Russia’s Jews in World War I

August 8, 2026

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5 min read

In the summer of 1915, as the Russian army retreated from the front, Cossack soldiers would sometimes throw Jewish families’ belongings out of their windows into the street, where local neighbors had gathered to receive them. This was not official military policy—officers often looked the other way—but it was a pattern that repeated across the Pale of Settlement and into Galicia. The episode, drawn from Polly Zavadivker’s new book on Jewish civilians during World War I, captures a central tension in her account: the war was catastrophic for Eastern Europe’s six million Jews, but their experience was not only one of victimization. Zavadivker’s study, discussed in conversation with Eliana Adler, traces how ordinary people responded to violence, displacement, and state persecution with improvisation, organization, and a surprising degree of agency.

The War as a Crucible for Jewish Civil Society

Before 1914, Jewish philanthropy in the Russian Empire was largely local, religious, and organized around collective responsibility within individual towns. The war changed that almost overnight. As the front moved through the Pale of Settlement, displacing hundreds of thousands of Jews into the Russian interior, older charitable frameworks proved inadequate. In their place emerged a new, secularized, empire-wide infrastructure of relief.

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What you'll learn

1 Russia’s Jews in World War I – Timestamped Outline
2 (00:00) **Introduction & Setup** - Host Jonathan Brent introduces the episode and the book's author Polly Zavadivker and interlocutor Eliana Adler
3 (08:26) **Defining “Nationalist Philanthropy”** - Zavadivker explains how Jewish relief work merged imperial civil society traditions with Jewish nationalist renewal
4 (13:52) **Top-Down vs. Grassroots Antisemitism** - The military’s official view of Jews as “internal foes” combined with local populations’ opportunistic hostility
5 (20:00) **Sources & the Relief Worker Perspective** - The historian’s treasure: field reports from little-known Jewish aid workers across the empire
6 (28:38) **Gender: Women Without Men** - The trope of the abandoned weeping woman versus the complex reality of women’s wartime agency
7 (33:29) **Refugee Encounters in the Interior** - Jews from the Pale resettled far east, meeting established Jewish communities who were ambivalent about their arrival

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

When World War I began, the Russian Empire was home to more than 5.7 million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population in the world. Thirty years later, by 1945, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, launched nearly all the forces that led to this epic destruction.

In A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, Polly Zavadivker tells how Jewish civilians experienced that war and its epicenter of violence on the Eastern Front. World War I transformed the lives of East European Jews in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. State violence and forced migration determined many aspects of Jewish wartime and revolutionary experience. These policies not only destroyed much of traditional Jewish life but also inadvertently compelled a transformation of Jewish civil society. The collapse of Russian imperialism enabled the growth of an empire-wide humanitarian campaign to rescue the “nation of refugees,” whose plight embodied that of the Jewish nation itself. By exploring this history of Jewish humanitarianism during World War I, Zavadivker provides the origin stories of key leaders and public institutions that served East European Jewry in the interwar years and during the Holocaust.

Join YIVO for a discussion with Zavadivker about this book, led by historian Eliyana Adler.

Buy the book: here

This book talk originally took place on February 25, 2025.

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