The wave of anti-Semitism that engulfed Poland in the inter-war period did not skip over Hrubieszow. Immediately after World War I, Polish army units entered the city, and the soldiers abused the Jews, attacked them in the street, cut off their sidelocks and beards in front of passers-by, and stole their property. When war broke out between Poland and Soviet Russia, the city was, for a time, subjected to occupation by the Red Army, during which the Jews experienced abuse at the hands of soldiers in anti-Semitic Soviet Ukrainian units.
In 1926, Asher Segal, a 19-year-old Jew, was stabbed to death by an official in the city governor’s office. Segal’s funeral evolved into a mass demonstration against anti-Semitic incitement, and members of the city’s trade unions participated. In the 1930s, local anti-Semitism intensified. Jewish students at the local Polish gymnasium had to endure the anti-Semitic attitudes of some of the schoolteachers.
One key figure behind the rise of antisemitism in the area was Symon Petliura, a Ukrainian statesman who served as the last president of the People’s Republic of Ukraine. The republic’s military forces were among those who perpetrated pogroms in Ukraine in which thousands of Jews were murdered. Though Petliura condemned the murders, he was accused of doing nothing to stop them. In the Russo-Polish war, Ukraine was an ally of the Poles, and Ukrainian soldiers routinely mistreated local Jews. Petliura was murdered in Paris in 1926 by a Jew named Shalom Schwarzbard, to revenge the pogroms and the murder of his family members.
Another factor in the rise of antisemitism was the Endecja Party, a right-wing nationalist party that embodied the notion of “Poland for the Poles”. Its members announced a boycott of Jewish tradesmen and craftsmen. The party carried out an anti-Semitic policy encouraging the emigration of Jews from Poland, predicated on the belief that that the Jews would not integrate into Polish society due to their disparate culture. Informed by the emergence of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s, the anti-Semitic ideas spread by the party became even more extreme.
