Simon Petlyura: Ukrainian hero and pogromist

Larry Bush, editor of Jewish Currents magazine, has been sending out a daily email, which he calls "Jewdayo," with little-known or forgotten tidbits of Jewish history. A tip of my hat to him for today's installment:

On this day in 1919, Simon Petlyura, Ukrainian writer, Cossack commander, and head of the break-away Ukrainian state during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, began attacking Jews in a sustained wave of violence that took the lives of tens of thousands. Hundreds of cities and towns were attacked; thousands of Jewish women were raped; half a million Jews were left homeless.

In 1926, Petlyura was assassinated in Paris by Sholom Schwartzbard, a Jewish anarchist and Yiddish writer who had lost fifteen members of his family, including his parents, in pogroms in Odessa. Testimony at Schwartzbard’s trial revealed the depth of the anti-Jewish carnage in the Ukraine (committed both by Ukrainian nationalists and White Russian forces) and led to his acquittal.

In the Ukraine, Petlyura is a nationalist hero, with a street named for him in Kiev. In Israel, Schwartzbard is honored with a plaque on Hanoken (“The Avenger”) Street in Beersheba.