The 200th anniversary of the first pogrom came and went a month and a half ago with little fanfare. Pogrom, a Russian word meaning to wreak havoc on an ethnic community, is the reason the majority of our Jewish ancestors came to the US in the first place. Starting in the 1880s, hundreds of government sanctioned attacks against small and large Jewish communities throughout Eastern Europe forced several million Jews to make the arduous journey across the Atlantic to the United States. While there is no record of which attack spurred my own family to flee, my mother recently told me that my red hair is an indicator of Kossack involvement in our family line. The effects of pogroms are literally in our DNA.
In April of 1821, Gregory V, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, was violently murdered. The Jews there were accused of dragging his body across the streets, leading to widespread attacks against the community. This incidentally, was one of the many factors that led Manuel Noah to trying to establish a Jewish state in Grand Island four years later in 1825. Pogroms were designed to force the Jews out. Long before Hitler, the campaign to de-judify Europe had already begun.
I mention this in light of this week’s Torah portion, Korach, which documents the greatest massacre in Biblical history, the squashing of a priestly rebellion that led to the violent and sudden death of nearly fifteen thousand Israelites. The Torah tells of a hole opening up in the earth and consuming two-hundred-fifty of the main instigators by God. The intensity of the response assures Moses’ leadership throughout the rest of Torah, but the bloodiness of the affair hangs over the community for the remainder of their time in the wilderness.
Last week, marked the one hundredth anniversary of the largest pogrom on American soil, not against Jews, but against African Americans – the Tulsa Massacre. Well over two hundred people died in the unprovoked attack, as well as homes and businesses burned. And, the worst part about it is that after all that happened the event was all but forgotten, lost among hundreds if not thousands of other smaller acts of violence against people of color across the country. Just as the Korach rebellion is a blight on the ancient Israelites, the many pogroms/massacres that have been perpetrated in the past two centuries are a stain on our history. By recovering, revealing and redeeming this part of our history, we hopefully will prevent similar attacks in the future. In this way, we hope we can have a kindler and gentler version of humanity over the next two hundred years.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex