The only medium through which the Jews could give vent to their burning national sorrow was a religious demonstration within the walls of the synagogue.
3.

MILITARY MARTYRDOM The ways and means by which the provisions of the military statute were carried into effect during the reign of Nicholas I.we do not learn from official documents, which seem to have drawn a veil over this dismal strip of the past.

Our information is derived from sources far more communicative and nearer to truth--the traditions current among the people.

Owing to the fact that every Jewish community, at the mutual responsibility of all its members, was compelled by law to supply a definite number of recruits, and that no one was willing to become a soldier of his own volition, the Kahal administration and the recruiting "trustees," who had to answer to the authorities for any shortage in recruits, were practically forced to become a sort of police agents, whose function it was to "capture" the necessary quota of recruits.
Prior to every military conscription, the victims marked for prey, the young men and boys of the burgher class, [1] very generally took to flight, hiding in distant cities, outside the zone of their Kahals, or in forests and ravines.

A popular song in Yiddish refers to these conditions in the following words; [Footnote 1: Compare on the status of the burgher in Russian law Vol.