5th of Tammuz, 1946

5 Tammuz,



In 1946, Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with no other place to go, returned to their hometown of Kielce, Poland -- and were attacked by the townspeople in a bloody pogrom that left 42 Jews dead and 80 wounded. The pogrom began when rumors spread that Jews had kidnapped a Polish child. Polish policemen and soldiers entered the Jewish residences and began the violence; the Jews were then attacked outside by mobs in a fray that lasted five hours. Some 3 million Polish Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust, yet this pogrom -- occurring 15 months after the end of World War II -- was a horrific aftershock.