According to Wikipedia: “The Kishinev pogroms were an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev (Chişinău), then the capital of the province of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire (now the capital of the Republic of Moldova), on April 19-20, 1903, and a second, smaller riot that erupted in October 1905.”
From The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank) 1894-1915:
Some of this doubtful Jewish testimony had been published by the foreign press and further elaborated upon, so that the versions that reached foreign audiences were often even more sensational and unreliable. It was, of course, a natural temptation for Jewish organizations, in their frantic efforts to elicit sympathy and funds for the victims and to discredit Russian authorities, to present the most damning, sensational accounts possible… An indication of the lengths to which such fabrications about Kishinev ultimately could reach is seen in a letter from Chaim Weizmann (at the time of Kishinev a Zionist activist, later president of the state of Israel) to Dorothy de Rothschild:
“Eleven years ago, I happened to be in the cursed town of Kishinev. In a group of about 100 Jews we defended the Jewish quarter with revolvers in our hands, defended women and girls. We ‘slept’ in the cemetary – the ‘safe’ place, and we saw 80 corpses brought in, mutilated dead…”
Thus Weizmann reports that he personally saw 80 mutilated corpses in a single place, when the death toll for the entire city was later generally recognized to be 45. But there is another problem with the account he provides. It is pure fantasy. Weizmann was in Warsaw at the time…
[Prince] Urussov was also distressed by the tendency of Jewish spokesmen, who on other occasions expressed outrage that Jews were held collectively responsible for the acts of Jewish assassins, to hold the Christian residents of Kishinev collectively responsible for acts by non-Jewish criminals… (Pg. 164-165)
