This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Veidlinger's own widely cited synthesis puts the wave's full toll at over 100,000, a figure some contemporary observers placed as high as 300,000. This is not a count of direct killings alone: it folds in the substantially larger number who died in the wave's aftermath, of wounds, disease and exposure while displaced or in flight, on top of those killed outright in the pogroms themselves. This atlas records both this aggregate figure and the narrower direct-killing bounds of roughly 31,000 to 60,000 as distinct claims, since neither supersedes the other.
The violence targeted Jewish communities as such, with attacks frequently accompanied by the destruction of synagogues, desecration of Torah scrolls and killing of rabbis alongside the wider civilian toll. Astashkevich's study documents rape used systematically against Jewish women across the pogroms, arguing the pattern reflects a genocidal logic aimed at the community's religious and social continuity rather than opportunistic wartime disorder alone. Veidlinger's scholarly framing situates the wave as a direct forerunner of the Holocaust two decades later, a reading gaining wider acceptance among historians of the period but never converted into any formal recognition process; international Jewish relief organizations, including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, mounted large-scale aid efforts at the time amid warnings that the region's entire Jewish population was at risk of complete destruction.