Some 150,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of 1918–1922, 125,000 of them in Ukraine, 25,000 in Belarus. The pogroms were mostly perpetrated by anti-communist forces; sometimes, Red Army units engaged in pogroms as well. After a short period of confusion, the Soviets started executing guilty individuals and even disbanding the army units whose men had attacked Jews. Although pogroms were still perpetrated after this, mainly by Ukrainian units of the Red Army during its retreat from Poland (1920), in general, the Jews regarded the Red Army as the only force which was able and willing to defend them. The Russian Civil War pogroms shocked world Jewry and rallied many Jews to the Red Army and the Soviet regime, strengthening the desire for the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people. In August 1919 the Soviet government arrested many rabbis, seized Jewish properties, including synagogues, and dissolved many Jewish communities. The Jewish section of the Communist Party labeled the use of the Hebrew language "reactionary" and "elitist" and the teaching of Hebrew was banned. Zionists were persecuted harshly, with Jewish communists leading the attacks. Following the civil war, however, the new Bolshevik government's policies produced a flourishing of secular Jewish culture in Belarus and western Ukraine in the 1920s. The Soviet government outlawed all expressions of anti-Semitism, with the public use of the ethnic slur "жид" ("Yid") being punished by up to one year of imprisonment, and tried to modernize the Jewish community by establishing 1,100 Yiddish-language schools, 40 Yiddish-language daily newspapers and by settling Jews on farms in Ukraine and Crimea; the number of Jews working in the industry had more than doubled between 1926 and 1931. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Jews were 1.8 percent of the Soviet population but 12–15 percent of all university students. In 1934 the Soviet state established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Russian Far East. This region never came to have a majority Jewish population. The JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast and, outside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status. The observance of the Sabbath was banned in 1929, foreshadowing the dissolution of the Communist Party's Yiddish-language Yevsektsia in 1930 and worse repression to come. Numerous Jews were victimized in Stalin's purges as "counterrevolutionaries" and "reactionary nationalists", although in the 1930s the Jews were underrepresented in the Gulag population.