News Brief

The suspicion that Schwartzbard’s action in killing Pe###had a motive other than that of avenging the death of his relatives in the Ukraine, was voiced this morning by the “Nouveau Siecle” which defends Petlura.

Referring to the book of Dr. Arnold Margolin on the pogroms of the Ukraine, the newspaper charges that Schwartzbard was “a Zionist instrument” and states that “the hands of the Bolsheviks desired to hinder Petlura from going to Warsaw to join his friend. Pilsudski, against the Soviet government.”

Police investigation, however, established the fact that Schwartzbard acted only on his own behalf and that he had no accomplices.

Dr. Goldstein, a Russian Jewish attorney who was formerly president of a commission to investigate the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine, in an interview with the representative of the Paris Jewish daily newspaper “Pariser Hajnt,” declared that “Jewish history knows of no pogroms like those of Petlura.”

Philip and George Morrison (whose original name was Schwartzbard), cousins of Sholom Schwartzbard, described the story of the Schwartzbard family and the tragedy which led Sholom Schwartzbard to kill Petlura. In the editorial offices of the “Jewish Daily Forward” in New York Philip Morrison declared: “The blood of his father and my father, of scores of our cousins who were killed in the pogroms, the blood of all Jewish martyrs, drove him to this act of revenge on Petlura.”

The origin of the Schwartzbard family was Balta, government of Podol. Their grandfather. Moses Schwartz bard, was a prominent citizen of his community. He had fourteen children, among them Isaac, the father of Sholom. Up to 1905 Sholom lived in Balta where he was arrested for participation in the socialist movement and sentenced to exile in Siberia. On the road he escaped. He was married in 1912. His mother died before and to his father, who remained in the Ukraine, he was deeply devoted, sending him money continually and dedicating many Yiddish poems to ### During the Petlura pogroms his father, Isaac Schwartzbard, and his uncle, Israel, the father of Philip Morrison were killed. In April 1919, Sholom notified Philip Morrison that their fathers had been killed in a pogrom in Oloskoff, government of Podol, together with 102 other Jews.

“Describing all the details of this horrible pogrom. Sholom tried to console me and asked me not to think of revenge. “The entire world is bathing in blood,’ he wrote. “The whole world has gone mad. Your father died for the Sanctification of the Name. (Kiddush Ha’shem). You must take it as it comes. You should not think of revenge,'” Philip Morrison quoted his cousin’s letter, weeping bitterly.

“In all his letters to me he always urged me not to think of revenge. I asked him several times why he continued to warn me against revenge to which he replied with the Hebrew phrase ‘D’mei Avi Itzaku li’ (‘My father’s blood is calling to me.’)”

The cousin of Sholom Schwartzbard gave the names of their relatives who were killed in the pogroms. They include fifty persons of the families of Gaber and Bateuski of Balta, Rosenfeld and Belis of Krivoje Osero, Tokman and Miller of Sabron.

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