Some Ukrainians also sheltered Jews from the Nazis, including the Uniate Metropolitan Andryi Sheptytskyi, responsible for rescuing some 250 children in his network of convents and monasteries. Judith Butler, Cheryl Greenberg, Marianne Hirsch, and Robin D. G. Kelley tackle the core epistemological and moral question of whether we can know anothers experience, and what is at stake in our answer. Their executioners were German but also Ukrainian, Russian, and other local collaborators. Tensions between Misnagdim and Hasidim were substantially submerged with the emergence of an intellectual movement that threatened them both equally: the Haskalah, orJewish enlightenment, which emerged from Germany in the late eighteenth century. In my recent book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 19181921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, I argued that the presence of Jews on all sides of the conflict that enveloped Ukraine during the revolutionary era following the First World War meant that whichever side you were on, there was always a Jew to blame. When the Bolsheviks attacked the bourgeoisie and the capitalists, many Jews trembled. On March 3, I awoke to a message in Zelenskys Telegram channel in Hebrew. These political organizations, which were initially forced to operate underground, were increasingly active after the 1905 Revolution and the subsequent lifting of selected bans on political organization. Born Lev Bronstein to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian village of Yanivka, Trotsky served as Commissar for Foreign Affairs as well as head of the Soviet Red Army. For many Jews, the resonances are especially strong. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, View of the ruins of the main synagogue in Brody, Ukraine. As one of those scholars, I suppose that I should use this opportunity to comment dispassionately on this latest intersection of the Ukrainian and Jewish historical trajectories. Often competing with each other, they also clashed over some specific issues, such as the experimental Jewish farms set up in Ukrainian regions. Overall, in 1897, Jews made up 30 percent of the urban population of Ukraine.
After their most pressing needs are met, refugees benefit from help settling into their new environments. Indeed, rather than actively curbing his troops, Petliura may well have simply turned a blind eye to their anti-Jewish (and anti-Polish) violence during a few critical weeks in the campaign. During this time, and for reasons both pragmatic and idealistic, Jewish and Ukrainian political activists sought to bring a new harmony to UkrainianJewish relations in a proposed postrevolutionary democracy.
The Rada declared independence in January 1918, over the objections of its Jewish members. Indeed, Lenin pursued a determined policy of opposition to antisemitism. A jury of Ukrainian peasants acquitted Beilis in 1913. Ukrainian Jews numbered 1.5 million, or 60 percent of the USSRs Jewish population, in the 1920s. While of course each conflict engenders its own forms of terror, all refugees have certain basic and immediate needs. The Nazis considered this violence quite advantageous, and in some cases (such as the infamous Petliura Days of Lviv) actively sought to encourage Ukrainian attacks on Jews. A few days ago, a dear friend of mine in Boston, Rabbi Sue Fendrick, wrote an affecting poem merging her old vision of Ukraine with a very new one: She continues, For a Jew, no script / prescribes what sense to make now / of these lives and deaths, describing Zelensky as the Shoah's brave grandson and conceding, despite a history / [that] is painful, that contemporary Ukraine is ground for / Jewish life now, too. The poem closes: We stand with Ukraine. Its title? The eastern portions of Ukraine, extending all the way to Kiev, were later absorbed into the Khazar kingdom, with its center just north of the Caspian Sea. What we do know is that following the brutal invasion of the Soviet Union by the German military, special forces called Einsatzgruppen arrived with orders to kill civilians perceived to be enemies of Nazi Germany.
The Jewish political movement that had the greatest initial political achievement in Ukraine was the so-called autonomist movement (also known as Diaspora Nationalism), devoted to establishing a secular, modernized form of Jewish national autonomy in twentieth-century Ukraine. Ukraine was exceptionally fertile ground for the Hasidic movement, particularly for the dynasties centered in Belz, Bratslav and Uman, Chortkiv, Chernobyl, and Ruzhin. (YIVO), Graduating class of the Moriah School, a Hebrew-language school for girls, Zhvanets, Russia (now in Ukraine), 1910. The appeal felt cynical. On March 6, Zelensky offered another clear reference to World War II and Nazi war crimes when he declared that he was proclaiming six Ukrainian locales hero cities, as was done once before, when we withstood another attack, a very similar attack; another invasion, but an invasion no less brutal. In the same Telegram message, he stated that he was awarding the Order of Bohdan Khmielnitsky, one of Ukraines highest military honors, to heads of regional administrations and mayors who excelled in the defense of their communities. The historical irony was thick. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not about the Jews. Jews living in the western regions taken under Nazi control in September 1939 were forced into ghettos, followed by deportation to death camps. Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oswiecimiu; Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, A large group of men seated with their hands on their heads while being forced to watch the execution of Moshe Kagan and Wolf Kieper. Vynnychenkos Jewish wife was very likely an inspiration for his stories about the difficulty of Jewish life in Russia, as well as his commitment to the multinational character of the region. You are murdering the victims of the Holocaust a second time. NOTE: you will be redirectedto the Web site for the. While scholars of Eastern European Jewish history know that the popular image of Ukrainian-Jewish relations as two solitudes (the title of one of the earliest academic works on the subject) is overly simplisticthe two groups had multiple points of contact over their centuries of occupying the same territorythe impression of ethnic Ukrainians as steeped in antisemitism has remained widespread among Jews.
Hence, both regions were under complete martial law, and lacked the sort of meaningful organs of self-government that were permitted in some Western countries.
The devastation of the period, known among Jews as Gzeyres takh vetat, or the Evil Decrees of 16481649, resulted in the deaths of up to half of theJewish population. Siding with Ukraine today does not entail in any way dismissing or forgetting the dark pages of anti-Jewish violence in the region. Jewish participation in the Ukrainian movement was important for giving the movement both a solid foundation in urban regions as well as a foothold in the economic life of the country, and also helped Ukrainians argue for greater independence from the former empires center in Saint Petersburg. Even though few alive today remember the start of the Second World War, let alone the refugee crises of the First World War and Russian Civil War or the turn-of-the-century period, many carry a cultural memory of fleeing from those very lands. This online forum will not be the last word said on a grave political and moral crisis that is not likely to abate soon.
To destroy us all. He called to all the Jews of the world, Dont you see what is happening here? Kiev in particular shows significant evidence of Khazar settlement, and the city may in fact have been founded by the Khazars as a trading outpost. The dominant experience of Jews in Ukraine during the civil war period was one of violence, as hordes of pogromists swept across the countryside. Remarkably, it is now a call that Jews feel comfortable adopting as well. Ukrainian folk songs record numerous abusive practices from this period, including a possibly mythical description of the practice of paying a fee to Jewish authorities to gain access to the church for ritual functions, and the attempts of Catholic Poles to wean the overwhelmingly Eastern-rite Ukrainians from their Orthodox tradition. Khreshchatyk, the wide boulevard at the heart of the city flanked by neo-classical Stalinist apartment buildings, once populated by middle-aged women strolling arm in arm, gaggles of teenagers grasping bottles of Obolon beer, and buskers playing Ukrainian folk songs on beat-up guitars. The Holocaust and the BLM movement share the problem of knowing anothers experience. Takingthe example of language once again, Russian replaced Ukrainian in scores ofofficial settings; publication of Ukrainian dictionaries was suspended; Jewish schools, theaters, and other cultural institutions were closed down; and Jewish publications of all kinds fell off sharply. Eventually, however, Odessa became the metropolis of modernizing trends among Ukrainian Jews. Academics and professionals have studied the best practices for short, medium, and long-term physical and psychological care of refugee populations. These persecutions often reached absurd proportions. The 1897 census shows that only 2.66 percent of Jews in the tsarist empire made their living from agriculture; the corresponding Ukrainian figure is 73 percent. [1] Vasily Grossman, "Ukraine without Jews," trans.
An exception was Kiev, where Jewish residence continued to be forbidden, although several thousand Jews lived there illegally in the early twentieth century.
Both the governments of Kerensky and of Hrushevsky and Vynnychenko were threatened by the Bolsheviks, who sought to foment a proletarian revolution in Ukraine and establish a European-wide Soviet republic.
And Zelensky may be devaluing his own rhetorical currency in this particular information war by leveling the accusation of genocide. Under this system, Jews in Ukraine flourished, reaching a population of approximately 40,000 by the middle of the seventeenth century. When Mr. Goldberg and several hundred thousand other Polish Jews fled east in 1939, they struggled to find both food and shelter. The association of Jews with communism in the minds of many Ukrainians aggravated tensions between the two groups, since the catastrophic food-distribution polices of the regime must bear considerable responsibility for the severity of the famine. The Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum Yad Vashem even petitioned the United States to have Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich kept off any sanctions list on account of his beneficence to the museum. Explore the Museum's vast collection of artifacts, photos, film, and more. If we can learn from the past at all, let us focus on care for refugees. Zelensky not only passed a law against antisemitism, which was approved by the Ukrainian Parliament in the fall of 2021, but also dedicated the Ukrainian governments support to fund a memorial complex at Babyn Yar, the site of the single largest massacre in the history of the Holocaust.
The towns and cities of Ukraine were far from being mere sites of destruction and suffering; most of the time they were places of coexistence, where Jews produced some of the greatest chapters in the history of Eastern European Jewish life, achieving a grandeur and originality in the spheres of culture, religious life, and politics, ranging from Hasidism and Hebrew poetry to Yiddish literature and Socialist Zionism. US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Museum is in the process of gathering written records and oral testimony to fully tell the story of what happened in Ukraine during the Holocaust. A rich network of Jewish schools and synagogues appeared in the major centers, especially Kiev, Lviv, and Dnipropetrovsk, where the Lubavitch Hasidic movement was especially active, and many buildings confiscated by the Soviet regime were returned to Jewish communal organizations. The last email received from a colleague before the correspondence fell silent, in response to words of encouragement that, while sincerely intended, felt far too weak (We all support Ukraine at this difficult time): Thanks, lets hope for better times.
Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 19171920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Howard Aster and Peter J. Potichnyj, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. Photograph by Andrzej Polec. The tragic pages that tell the story of more than 100,000 Jews murdered in the towns and cities of Ukraine during the civil war are preceded by other painful ones: the anti-Jewish violence perpetrated during the 164849 Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmielnitskyand then, more than a century later, the massacres carried out by Ivan Gonta, as both leaders fought against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A major watershed in Ukrainian Jewish history occurred in March 1881 when Alexander II was assassinated by a grenade thrown by a member of a small socialist circle. (YIVO), Jews and non-Jews, stores, homes, and other buildings, Bolechw, Poland (now Bolechiv, Ukraine), 1930s. (Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ludwig Jesselson, 1998.615. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Round-up of [Jewish] men in an unidentified camp in the eastern Ukraine. Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 194143. As an historian, I appreciate the increased discussion of historical information over the past two weeks. More ominous, however, is the prominence, especially in the early 1920s, of Jews in various branches of the Ukrainian Cheka, theSoviet secret police (known later as the GPU/NKVD). Although Jews have had a long history in ethnolinguistically Ukrainian territory, by the turn of the twenty-first century only a small remnant of this once commanding population remained. On the eve of the invasion in 1941, the territory of Ukraine in its current internationally recognized borderswas home toone of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Jews, on the other hand, were concentrated in urban settings, where more than 80 percent made their homes. Putins charge of genocide against the Ukrainian government has been widely debunked in western countries and in intellectual circles (and perhaps even more widely) in Russia. A people has been murdered.[1]. By 17641765, about 300,000 Jews lived in these regions. In this JQR forum, four historians of Jewish Eastern Europe reflect on Russias invasion of Ukraine. While both groups retained, for example, quite distinct languagesUkrainian and Yiddishborrowed terminology is common to both. Slava Ukraini ("Glory to Ukraine")the Ukrainian nationalist call that Zelensky has made famous around the world as a symbol of resistance in the face of brutal aggression. Jewish settlement in Ukraine predates the beginnings of recorded history in the region. Khmielnitsky is, of course, a Ukrainian national hero whose image you see every time you pay using a five-hryvnia note. When he finally got back home, he described his hair-raising escape and the horrible scenes he witnessed along the way to an aid agency.
[The Russians] have ordered the destruction of our history, of our homeland. Who could have imagined that one day a Jewish president of Ukraine would lead his country in wartime and bestow an honor named after a figure some perceive as one of the greatest villains in Jewish history?
In his 1943 account the great writer Vasily Grossman described a Ukraine in which there are no Jews. In the late Soviet period, Jews had already begun emigrating at a rapid rate, especially to Israel and the United States. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, German police take aim at Jews from Ivanhorod who have just finished preparing their own grave. As a scholar of Eastern European Jewry, I am intimately familiar with some of the darkest pages in the history of the Jewish communities of Ukraine. Silence.
In his 1943 account the great writer Vasily Grossman described a Ukraine in which there are no Jews. According to the 2001 census, roughly 380,000 Jews had chosen to leave Ukraine, some three-quarters of the Jewish population. A people has been murdered., Jeffrey Veidlinger, University of Michigan, Yet, as has been well publicized in recent weeks, Ukraine today is the only country outside of Israel with, At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly and disingenuously justified his aggression on the grounds of. Thus, many felt that the problems of the tsarist empire had to be addressed directly, and through potentially radical change. The largest Jewish population centres in Ukraine are Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov and Odessa. Stalins drive to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union had catastrophic consequences for Ukraine. The Jewish world has taken note. Following Ukraines declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, scholars have begun piecing together a more complete history of the Holocaust in Ukraine. 1920s. Accurate demographic calculations of the extent of the Holocaust are difficult to achieve, but a realistic estimate of the number of Ukrainian Jews killed would be approximately 1.5 million: 60 percent of the total prewar population.
With help from the British consul, he finally made it out of the war zone and back to his family in May of 1940. Nopethis particular message, conveying Zelenskys reaction to a Russian rocket that hit the television tower close to the Babyn Yar memorial site on March 2, was directed at Jews. Facebook friends with little knowledge of contemporary Jewish life in Ukraine struggle to reconcile their image of Ukraine as a land soaked with Jewish blood with Zelenskys inspirational videos and photos of bearded Jewish men dressed in military uniforms heading off to fight the Russians. Khreshchatyk, the wide boulevard at the heart of the city flanked by neo-classical Stalinist apartment buildings, once populated by middle-aged women strolling arm in arm, gaggles of teenagers grasping bottles of Obolon beer, and buskers playing Ukrainian folk songs on beat-up guitars. by David Myers, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 2022 The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, Eliyana Adler, Pennsylvania State University, Elissa Bemporad, Queens College and The CUNY Graduate Center, The culmination of the darkness came during World War II, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Ironically, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Ukrainian perception that Jews sympathized with the Soviet enemy motivated pogromists to attack Jewish communities, and the Jewish perceptionthat Ukrainians were pogromists prompted them to join the Red Army, which in turn fueled the Ukrainian belief that Jews were overwhelmingly pro-Soviet. The Jewish Quarterly Review convened a forum onrecent developments in Ultra-Orthodoxy. Indeed, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed considerable internal migration of Jews in the Pale of Settlement to new settlements in southern Ukraine, of which Odessa was the most prominent. While antisemitism does exist in Ukraine today, all things considered, life might be more dangerous for Jews in American cities than Ukrainian ones. ), ca.1926. This is certainly true for the most recent group of migrants, who came after the collapse of the USSR. Jews, however, were opting to follow another course by orienting themselves toward the Russians, a minority in the Ukrainian SSR but the dominant nationality in the Soviet Union as a whole. The site was neglected and abused for decades under the Soviets, and has recently been damaged by the Russians in their indiscriminate shelling. Before the Whites started massacring Jews on the accusation of Bolshevism, Jews tended to welcome their arrival in town, greeting them with bread and salt and holding Torah scrolls. I do not envy the country that is governed by them..
When reading accounts about Ukrainians taking refuge in a mikvah in Uman together with their Jewish neighbors, or about Hasidic Jews taking up arms to defend their country alongside Ukrainian soldiers, one might be tempted to explain all this by calling attention to a common enemy, which can eliminate preexisting tensions and heal the wounds of the past.
Thousands of young Jews were drawn to revolutionary movements, some of which espoused socialism. Vasily Grossman, "Ukraine without Jews," trans.
Other bouts of violence against the Jewish communities of Ukraine took place in the long nineteenth century, when waves of anti-Jewish pogroms occurred in the midst of extraordinary political upheaval: in 188182, unleashed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and then in 1905, during the failed first Russian Revolution. Ive chronicled the violence experienced by many Jewish settlements west of the River Dnipro, as Ukrainian forces resented Jews for their alleged pro-Communist position, as saboteurs of the Ukrainian dream of independence. A group of Jewish women at the entrance to the Brody ghetto, Ukraine. The peak of this evolution over the past thirty years has been the democratic election of a Jewish president, Volodymir Zelensky, who in 2019 won with an overwhelming majority of 73 percent of the votessomething implausible in any other country in Eurasiaand whose Jewishness was never instrumentalized by his political opponents in Ukraine, but only recently by Putin and his puppet government in Belarus. TTY: 202.488.0406, Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oswiecimiu; Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, Guidelines for Teaching About the Holocaust, The Holocaust in Subcarpathian Rus and Southern Slovakia, Mass Shootings of Jews during the Holocaust, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, The Presidents Commission on the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Council (Board of Trustees), Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. When the extremist Russian nationalist organization Pamiat called for anti-Jewish violence in May 1990, Rukh successfully campaigned against any attacks, convincing many Ukrainian Jews that this more liberal, national-democratic movement deserved their support.