His Imperial Majesty, after listening to a report of the Minister of the Interior concerning the willful opening of the Moscow Synagogue by Rabbi Minor and Warden Schneider, was graciously pleased to command as follows: 

  First.  Rabbi Minor of Moscow shall be dismissed from his post and
  transferred for permanent residence to the Pale of Jewish
  Settlement.

  Second.  Warden 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-government, and could boast of a number of prominent municipal workers.  This activity of the Jews went against the grain of the inquisitorial trio, Pobyedonostzev, Durnovo, and Plehve, and they decided to bar the Jews completely from participation in the municipal elections.