Lazar Krestin

Lazar Krestin's historic painting titled Birth of Jewish Resistance, which was completed in 1905. The painting came in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and the mobilization of Jewish self-defense organizations in the Pale of Settlement. During the second Kishinev pogrom of 1905, armed Jewish groups fought back against antisemitic mobs. Jewish resistance in Kishinev and throughout Czarist Russia was greatly influential to the emerging ideology of Zionist stalwarts such as Ze'ev Jabotinsky. The history of Kishinev also contributed to the rise of the earliest Jewish self-defense organizations in Eretz Yisrael like HaShomer in 1908, and later the Haganah, the precursor to the IDF.