News Summary

• Hayim Nahman Bialik’s 1903 open wound of a Hebrew poem, “On the Slaughter,’ is a case in point.
• “Skies,” it begins, � “have mercy….” This dark lyric constituted Bialk”s immediate response to an attack that year on the Jewish community in Kishinev, the backwater capital of Bessarabia.
• Incited by antisemitic articles in a local newspaper and by rumors that Jews had ritually murdered Christian children to supply blood for their Passover matzo, vodka-fueled mobs killed forty-nine Jews.