Translation of the first two images: Today was the 23rd of Av. This is the date of the 1929 pogroms. Today I was in Safed, one of the cities where the Arab pogroms took place on August 29 (23 Av), 1929.
"Disturbances in Eretz Yisrael — News and Telegrams in Illustrations" — a booklet created by the artist Nahum Gutman in 1929 together with Nahum Eitan and Saadia Shoshani. The booklet served as a chronicle of the bloody riots of 1929. Gutman depicted the riots — both those he witnessed himself and those he read about with rage and despair in the press of the British Mandate.
Rapes, burned houses, torn Torah scrolls. Hundreds wounded.
Further from a publication in The Librarian on August 23, 2018:
Gutman collected 18 drawings. He knew that no one would agree to publish them: it was a sharp reproach to the British. He took them to Herzl Street in Tel Aviv, laid them out on the sidewalk, and waited.
Soon a crowd of shocked, stunned onlookers gathered around them. The first to react was the writer Avigdor Hameiri. He was hypnotized by a drawing depicting the looting of the city of Safed. All he could say was: "And in the newspaper they wrote: 'The Jews of Safed are safe in the government house. It is quiet in the city.'"
Gutman quickly wrote the sentence right below the drawing.
Soon Avraham Shlonsky and Uri Zvi Greenberg, both famous poets of the Jewish Yishuv, appeared on Herzl Street. Together with Gutman, they wrote provocative captions for each of the drawings, most of which were based on real news reports taken almost unedited from the press.
After the improvised street exhibition, only one drawing was added to the collection. It was captioned: "Saviors of the Honor of England." It was also the only drawing without the slightest hint of irony. Gutman depicted a group of Oxford students who were in the country during the riots and came to the defense of Jewish victims.
Stepping out of the crowd that had gathered around the caricatures, Nahum Eitan approached Gutman and asked him a question that had not yet been answered: "Where will you print these drawings?"
Eitan offered himself as a publisher, and his friend Saadia Shoshani as a printer ("I know him well. He is brave. He will surely agree"). After two days of hard work, the brochure was published — in about half the time it took the British police to ban it. However, an order prohibiting any sale or viewing of the brochure was soon issued.
Only the intervention of Mayor Dizengoff and other high-ranking figures of the Yishuv saved Gutman and his partners from prosecution. Shoshani's printing house, which was closed after the publication of the brochure, resumed operations after he directly promised not to print it anymore.
Shoshani handed the printing plates to Eliezer Levin-Epstein, owner of a famous Warsaw printing house, where they were also translated into Yiddish. Thanks to the translation, the brochure was a great success throughout the Jewish world. The drawings themselves were also printed separately in the international Jewish press.
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