There is a classic expression that asserts “when cannons roar the muses fall silent.” In times of distress and upheaval, creativity and art may falter. However, there are always those artists who quietly and stubbornly continue their work no matter what the circumstances. The recent exhibition “Jewish Art in Ukraine: The Torah in the Paintings of Yevhen Roytman” offers an example. The show was held at the Museum of the History of Kiev, sponsored by the Kyiv city government and with the support of the Jewish community of the city. The Museum presented the Torah project as a series of paintings that illustrate renowned Biblical subjects. The artist and poet Roytman believes that humanity, and in particular Ukraine, is living through a complex historical period. There is a fundamental epochal change happening. Sharp conflicts of opinion erupt. The old ways of life are being challenged, ruined, and discarded. This powerful process affects the consciousness of people and fundamentally alters viewpoints. In order to take advantage of and sustain such changes, society needs to believe in truth, justice, and morality. For the Jewish people, the Torah is a source of these understandings. The sacred texts guide the Jewish people through the […]

The Kyiv of his youth was very different from today’s busy capital of Ukraine. The city was greener, and quieter. Life was calmer. The city was infused with the mysteries of the past, and held more secrets. The climate was more bracing—with honest cold snaps and dry snowy winters. Kyiv springs were velvety and the summers hot, punctuated with cheerful sudden downpours of refreshing rain. And the fall was peaceful, generous with harvest and blazing yellow colors. And so recalls the prize-winning Ukrainian Jewish poet and public figure Hryhorii Falkovych. Falkovych remembers as a very young child returning to his native city of Kyiv. He was already a fourth generation Kyivite. Along with his mother he had been evacuated as an infant to Russia at the outbreak of the Second World War. The trip home was memorable for the boy. A locomotive with trailing black clouds. A crowded train chugging through endless steppe during a searing hot summer. Lunch breaks on faded grass. The aluminum cups filled with tea were too hot to hold. And there was no way to climb back onto the train by your self. It was too high! Falkovych and his mother returned to their pre-war […]