First Russian Pogroms

April 27, 1881

After Alexander II's assassination, anti-Jewish riots swept through southern Russia: Jewish shops burned, synagogues desecrated, hundreds killed. The authorities did little to stop them. The pogroms began the mass Jewish exodus from the Russian Empire toward America and Palestine that would define the next forty years of Jewish history. Between 1881 and 1914 over two million Jews emigrated, transforming New York's Lower East Side and planting the seeds of Zionism.