Today we turned another tragic page in the history of the Jewish people and the history of our city. February 15, 2022 marked the 103rd anniversary of the event, which in historical literature has been called the "Proskuriv Bloodbath."
The red quarantine zone made its own adjustments to today's event: according to the restrictions, we could not gather community members for a prayer meeting, so only Hesed employees and individual members of the Jewish community gathered at the monument to the victims of the Proskuriv Jewish pogrom to pay homage to the bright memory of the numerous victims of the rampant haidama violence.
The victims of the pogrom were mostly ordinary people, they lived modestly and honestly, earned bread for their families with hard work, and did not get involved in politics. The Jewish community at the beginning of the 20th century was quite wealthy and made a great contribution to the economic, spiritual, and cultural development of the city. But the bandits, infected with the bacillus of anti-Semitism, did not see this. They considered Jews a dangerous element for Ukrainian society. The well-known ataman Semesenko called on the Cossacks and Haidamaks to slaughter the entire Jewish population, just think about it, to save Ukraine!..
The mass massacre in Proskurov lasted several hours, and there were isolated pogroms in the following days. Jewish houses and streets were covered in blood. In the morning 17 February on cemetery with'were going many conclusions with bodies tortured. The bandits didn't even allow the dead to be buried according to Jewish rites... Then 1,600 lives were lost. 960 children were orphaned. A huge number of those killed received serious wounds and injuries.
And then the destruction of innocent civilians began in the town of Felshtyn (now the village of Gvardiyske, Khmelnytskyi district), where the same gangs of thugs also “roamed” to their heart’s content. The Felshtyn massacre is an episode of the Proskuriv pogrom, its continuation.
The Little Holocaust (as historians also call the Proskuriv pogrom) made the world shudder. Initiator pogrom Semesenko did not long survive its victims. In the spring of 1920 he was shot.
103 years have passed since that terrible tragedy. For history, it is a moment. For us, people, it is a significant period of time. But we have forgotten nothing. The participants of the event lit lamps near the monument and, according to Jewish custom, placed pebbles at the mass grave.
