Schneider shall be removed from the precincts of
Moscow for two years.

_Third_. The Jewish Synagogue Society shall be notified that,
unless, by January 1, 1893, the synagogue structure will have been
sold or transformed into a charitable institution, it will be sold
at public auction by the gubernatorial administration of Moscow.

The rabbi and the warden went into exile, while the dead body of the
murdered synagogue--its structure--was saved from desecration by placing
in it one of the schools of the Moscow community.

The fight against the places of Jewish worship was renewed by the police
a few years later, during the reign of Nicholas II. The principal
synagogue being closed, the Jews of Moscow were compelled to hold
services in uncomfortable private premises. There were fourteen houses
of prayer of this kind in various parts of the city, but, on the eve of
the Jewish Passover of 1894, the governor-general gave orders to close
nine of these houses, so that the religious needs of a community of ten
thousand souls had to be satisfied in five houses of worship, situated
in narrow, unsanitary quarters. The Government had achieved its purpose.
The synagogue was humbled into the dust, and its sight no longer
offended the eyes of the Greek-Orthodox zealots. The Jews of Moscow were
forced to pour out their hearts before God in some back yards, in the
stuffy atmosphere of private dwellings. As in the days of the Spanish
inquisition, these private houses of worship would, on the solemn days
of Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, be stealthily visited by the
"marranos" of Moscow, those Jews who had saved themselves from the
wholesale expulsions by fictitious conversion to Christianity. The
passionate prayers of repentance of these involuntary apostates rose up
to heaven as they had done in centuries gone-by from the underground
synagogues of Seville, Toledo, and Saragossa.

By and by, the attempt to take the Jewish citadel by storm gave way to
the former regular state of siege, which had for its object to starve
out the Jews. The municipal counterreform of 1892 dealt a severe
political blow to Russian Jewry. Under the old law, the number of Jewish
aldermen in the municipal administration had been limited to one-third
of the total number of aldermen, aside from the prohibition barring the
Jews from the office of burgomaster [1]. Notwithstanding these
restrictions, the Jews played a conspicuous part in municipal
self-