Millions of European Jews were not in mortal peril (or at least no more so than their non-Jewish neighbors) throughout the early 20th century. Of course there are more stories about what is real.
This is a grotesquely ignorant statement.
In 1881, East European Jews - those living in the Russian Empire - became the victims of a wave of rioting and killings which in the *Russian* language are known as
pogromy, which entered the English language as '
pogroms'. In Russian, a pogrom is a massacre.
The 1881 pogroms did not cost many lives, but they triggered the start of a mass emigration out of the Russian Empire, which then accelerated when in 1903-1906 another wave of pogroms broke out, this time costing 2,000 lives.
Then in 1915, when the Tsarist Army was retreating out of Poland and Lithuania under pressure from the Imperial German Army, Tsarist commanders decided that Lithuanian, Polish and Russian Jews were "German spies" on the grounds that Yiddish is similar to German and because they had imbibed the virulent antisemitism that was rampant in Tsarist Russia, so they deported more than 1 million Jews out of the combat zone. The Tsarist authorities also deported and arrested ethnic Germans in the same time-frame. They also used traditional Russian scorched-earth tactics and generally caused havoc. The deportations obviously led to major economic and food supply dislocations which required humanitarian aid.
At the same time as the Russians were deporting Jews and Germans, the Ottoman state was busily deporting Armenians, only under far worse circumstances that led to the deaths of most of the deportees from exhaustion as well as direct killing. This is now known as the Armenian genocide.
In 1918, after the two Russian revolutions of 1917, the Central Powers overran most of the Baltic states, Belorussia, Ukraine and went all the way to the Caucasus, forcing the new Bolshevik regime to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. The Russian Civil War broke out shortly thereafter, pitting White Russian monarchists and conservatives, who were invariably extremely antisemitic, against the Bolsheviks. From November 1918, the conflict became a free-for-all as every non-Russian region generated a nationalist movement which sought to secede from Russia, in particular in the Ukraine. Kiev changed hands about eight times in the Civil War.
During the Civil War, there were nearly 1,000 pogroms which cost around 100,000 lives. 65% were perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists and anarchists, 17% by the White Russians and 8.5% by undisciplined Red Army units. The Polish Army also carried out reprisal shootings of Jews which in the climate of mass violence against Jews were initially interpreted as pogroms until they were investigated and shown not to be.
At the same time as rival armies and partisan forces wreaked havoc across Russia, food supplies became endangered, the urban population was halved (and where did East European Jews live at this time? In the towns, of course), and by 1921 a major typhus epidemic broke out, coinciding with the end of the Civil War and a harvest failure so severe that the Bolshevik regime appealed for international aid, which was delivered under the aegis of future US President Herbert Hoover, joined by medical relief expeditions from the Weimar Republic.
In total, the Russian Civil War and the associated famines and epidemics cost between 5 and 9 million lives, following on from the loss of three and a half million lives in WWI, of whom 1.5 million were civilians.
So, in 1919, not only were East European Jews threatened with humanitarian disaster because of the aftermath of WWI, revolution and the ongoing civil war, they were also being targeted by many sides in the civil war for actual murder, in a land which had previously seen two major outbreaks of lethal antisemitic violence and the displacement of over a sixth of the entire Jewish population of the Russian Empire.
