The Lviv pogroms were two massacres of Jews living in and near in the city of Lwów, the occupied Republic of Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), that took place from 30 June to 2 July and 25–29 July 1941 during World War II. According to Yad Vashem six thousand Jews were killed by Einsatzgruppen, some Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian militia. During the interbellum, Lviv had the third-largest Jewish population in Poland, which swelled further to over 200,000 Jews as refugees fled from the Nazis.

Immediately after the Germans entered the city, Einsatzgruppen with the participation of Ukrainian nationalists organized a pogrom in retaliation for the retreating NKVD's mass-murder of approximately 2,000-10,000 prisoners (including Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish intellectuals and political activists) at Lviv's three prisons (Brygidki, Łąckiego Street, and Zamarstynowska Street prisons). According to victim lists, a large number of the victims were Ukrainian. Although a significant number of Jews had also been among the victims of the NKVD massacre, Jews were collectively accused by the German authorities of having been active perpetrators of that massacre. German propagandists went to work spreading rumors and showing distorted films that purported to implicate the Jews in the killing of the Ukrainian prisoners. These instigations inflamed the local Ukrainians, who then took vigilante action against the Jewish population of the city.

Lviv (Ukrainian: Львів L’viv, IPA: [lʲwiu̯] ( listen); Polish: Lwów, pronounced [lvuf]; Russian: Львов, L'vov; German: Lemberg and Yiddish Lemberg, לעמבערג; Latin: Leopolis; see also other names) is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically had also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center; as Poles and Jews comprised a demographic majority of the city for a period leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Holocaust, and Polish population transfers (1944–1946) that followed. The historical heart of Lviv with its old buildings and cobblestone roads has survived World War II and ensuing Soviet presence largely unscathed. The city has many industries and institutions of higher education such as the Lviv University and the Lviv Polytechnic. Lviv is also a home to many world-class cultural institutions, including a philharmonic orchestra and the famous Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet. The historic city centre is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Lviv celebrated its 750th anniversary with a son et lumière in the city centre in September 2006.

Mordechai Gebirtig, born Mordecai Bertig (Yiddish: מרדכי געבירטיג, b. 4 April 1877, Kraków, Austria Hungary; d. 4 June 1942, Kraków Ghetto, Poland) was an influential Yiddish poet and songwriter.

One of Gebirtig's best-known songs is "S'brent" (It is Burning), written in 1938 in response to the 1936 pogrom of Jews in the shtetl (small town) of Przytyk. Gebirtig had hoped its message, “Don't stand there, brothers, douse the fire!” would be a call to action. Cracow's underground Jewish resistance adopted S'brent as its anthem.Undzer shtetl brennt was sung in the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. Since then the song, in the original Yiddish and in its Hebrew translation titled "Ha-Ayyarah Bo'eret" (העיירה בוערת, "Our Little Town is Burning!" - hence the occasional reference to a Yiddish title, "Undzer Shtetl Brent!"), continues to be widely performed in the context of Holocaust commemoration.

One of Gebirtig's political songs that is also still popular today is the Arbetloze marsh, or Song of the Unemployed: