Pogrom in Kielce

On 11 November 1918, the day on which in Warsaw the Regency Council handed Piłsudski command of the army, anti-Jewish violence broke out in Kielce, the most serious in the lands of the former Kingdom of Poland in the first days of independence. A crowd of local people, many of them young, attacked those attending a Jewish meeting in the town theatre. According to some sources, militiamen and soldiers also took part. The rioting and looting continued the next day. Four people were killed and about 250 were wounded.

Kielce had a large Jewish community. In the autumn of 1916 the Jewish congregation had 18,500 members, 16,000 of whom lived in the town itself. During the war Polish-Jewish relations in the Kingdom had clearly deteriorated. The main source of conflict was economic rivalry, but Poles also accused Jews of siding with the partitioning powers. The end of the war brought heated arguments about the rights of Jews in the reborn Poland. The Austro-Hungarian occupation troops had just left the town, there was as yet no Polish state authority there, and order was in the hands of the municipal council and a weak citizens’ militia.

The meeting in the theatre

The meeting, of which the town authorities had been notified in advance, began just before two in the afternoon. It was to discuss Jewish national aspirations, and the hall was packed. The local “Gazeta Kielecka” wrote that it opened with thanks to God for the rebuilding of the Polish state and assurances of loyalty, but then went on to demand political and cultural autonomy for the Jews. The meeting’s vice-chairman, the industrialist Herman Lewi, later insisted that every speech, in Polish or in Yiddish, had ended with the cry “Long live a free, democratic Poland”. News of the demand for autonomy spread through the town, and with it a rumour that Jews had killed a legionnaire. A crowd gathered outside the theatre, made up mostly of students according to the American report of 1919.

At about half past six in the evening, when some 300 people were still in the hall, a group of militiamen went in to search for weapons. A crowd burst in after them. According to Henry Morgenthau’s report, it included civilians and soldiers. Those at the meeting were driven down the stairs, where men standing in two rows beat them with clubs and bayonets. In the street the waiting crowd beat them again. The Kielce Jewish memorial book also mentions soldiers taking part, but the councillors who debated the events did not. The historian Marek Maciągowski suggests that armed militiamen were taken for soldiers. Order was restored only by the army, which General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz led out of barracks at the request of the town’s mayor, Gustaw Bukowiński. The next day Jewish shops were still being looted, a cinema was wrecked and windows in Jewish homes were smashed.

The victims

According to figures from the American relief committee, the Joint, four people were killed and about 250 were wounded. The same figures were given in a letter to the Vatican of 1 January 1919 by the vicar general of the Kielce diocese, Father Antoni Bożek, who wrote of “a pogrom of the Jews, combined with murders and robbery”. Some studies speak of two dead or of 400 wounded. The civil registers of the Kielce Jewish district record the names of four victims: 17-year-old Chaim Jeger, killed in the scuffle in the theatre; Szulim Owsiany, attacked next to the theatre, who died on 14 November; 20-year-old Jojne Cytryn, who died of a stab wound; and Jojne Janas from Chęciny.

In protest Jewish shopkeepers kept their shops closed for a week. On 4 December eight Jewish councillors lodged a protest against the inaction of the town authorities and the “hateful and partial” conduct of the militia. On 11 December the town council passed, by 17 votes to 4, a resolution that condemned the events as “a sign of savagery” but also laid the blame on the Jews, on their conduct during the war and on the demands for autonomy made at the meeting. Most of the Jewish councillors had left the chamber beforehand. The perpetrators went unpunished. Twelve people stood trial and four were sentenced to four months in prison, but in March 1923, on appeal, they too were acquitted. The events in Kielce were listed in 1919 among the eight anti-Jewish “excesses” described by the American Morgenthau mission, sent to Poland at the request of the government of Ignacy Paderewski.