• 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
In the last two episodes of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, we learned that several Jews from Ukrainian territories were awarded one of Israel’s highest honors: their portraits depicted on the state’s banknotes and coins. And that Ukraine has returned the favour. In Episode 1, the focus was on the respective histories of the currencies of Israel […]
In this edition of Knyzka Corner, we will be discussing Sandra Semchuk’s book on the internment of Ukrainians in Canada, The Stories Were Not Told – Canada’s First World War Internment Camps. From 1914 to 1920, thousands of individuals who had immigrated to Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and the Ottoman Empire were unjustly
The State of Israel was created and built by Jewish settlers who came mainly from Eastern Europe. Among them were quite a few natives of Ukraine, then ruled by the Russian & Austro-Hungarian Empires. Today’s episode of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, Part 2 of our series on the currencies of Ukraine and Israel, features Jews from
In this edition of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, we will be discussing Ron Vossler’s memoir Hitler’s Basement. Much has been written about Nazi concentration camps, but little has been written about the Nazi massacres of Jews on Ukrainian soil, and the peasants who witnessed and participated in these horrific events. In Hitler’s Basement, Ron Vossler reveals
Banknotes and coins are not only means of payment, they are also a symbol of sovereignty. This is a story about two currencies, two countries, and two peoples with a long and closely intertwined history. The hyrnvia, currency of Ukraine and the shekel, currency of Israel. This is the story of how both of these
Last week we aired the first part of an interview with Paulina Zelitsky, who published The Sea is Only Knee Deep. In this two-volume memoir she tells the fascinating story of her life growing up in the Soviet Union, working in Cuba on a Soviet naval base in the late 1960s, and her famous and
A couple of weeks ago on Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, we aired a book review of the memoirs of a Jewish woman from Odessa. An engineer, who worked on a nuclear submarine station in Cuba during the height of The Cold War, shortly before a daring defection from the Soviet Union to Canada. Her name is
In this edition of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage, Myra Junyk reviews The Sea is Only Knee Deep, a two-volume memoir of a nuclear scientist who defected from the Soviet Union to Canada at the height of the Cold War. The Sea is Only Knee Deep is the true story of Paulina Zelitsky’s defection to Canada from
In this edition of Knyzka Corner, we will be discussing Serge Cipko’s ground-breaking book Starving Ukraine – The Holodomor and Canada’s Response. Starving Ukraine is a richly detailed history of Canada’s response to the Holodomor, the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. By examining Canadian newspapers, contemporary letters, and government documents, Cipko paints a
This episode of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage examines the extraordinary WWII story of Crimean Tatar teacher Saide Arifova, who protected 88 Jewish children from both the Nazi Gestapo and later the Soviet NKVD. Her real-life rescue, portrayed in the film “A Prayer of Strangers,” reveals the intertwined histories of the Holocaust and the 1944 Crimean Tatar deportation.
