which all food supplies were prioritized for the army. The crisis  further exacerbated a black market run by well-connected usurers.

                                                               

                 Beirut, the capital; enjoyed outdoor dining before the famine

The Ottoman government had appropriated all of the empire's railway services for military use, which disrupted the procurement of crops to parts of the empire. One of the first cities to be hit by the grain shortage was Beirut, the capital.

                                                       

On 13 November 1914, only 2 weeks after the Ottoman Empire joined the war, a group of citizens stormed the Beirut municipality to warn the municipal council of the severe shortage of wheat and flour in the city. The train freight cars that regularly transported grains from Aleppo,  had not arrived and the bakery shelves were empty. Angry mobs looted the bakeries of whatever little reserves of flour and grain they had left.                                         

 The municipal council dispatched a message to then Beirut Vali Bekir Sami Kunduh who requested grain provisions from the governor of Aleppo Vilayet and urged the Ottoman authorities to prioritize grain shipping to Beirut. 

                                                            

                                        The bridge at Khan-M'rad, with a DHP train

Acquiring train freight cars to transport anything to the Beirut Vilayet was impossible without paying large bribes to military commanders and to the railroad authorities. Grain prices began to soar, which prompted the president of Beirut's municipal body, Ahmad Mukhtar Beyhum, to address the grain supply bottlenecks himself.

On 14 November 1914, Beyhum took off to Aleppo,   where he negotiated with authorities, securing grain freight cars from the Ottoman Fourth Army. The wheat was paid for from the municipal treasury. Grain freights arrived to Beirut on 19 November 1914 to the relief of the masses; however, the crisis was to worsen as both reports of the Ottoman officials and correspondence from the Syrian Protestant College indicated that food shortages were to become a daily occurrence past November.                                             

Around 200,000 people starved to death at a time when the population of Mount Lebanon was estimated to be 400,000 people. The Mount Lebanon famine caused the highest fatality rate by population during World War I. Bodies were piled in the streets and people were reported to be eating street animals. Some people were said to have resorted to cannibalism.  There were reports of bloated bodies dead in the street, even cannibalism. One account from a Jesuit priest tells of a father coming to confess he had eaten his own children.

                                                            

Some tried to help and soup-kitchens started to open. Thousands were fed, but there was no way to mitigate the effects of the double blow.

Soup kitchens were set up but had little effect in relieving the starving population. The Lebanese community in Egypt funded the shipping of food supplies to the Lebanese mainland through Arwad. This assistance was delivered to the Maronite patriarchate (Christians)  who distributed it to the populace through its convents.

The Syrian–Mount Lebanon Relief Committee was "formed in June of 1916 under the chairmanship of Najib Maalouf and the Assistant Chairmanship of Ameen Rihani" in the United States.

The first memorial to memorialize the victims of the famine was erected in Beirut in 2018, marking the 100th year since the end of the famine. The site is called "The Great Famine Memorial", and is located in front of the Saint-Joseph University It was erected based on initiatives by Lebanese historian Christian Taoutel (curator of the memorial) and Lebanese writer Ramzi Toufic Salame.

                                                            

                       Lebanese men from Mt. Lebanon in the 1880s, all with rifles

The finances of the world affect the affairs just as much as the people's religion does.  As a prelude to 

Before World War I, the scene was set for further problems.  European economic activities that grew significantly during the 19^th century benefited mostly Christians (and some wealthy Muslim and Jewish merchants) but damaged the livelihood of Muslim artisans and traders, members of the traditional middle classes. They and members of the lower classes were also badly affected by the newly introduced Ottoman reforms of the Tanzimat in 1839, 1856, and 1876, namely, regular taxation, mandatory recruitment to the army as well as some reduction in the role of Islam and equal status granted to non-Muslims, particularly Christians. This would be the Dhimmi status, 2nd class citizens which Jews also were who had to pay more taxes and were under certain stipulations not required by others.  

All these developments – European intervention, the Tanzimat reforms and periodically provocative Christian behavior – led to Muslim-Christian tension and violence, particularly in Aleppo in 1850 and in Damascus in 1860. 

In Damascus thousands of Christians were massacred by Muslims, assisted actively by Druze.  Around the same time Druze in Lebanon massacred many Christian Maronites in an ongoing attempt to curb their socio-political ascendancy in Mount Lebanon.

Resource;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon****

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Lebanon

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30098000

Declared WWII War and Terrorism on Latvia Shtetl Ribinishok and all of Europe

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                        

The shtetl of Riebini aka Ribinishki in Latvia and wooden house there

Terrorism is now happening in Europe and the USA.  The Nazis of WWII were an organized terrorizing army in a declared war whose aim was to wipe out all Jews.  The USA really did not experience terror until 9/11 when Saudi pilots and their band rammed their plane into a tall building in New York City.  It's been about 76 years since the Nazi terror, and here we are again, preparing to defend our country from another group of terrorists, ISIS from the Middle East.

Occupation during World War II from 1939 to 1945 involved terroristic attacks and atrocities.  When the Germans occupied Latvia in the Balkans, they slaughtered 236 Jews in the village of Ribinishki (Silajani).  This is what Jews all over Europe were facing during those years.  This wasn't a matter of soldiers fighting soldiers and following the rules of war.  It was downright murder of innocent people!
                                                                         

Pale of Settlement where Empress Catherine II caused all Jews to be confined and were kept from entering Russia.  This is why shtetls were so high in Jewish population.  She ruled from 1725 to 1727, but laws kept Jews confined to end of WWI in 1917.  

Also called  "Riebini, it is a small town in the Latgale region of Latvia, about 56 km. north of Daugavpils. It was part of Vitebsk gubernia under the Russian Empire."  In 1897 the town was made up of 533 Jews  who were 91% of the population.   By 1935 there were only 317 Jews living there, but that was 68% of the population.  The town had become a village, called a Shtetl.  "In the Shtetl Finder of 1989 it is listed as Ribinishok. " 
                                                                             

"The Soviet army occupied Latvia in the summer of 1940. The following year, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. At least 20 inhabitants of Riebini joined the Red Army to fight the Germans. 
                                                             

Fresh Russian Troops

Following the Russian defeat in July 1941, anti-Soviet Latvians began to round up Jewish residents, especially those with leftist leanings. At the end of August 1941, Latvian civil defense police (Aizsargi) arrived in three trucks to round up the Jews of Riebini.
                                                                         

Members of the 21st Latvian Police Battalion assemble a group of Jewish women for execution on a beach near Liepāja, 15 December 1941.

The Jews were arrested and locked into the synagogues. Then they were moved to Ribinishki Forest (4 km. northwest of Ribinishki) and killed there. There were some local inhabitants living in the Soluions district) who took part in that bloody Aktion from August 23rd to the 25th in 1941;   three days of hell for the Jews to suffer such a death."  

One of the Jews killed was Hona Orliyan b: 1909 and died in the 1941 massacre at age 32.  He had 4 siblings, so they were probably all murdered.  

The Germans had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 and was the turning-point in German policy towards the Jews.  21 months before, at least 30,000 Jews had been killed.  Of these, 10,000 were murdered in individual killings or terror attacks that happened in  street massacres, in punitive reprisals, in outbreaks of savagery in the ghettos, and in the labour camps.  20,000 had died of starvation in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos.  But in no Jewish community had more than 2 or 3% been murdered.  Jews had been virtually unmolested in Western Europe.

The Russian invasion changed all that, which was called Barbarossa.  Throughout eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, Ukraine, White Russia and the western regions of the Russian Republic, the Nazi's new policy was carried out.  It was the systematic destruction of entire Jewish communities.  This happened in land where Jews had been isolated, cursed for the past 200 years, where the region had been Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Ethnically  German and Jewish.  

In advance of Barbarossa, the Nazi SS leaders had special killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen, who went about finding collaborators from the Lithuanians and Ukrainians and had them in murder gangs who were very anti-Jewish and held hatred for them, something easy to use to turn them into mass murderers.  
                                                          

Husseini and the Nazis, 1941 Germany

In the very first hours, Jews in Western Europe, Greater Germany, and in German-occupied Poland, saw the German invasion of the Soviet Union as a hopeful sign.  They figured that the Russians would advance and beat the Germans, meaning the end of the war.  They thought victory was certain and the end for Hitler was near.  About 85,000 Jews were living there in 1940.  Russia departed a considerable number of Jews belonging to the wealthy classes or intelligentsia to Northern Russia.  

The Germans fooled everyone.  "Don't worry," a Red Army officer told the Jews of Nieswiez as his men withdrew eastwards."   "We'll be back."  The rumor then changed and Jews heard that the Germans would send all the Jews to Madagascar.  That wasn't so bad.
                                                              

Nazi invasion chasing out Russians who left their tanks in Riga, Latvia 1941

But the slaughter started from the 1st day of the German invasion.  Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainian policemen and their auxiliaries, the Einsatzgruppen moved rapidly forward behind the advancing German forces.  Jews were placed alive in anti-tank trenches about 2 km long and killed them with machine guns in the frontier shtetl of Virbalis.  They sprayed lime on the dead Jews and then a 2nd row of Jews were made to lie down, and were then shot.  They did this 6 more times.  Only the children were not shot but were caught by their legs and they hit the children's heads against the stones and then the children were buried alive!

"In Liepāja the first mass killing of Jews took place on July 3 and 4, when about 400 people were shot dead, and on July 8 when 300 Jews were killed. The German group of SD and policemen did the shooting, while the members of Latvian Selbstschutz convoyed victims to the killing site. On July 13 the destroying of the large choral synagogue of Liepāja began. The rolls of the Scripture were spread on the Ugunsdzēsēju Square, and the Jews were forced to march across their sacred things, with watchers merrily laughing at the amusing scene. The above operations took place under the direct leadership of Erhard Grauel, commander of the Einsatzgruppe's Sonderkommando."

After the war, over 30,000 Jeews returned to Latvia but 1/3 of them then emigrated to Israel.  Latvia's population in 1989 was 22,897.  

These people were just as bad as any terrorist group out of the Middle East today.  The horror of it all is that Germans were the most advanced society in Europe, yet they had this religious hatred for someone not complying to their way of belief.  Jews were not of their religion and they were successful and intelligent.  So Hitler led the way for practices completely irreligious and hateful-completely against Christianity.  And everyone followed their leadership.  
                                                               

Remember this.  The Germans failed.  Those who were the worst stood trial.  The same will happen to ISIS.  Those against a decent way of living will not be successful.  

" "Back to Ribinishki" is a  Case Study in Latvian Jewish Genealogical Research] by Marion S. Werle; found in Vol. VIII 2000. in FEEFHS.(Foundation for East European Family History Studies.)."

Update: 12/18/15, 3:28pm with numbers
Resource:THE HOLOCAUST, by Martin Gilbert-pages 154-155.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Latvia
 http://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source_view.php?SourceId=30777
http://www.jewishgen.org/latvia/Riebini.htm
http://www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org/latvia/riebini.html
http://www.geni.com/people/Hona-Orliyan/6000000037336316452
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia-