On this day in 1905, the second of two pogroms took place in the town of Chişinău, the capital of Bessarabia (modern-day Moldova), in what was then the Russian Empire. The first pogrom had taken place a year and a half earlier, from April 19 to 21, 1903, in which close to 50 Jews were murdered; 600 people were injured and hundreds of homes and stores were destroyed. The pogrom was justified by the myth of the blood libel, an ancient antisemitic trope that Jews harvested the blood of Christians for Jewish rituals, and sought revenge on the innocent Jewish community for the deaths of a murdered boy, as well as a girl who had committed suicide. The Yiddish Daily News reported that priests stood at the head of rioting mobs chanting ‘Kill the Jews’. The second pogrom developed out of a protest against the Czar as the townspeople turned their anger from their government to the Jewish community. This demonstrated the now widespread practice of using Jews as a scapegoat for the general discontent of the peasantry. In this pogrom, 20 Jews were killed and over 50 were injured. By the autumn of 1905, pogroms aimed at the Jews had spread throughout the Russian Empire. The first defense motivated the creation of various Jewish Defense Leagues, which played a role in calming the second pogrom. The second pogrom added fuel to the cause of getting Jews out of Russia, many to the West and some to Palestine. It also strengthened the Zionist call for a Jewish national homeland free of persecution.