A Rich but Complicated History

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Today, there are between 40,000 to 100,000 individuals who identify as Jewish in Ukraine – numbers vary. Most of the country’s Jews, who are mainly Russian speakers, are secular.

They are braced for further conflict now that Russian troops have crossed the borders into the country.

Currently, Ukraine has the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe following France, Great Britain and Russia.

This is down considerably from 400,000 before the massive waves of Jewish emigration at the end of the 20th century, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which Ukraine was a constituent republic. At its high point, Ukraine had more than a million Jews whose native language was nearly 100 per cent Yiddish.

They include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Eight decades ago, members of the Zelensky family were murdered during the Holocaust and others fought in the Red Army. But anti-Jewish rhetoric has not played a significant role in the current war.

Jews have a rich but complicated history with Ukraine, both when it was part of tsarist Russia and later when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, occupying all of Ukraine for a time.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the 1917 Russian Revolution, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine. Of the three million Jews who lived in the region, about 12 per cent of the overall population, more than 100,000 were massacred by various armies.

This preceded the “Holocaust by bullets,” as it is called, when over one million Jews were slaughtered by German forces aided by collaborators after 1941. Most were shot to death.

What happened to the Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War, then, has roots in what happened to the Jews in the same region only two decades earlier. As the demographer Jacob Lestschinsky noted on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the “heritage of atrocities” left by the events of 1918–1921 had “still not fully healed.”

Soviet Communists worked to destroy all religious expressions of Judaism in the USSR and control the nature of secular Jewish, mostly Yiddish, culture in their country. In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s policies of collectivization and political suppression led to the complete failure of the Ukrainian agricultural sector and led to millions of deaths by starvation.

During this period known as the Holodomor, Jews increasingly left their villages in Ukraine to look for food and work in the larger cities.

Given this history, some of today’s Jewish communities are alarmed, particularly in cities like Odessa, where successive waves of violence, from Jewish pogroms in the early 20th century to mass executions by the Nazis in World War II, have left indelible scars.

During World War II, Romanian troops allied with the Nazis occupied Odessa, and started a program of extermination. As many as a quarter of a million Jews in Odessa and the surrounding region perished.

At the end of the 19th century, Odessa had the third largest Jewish population in the world, after New York and Warsaw. There were Jewish universities and schools, Jewish-owned factories and theaters and about 40 synagogues.

Odessa is a potential target for Vladimir Putin. It is home to the country’s largest ports and is the headquarters of Ukraine’s Navy. It is flanked by Russian-occupied Crimea to its east and the Russian-backed separatist enclave of Transnistria, in Moldova, to its west, a region along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast that Putin has referred to using the tsarist-era name, Novorossiya, or New Russia.

As with other Jewish communities, the one in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, where about 20,000 Jews live, is focusing on making sure the elderly population and other vulnerable groups remain safe if traveling local roads becomes dangerous, she added.

The Israeli mission to Ukraine is now based in Lviv, in the west of the country. The Jewish state finds itself walking a tightrope in the war, as there is a large Jewish population in Russia as well.

Israel supports Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, the government said Feb. 23 in its first official statement on the crisis between Kyiv and Moscow. It is prepared to transfer immediate humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, the Foreign Ministry statement added.

The statement, however, did not address Russia by name, reflecting the complicated position Israel has found itself in over the crisis unfolding 3,000 kilometers away.

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Michael Brodsky told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that while the statement did not constitute an outright condemnation of Russia, it was “far stronger than our usual position.” 

Jerusalem also has to be cautious in its approach to the current crisis due to its position in the ongoing conflicts in its neighboring Arab states. Israeli officials wouldn’t agree to the transfer of Iron Dome missile batteries to Kyiv, fearing it would hurt its relations with Russia, especially in light of Moscow’s influence over Syria.

Vera Michlin-Shapir, a former official at Israel’s National Security Council and the author of “Fluid Russia,” a book about the country’s national identity, said that Israel’s regional security concerns were of greater interest than challenging Russia on its narrative.

“Russia can provide weapons systems to our worst enemies and therefore Israel is proceeding very cautiously -- you could say too cautiously -- because there is an issue here that is at the heart of Israel’s security,” she explained.

As Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has noted, “Our border with Syria is, for all intents and purposes, a border with Russia.”