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When William was eleven, rioters in his hometown of Kishinev attacked their Jewish neighbors, killing forty-nine and injuring over four hundred more.

The pogrom in Chisinau, also known as Kishinev, “was a very central event that drove modern Zionism,” the Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, said in a phone interview on Monday.

Although the Dreyfus affair and the Kishinev Pogrom were formative events in its history, Zionism issued from the same womb that produced pan-Germanism and other late 19th-century ethnocentric and xenophobic movements.

Mr. Lieberman, 60, was born in Kishinev, now the capital of Moldova, and emigrated to Israel at 20.

Before the Holocaust, Jewish suffering was synonymous with the name of the city, Kishinev, where in 1903, 49 Jews were killed in a paroxysm of violence.