Sholem Schwarzbard
Sholem Schwarzbard · Historical & Religious Figures
Yiddish poet and organiser of Jewish self-defence against the pogroms; decorated with the Croix de guerre. He killed Symon Petliura in Paris in 1926 and was acquitted in 1927, in a trial that put the Ukrainian pogroms on the world record.
18 August 1886, Izmail, Bessarabia, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) — 3 March 1938, Cape Town, South Africa
Paris, France
Sholem Schwarzbard is recognized among Jewish contributors to Historical & Religious Figures — Yiddish poet and organiser of Jewish self-defence against the pogroms; decorated with the Croix de guerre. He killed Symon Petliura in Paris in 1926 and was acquitted in 1927, in a trial that put the Ukrainian pogroms on the world record.
Origins and early life
A watchmaker's apprentice from Balta who became a Yiddish poet, Sholem Schwarzbard organised Jewish community self-defence against the pogroms — first before the First World War, then during the Russian Civil War.
Work and career
In August 1914 he and his brother enlisted in the French Foreign Legion; he came out of the war with an arm left almost useless and the Croix de guerre. He lost his family in the pogroms of 1919. On 25 May 1926, on the rue Racine in Paris, he shot Symon Petliura, the exiled Ukrainian leader he held responsible for them, and told the police: 'I have killed a great assassin.' A French jury acquitted him after an eight-day trial in 1927 — a trial that became the first world platform for the evidence, where survivors such as the nurse Haia Greenberg testified to the carnage at Proskurov.
He died in Cape Town in 1938; his remains were brought to Israel in 1967. This fiche thanks the self-defence, the soldier, the poet and the record that trial left. It does not thank the killing. Petliura's own responsibility for the pogroms is still debated by historians, and a 2006 Russian intelligence publication claimed — without established proof — that Schwarzbard had acted for the Soviet secret services.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholem_Schwarzbard
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Yiddish poet and organiser of Jewish self-defence against the pogroms; decorated with the Croix de guerre. He killed Symon Petliura in Paris in 1926 and was acquitted in 1927, in a trial that put the Ukrainian pogroms on the world record.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholem_Schwarzbard
