Six Thousand Inside the Nemirov Synagogue

A century and a half after Spain. In that time, the center of Jewish life had shifted north. Poland-Lithuania had become the biggest Jewish community on earth — home to the yeshivot of Lublin, Krakow, Poznan, and Vilna, and to the Council of Four Lands, an amazing kind of Jewish parliament that ran Jewish civil affairs across the whole country. In Ukraine, many Jews worked for the Polish nobles as arendars — managers of noble estates. That put them, in the eyes of Ukrainian peasants, between the Catholic landlord above and themselves below. The peasant's anger had nowhere else to fall.

Bogdan Chmielnicki was a Cossack officer with a personal fight against a Polish nobleman who had stolen his mistress and killed his son. He turned his personal fight into a full-scale revolt. Allied with the Crimean Tatars, his forces poured out of the Ukrainian steppe in the spring of 1648 and swept west through the Polish borderlands, town by town.

Wherever the Cossacks came, the Jews died first. A rabbi named Nathan Nata Hannover wrote it all down in a book he called Yeven Metzulah — 'The Deep Mire,' from Psalms — and community after community appears in his pages by name. At Nemirov, the Jews had shut themselves inside the synagogue with the Polish garrison. The Poles opened the gates in exchange for their own lives. Six thousand Jews were slaughtered inside the synagogue on the twentieth of Sivan, 1648. The Council of Four Lands afterward made the twentieth of Sivan a fast day for the whole diaspora; it is still on some Ashkenazi calendars.

At Tulchin, Jews and Poles had jointly defended the walls together. When the Cossacks offered the Poles their lives in exchange for handing over the Jews, the Polish garrison agreed. Rabbi Yechiel Michel ruled inside the town that armed resistance was now required. The community died fighting. At Polonnoye, at Bar, at Zaslav, at Ostrog — the list runs on for pages. Estimates of the total dead range from tens of thousands to a hundred thousand.

The wound went deep in ways that weren't only about numbers. The Shabbatai Tzvi false-messiah movement, which will shake world Jewry starting in 1665 and shatter thousands of communities in a wave of hope and shame, is understood by many historians as a direct spiritual response to the shock of 1648 — a people who needed a savior so badly they accepted a fake one. Ukrainian Jewry never got its Torah institutions back. The centers shift westward, and within a century the Hasidic movement will rise, quietly, in the very villages the Cossacks emptied.

The Chmielnicki massacres are remembered in kinot said on the ninth of Av. Traditionally they are counted among the great destructions of the diaspora — the largest single loss of Jewish life between the Crusades and the Shoah.