For many years, the small community of 800 Jews in the ancient city of Hebron lived in peace with their tens of thousands of Arab neighbors. But, on the night of August 23, 1929, the tension simmering within this cauldron of nationalities bubbled over, and for a period of three days, Hebron turned into a city of terror and murder as the Arab residents led a rampaging massacre against the bewildered and helpless Jewish community.

By the time the massacre ended, 67 Jews lay dead – their homes and synagogues destroyed – and the few hundred survivors were relocated to Jerusalem. The aftermath left Hebron barren of Jews for the first time in hundreds of years.

The summer of 1929 was one of unrest in Palestine as Jewish immigrants were arriving in increasing numbers, and the agitations of the mufti in Jerusalem spurred on Jewish-Arab tensions. Just one day prior to the start of the Hebron massacre, three Jews and three Arabs were killed in Jerusalem when fighting broke out after a Muslim prayer service on the Temple Mount. Arabs spread false rumors and libels throughout their communities, saying that Jews were carrying out “wholesale killings of Arabs.”

Hebron Massacre
Collage of massacre photos.

Hebron had up until this time been outwardly peaceful, although tensions hid below the surface. The Sephardi Jewish community (Jews who were originally from Spain, North Africa, and Arab countries) in Hebron had lived quietly with its Arab neighbors for centuries. These Sephardi Jews spoke Arabic and had a cultural connection with the Arabs of Hebron.

In the mid-1800s, Ashkenazi (native European) Jews started moving to Hebron, and in 1925, the Slobodka Yeshiva – officially called the Yeshiva of Hebron Knesset Yisrael-Slobodka – was opened. Yeshiva students lived separately from both the Sephardi Jewish community and from the Arab population. This isolation fed the Arab view that these “Zionist immigrants” were suspicious. Still, one yeshiva student, Dov Cohen, recalled being on “very good” terms with the Arab neighbors. He remembered yeshiva boys taking long walks late at night on the outskirts of the city and not feeling afraid, even though only one British policeman guarded the entire city.

On Friday, August 23, 1929, that tranquility was lost.

Arab youths began the riots by hurling rocks at the yeshiva students as they walked by. That afternoon, student Shmuel Rosenholtz went to the yeshiva alone. Arab rioters broke into the building and killed him. Rosenholtz’s was but the first of dozens of murders.

On Friday night, Rabbi Ya’acov Slonim’s son invited any Jews fearful of the worsening situation to stay in their family house. The rabbi was highly regarded in the community, and he kept a gun. Many of the Jews in the community took this offer for shelter. Unfortunately, many of these people were eventually murdered there.

Hebron Massacre
Destruction at the Avraham Avinu Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter

As early as 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning – the Jewish Sabbath – Arabs began to gather en masse around the Jewish community. They came in mobs armed with clubs, knives, and axes. While the women and children threw stones, the men ransacked Jewish houses and destroyed Jewish property. With only a single police officer in all of Hebron, the Arabs were able to enter Jewish courtyards with literally no opposition.

Rabbi Slonim, who had tried to shelter the Jews, was approached by the rioters and offered a deal. If all the Ashkenazi yeshiva students were given over to the Arabs, the rioters would spare the lives of the Sephardi community.

Rabbi Slonim refused to turn over the students. The Arabs killed him on the spot.

Albert Londres provided this account in his book The Wandering Jew Has Arrived:

Some fifty Jews, men, and women, had taken refuge outside the ghetto in the Anglo-Palestine Bank, which was managed by one of their own, the son of Rabbi Slonim. They were huddled in one room. The Arabs, the soldiers of the grand mufti, soon sniffed them out. It was Saturday, August 24, nine in the morning. After blowing open the door of the bank… But here’s the story in a nutshell: They cut off hands, they cut off fingers, they held heads over a stove, they gouged out eyes. A rabbi stood immobile, commending the souls of his Jews to God – they scalped him. They made off with his brains.

On Mrs. Sokolov’s lap, one after the other, they sat six students from the yeshiva and, with her still alive, slit their throats. They mutilated the men. They shoved thirteen-year-old girls, mothers, and grandmothers into the blood and raped them in unison.

Chief Rabbi Koot, interviewed immediately following the reports of the massacre, attested that it “was the worst slaughter Jews have experienced since the destruction of Jerusalem, because it was perpetrated in the town of King David.”

On August 25, the United States Consul General reported casualty estimates of 100 killed and 300 wounded, including 12 Americans dead and others wounded at Hebron. The actual casualty toll in the massacre was 12 Sephardi Jews and 55 Ashkenazi.

A few Arabs tried to help the Jews. Nineteen Arab families saved dozens, if not hundreds, of Hebron’s Jews. Zmira Mani wrote about an Arab named Abu Id Zaitoun who brought his brother and son to rescue her family. The Arab family protected the Manis with their swords, hid them in a cellar along with other Jews they had saved, and eventually found a policeman to escort them safely to the police station at Beit Romano.

Hebron Massacre
Jewish home in Hebron plundered

The Beit Romano police station turned into a shelter for the Jews on the morning of Saturday, August 24. It also became a synagogue when the Orthodox Jews gathered there and said their morning prayers. As they finished praying, they began to hear noises outside the building. Thousands of Arabs descended from Har Hebron, shouting, “Kill the Jews!” in Arabic. They even tried to break down the doors of the station.

For three days, the Jews were besieged in Beit Romano by the rampaging Arabs. Each night, ten men were allowed to leave the building and go to Hebron’s ancient Jewish cemetery to conduct a funeral for any Jews murdered that day.

Violence throughout Palestine instigated by the Arabs resulted in the death of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs (most killed by British security forces).

Three days after the massacre, the British evacuated the 484 survivors, including 153 children, to Jerusalem. More than 200 Arabs and 15 Jews were tried and sentenced for their role in the unrest in 1929. Out of 27 capital cases involving Arabs, only three of the death sentences were carried out; the others were granted “mercy,” and their sentences were commuted to life in prison. Muhammad Jamjoum, Fuad Hijazi, and Ataa Al-Zir were put to death on June 17, 1930, because they were convicted of particularly brutal murders in Safad and Hebron.

On July 14, 1930, the Palestine Bulletin reported that Arab leaders wanted to honor the men and planned to discuss whether to erect a statue in their memory. The British, however, banned all public assemblies and political speeches to commemorate their death. Today, there is a memorial to the men in Acre, and every year, the Palestinian Authority commemorates the execution of these “heroes.”

A number of Jewish families tried to move back to Hebron but were removed by the British authorities in 1936 at the start of the Arab revolt.

In 1948, Israel gained its independence from Britain, but Hebron was captured by King Abdullah’s Arab Legion during the War of Independence and ultimately annexed to Jordan.

When Israel finally regained control of the city in 1967, a small number of survivors from the massacre again tried to reclaim their old houses. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan supposedly told the survivors that if they returned, they would be arrested and that they should be patient while the government worked out a solution to get their houses back.

Years later, settlers moved to parts of Hebron without the permission of the government, but for those massacre survivors still seeking their original homes, that solution never came.

Sources: Arutz Sheva (August 1, 1999).
Jerusalem Post (July 23, 1999).
Jerold S. Auerbach, Remembering the Hebron Massacre, Wall Street Journal, (August 27, 2009).
Interview with Rabbi Dov Cohen, (August 1, 1999).
Calev Ben-David, “To live and die in Hebron,” Jerusalem Post, (July 23, 1999).
Maurice Hirsch, “The PA connection to the 1929 murder of 130 Jews,” Palestinian Media Watch, (August 23, 2019).
Elder of Zion blog, (July 14, 2020).
President Herbert Hoover’s News Conference, (August 27, 1929), Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States - Herbert Hoover, 1929, (DC: GPO, 1974), p. 186-187, FN 1.
“Student Slaughter Shocks Jerusalem,” New York Times, (August 28, 1929).

Collage Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. From top-left, clockwise: Shlomo, son of Eliezer Dan Slonim, aged 1, survives with wounds to his finger and forehead; The Holy Ark of the Sephardi Synagogue of Abraham is ransacked; A survivor reflecting in the aftermath of the slaughter; Family Kolstein recover from their injuries.
Bottom: Memorials to murdered rabbinical students in the old Jewish cemetery.
Photos Courtesy of United States Library of Congress Archives

The Hebron Massacre