• Feature Interviews – with artists, authors, acti vists, and other interesting people
• Ukrainian Jewish Heritage –exploring Ukraine’s rich Jewish history
• Knyzhka Corner – Myra Junyk reviews books on Ukrainian themes in English
• Victor’s Vignettes – personal recollections of soviet and post soviet life by the late Victory Sergeyev of Mykolaiv, Ukraine
Imagine everything that is dear to you in life has been lost. Imagine your world destroyed. And imagine if you can find the strength to move ahead. In 2011 the Austrian director Paul Rosdy released his film The Last Jew from Drohobych. The documentary chronicles the astonishing path of one man’s journey through the treacherous […]
As we discussed before in a previous segment, a recent conference held in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Lviv in early June analyzed the lethal impact of destructive propaganda on community relations. The conference was organized and hosted by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative. Entitled “The Seduction of Propaganda: Mass Violence in Ukraine in
Toxic terminology and the sinister manipulation of language can lead to murder. A recent conference held in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Lviv in early June underlined the dangers inherent in the misuse of the spoken and written word. “The Seduction of Propaganda: Mass Violence in Ukraine in the 20th and 21st Centuries” featured
The Western Ukrainian town of Brody is on my mind today. This historic town has always been in the minds of several generations of Jewish traders, writers, rabbis, and immigrants to the New World. Boris Kuzmany of the Institute of Slavonic Studies at the University of Vienna can tell us why this one particular town
He is relentless and outspoken. And he has paid the price. He was arrested twice for his human rights activities and served six years in prison in the Soviet gulag. But he emerged from behind prison bars to the world stage. Josef Zissels is now the head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities
The city of Dubno is located in the Rivne Oblast, or province, in western Ukraine. It sits on the banks of the Ikva River. The current population is around 38,000. Dubno was first mentioned in a chronicle dated 1099, although it is thought to be even older. In the “Story of the Passing Years” the
A grandfather taught his grandson the Jewish alphabet and read him poems in Yiddish. Shortly before his death, he tied all the Jewish books into a pile, and threw them onto the very top shelf of a cabinet. He believed that nobody would ever need them. But the grandson took down this pile and started
Andrea Chalupa’s Orwell and the Refugees traces the amazing connection between George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm and Ukrainian refugees in the displaced persons camps of postwar Germany and Austria. Animal Farm carries the message of hope that someone in the West knew the truth about the Soviet Union, that someone understood the unimaginable horrors
Passover is a festival of freedom. It commemorates the exodus of Jews from Egypt over 3000 years ago. The timeless and universal message of this holiday is that slaves can go free, and the future can be better than the present. Passover, or Pesach, as it is called in Hebrew, begins in the middle of
In this edition of Knyzka Corner, we look at Orphanage 41 by Victor Malarek. Although Victor Malarek has written six non-fiction books, Orphanage 41 is his first novel. Mykola Yashan, the 19-year old protagonist of this novel, is forced into a voyage of nightmarish self-discovery. After the sudden death of his parents in an automobile
