Savannah morning news. [volume] (Savannah) 1868-1887, 1881-05-25
THE JEWS IN RUSSIA.
Their Persecution and Massacre
Engineered by the NIhiIists.
Vienna Correspondence london Teleornnh.

Vienna Correspondence London Telegraph
A gentleman who passed through
Vienna yesterday on his way home
from the far East, via Baku, Tif1is and
CharkOff, assured me that the agitation
against the Jews in South Russia has
assumed proportions of which Western
Europe is not yet aware. He reached
Elisabethgrad during the recent disturb
ances, and gathered the particulars he
gave me from residents of that town and
neighborhood. He accounts for the
scarcity of news from that part of
Russia by the fact that the telegraph
officials will not accept messages in any
foreign language, while those written in
Russian are revised by the Censor prior
to transmission. The post is scarcely
safer means of communication, there be-
ing at present a regular system of letter.
opening for foreign postal service My
friends informant told him the anti
Jewish movement in Russia is entirely
the work of the revolutionists. They
understand that it would be of no avail
to appeal to an ignorant and bigotedly
loyal peasantry on grounds of political
emancipation. Ivan Ivanovitch knows
little, and is careless about constitutions
and administrative reform. 1t would be
worse than useless to talk to him on such
subjects. The revolutionists have con-
sequently touched another chord, and
have excited his religious fanaticism.
They have represented the Jews as
source of all the evils with which Russia
is afflicted. They are held up to popular
reprobation as the assassins of the late
Car, and Jessie Helfmann, the Jewess,
who was implicated in the conspiracy
against his life, is designated as having
been the soul of the whole plot. The
Cars assassination happened on a day
that is kept up festively by the Jews in
Russia, and after the event they were
charged with having made merry in an
ticipation of what was going to happen.
The object of the revolutionlsts is
to create popular rising, in which
the troops might be called upon
to defend the Jews against the
Christians. They anticipate that
either the troops would, under such
circumstances, refuse duty or that the
people would be so infurlated that a
general rising would ensue. The off.
GERS themselves apprehend the former
contingency; but in either case the OPP
portunity would be favorable for the
revolutionists, and they would know
how to turn it to account. The atroci-
ties committed at Elisabethgrad, said my
informant, must have been fearful to
witness. as an officer who travelled a
short distance with him and who was
present at the time, said he had
seen things that sickened him to think
of. Neither women nor children were
spared, and had not many of the
Jews been armed wholesale massacre
would have taken place. At first it was
proposed to burn the Jews houses; but
it SO happened that at EIisabethgrad
they do not live in distinct quarter of
the town. Their houses are not separa
ted from the Christians, so the latter
would have suffered from confagra-
tion. 1t appears that, at small locality
named Galta, massacre of the Jews
was actually on the point of commencing
when the inhabitants of neighboring
village. called Olviopol, came to the res
cue and defended the Jews against their
aggre sors. According to an evening
telegram. there has also been excuses
against the Jews in the government of
Kiev.