Examining the relationship between Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920. Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Centennials offer moments for reflection. The one hundredth anniversary of a major turning point in history provides an excellent opportunity for re-evaluation and reconsideration. In the spring of 1917 the Russian Empire came to an abrupt end. The Russian Revolution consumed the former imperial capital of Petrograd. Ukraine was breaking away, and Jewish and Ukrainian political leaders in Kyiv moved boldly to set up a striking new relationship between the two nationalities. This new relationship—and its eventual failure—is examined in the book A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920, published in 1999. The author, Dr. Henry Abramson, serves as Dean at Touro’s Lander College of Arts and Sciences in Brooklyn, New York. A native of northern Ontario, he received his PhD in History from the University of Toronto in 1995. He has gone on to visiting and post-doctoral positions at Cornell, Harvard, Oxford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Abramson writes that a potential newborn friendship between Ukrainians and Jews emerged in that revolutionary year of 1917. This was a tentative rapprochement between two groups that had lived […]

Written and narrated by Peter Bejger A quiet village set amidst rolling hills, forests, and ravines. A revered monastery. And four stories of salvation. A compelling article by Oksana Sikorska in the Ukrainian journal Zbruch outlines the remarkable role of the small western Ukraine village of Univ during the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. These are stories of resilience and triumph in the face of daunting odds and incredible danger. In the 1930s Univ had a little over a thousand souls and a village school. And by the time of the German occupation in 1943, a little boy was peering out a window from the attic of the schoolhouse onto the world outside. To leave the attic was to invite disaster. Most of the local Jewish population had already been deported and/or killed. Public signs posted everywhere warned that anyone assisting Jews would be executed. This boy, Roald Hoffman, who was to become the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, found shelter in the one room schoolhouse, which was also the home of the village schoolteacher Mykola Dyuk and his wife Maria. What is even more astounding is that Roald’s mother, two uncles, and an aunt were also […]

Franko and Jabotinsky: Setting the stage for cross-cultural understanding between Ukrainians and Jews -Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Two writers, two politicians. Two outstanding public figures. And two intriguing viewpoints on the historic challenges of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. The Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko passed away in 1916. The Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky was from a generation younger. Both made vital contributions to the creation of their respective national states of Israel and an independent Ukraine. But both did not live long enough to see their national dreams come true. Wolf Moskovich, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, compares and contrasts the lives of these two men in a fascinating essay. The essay was one of the contributions to an international conference and subsequent book on Ivan Franko and the Jewish issue in Galicia by the Vienna University Press. There is no evidence Franko and Jabotinsky ever crossed paths, though both met intellectuals they knew in common. Professor Moskovich traces some remarkable similarities in both men’s life stories. Both men ran for an elective political office before the First World War, Franko for the Habsburg Austrian parliament, and Jabotinsky for the Imperial Russian Duma. And both were defeated by […]

Today, two perspectives on loss and memory. “I close my eyes and I can hear the bells…ringing; each one rings differently. I can hear the splash of the fountains on the Marketplace, and the soughing of the fragrant trees, which the spring rain has washed clean of dust. It is coming up to ten o’clock and the place is so quiet that I can recognize the people going past by their footsteps as they hurry home for dinner. I recognize the footsteps of people who ceased to walk this earth long ago. There’s no one but shades clacking their heels on the well-worn pavement slabs.” So writes the Polish author Jozef Wittlin, conjuring up his native city of Lviv in his essay My Lwow, which he wrote in exile in New York in 1946. The essay has been recently translated into a whimsically lyrical English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published in a haunting new book entitled City of Lions. Wittlin was fortunate to escape. He was in Paris at the outbreak of World War II. After the collapse of France he managed to escape via Portugal to the United States and continued writing. He passed away in 1976. Wittlin was […]

“Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy ordinary people were happy to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think.” So writes Tim Judah, a reporter for The Economist, in his compelling book In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. The Londoner Judah covered the war in Ukraine for The New York Review of Books. Judah has a specific approach in his portrayal of the complexities of today’s Ukraine for the Western reader. He stressed that he wanted to mix people, stories, history, politics, and reportage instead of explaining why one event followed another. In addition to witnessing some horrifying scenes on the front lines of the war in Donbas, he traveled far and wide throughout Ukraine. He talked with people high and low, from impoverished refugees, elderly villagers, city sophisticates, and wealthy businessmen. One major theme is teased out of all the talks with Ukrainians. History weighs very heavily on Ukraine, Judah writes, “because of what really happened, what people believe happened, what people are told happened, and what is forgotten.” Furthermore, as Judah notes, what a Ukrainian believes today depends on what he […]

A young woman working in an office in New York City writes: “I was just another girl in a cubicle, doing the usual two years before leaving for graduate school. I was a mass produced good. My row of cubicles was almost entirely female, dark-haired and petite. We all wore colorful pashmina shawls to protect us against the air-conditioning, and we got our periods at the same time.” Her life changes radically when she meets a charismatic Ukrainian doctor at a conference. He is an activist who helps Eastern European drug users get HIV treatment. And soon our restless young woman, named Sophie Pinkham, starts working in programs to reduce drug-related harm through needle-exchange, drug treatment, and other services. Pinkham plunges into the chaotic harm reduction world of sex workers, junkies, and other lost souls in contemporary Ukraine. This is a world not often seen by foreigners. She meets a fascinating cast of characters. And her adventures in what she calls “post-Soviet punk delirium” are told in a riveting book called Black Square: Adventures in Post Soviet Ukraine. Pinkham deepens her encounter with Ukraine by collecting oral histories about women’s rights and AIDS activism, as well as making a documentary […]

Ukrainian folk songs and Hasidic music. Mutual borrowings between the Ukrainian and Yiddish languages. Striking similarities in the architecture of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues and Ukrainian wooden churches. A fascinating new book, The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions, documents the vivid highlights of two formerly stateless peoples with strong national aspirations. This collection of essays by a distinguished group of global academics presents an intriguing premise. Namely, a focus on culture illuminates crucial aspects of the Ukrainian-Jewish relationship often missed in standard historical accounts that only leap from crisis to crisis. In other words, cultural interaction between Jews and Ukrainians that unfolded over centuries through diverse and daily encounters had a profound impact on both communities. Culture shapes so many key aspects of life. The cultural history of Ukraine reflects long periods of normal coexistence between Jews and Ukrainians. This cultural history also set the broader context in which the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples developed. Cultural links also reflected the complex nature of their relationship. The book emerged from a pioneering conference held by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter in conjunction with the Israel Museum and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The conference, entitled: “The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Interaction, Representation, and Memory,” brought […]

Leszek Allerhand vividly remembers that day in the summer of 1941, when he was a ten-year-old boy. The Germans had recently occupied the city of Lviv. Two civilians wearing armbands came to his family’s flat and warned them not to leave the building. The Allerhands were puzzled when they watched a giant water tank roll onto their street. Soon the street was enveloped with fumes and heavy smoke. The family fled their building through an unguarded back way and began a desperate saga of hiding and survival. And so the historic heart of the oldest Jewish neighborhood on what is now called Staroyevreiska Street went up in flames. German soldiers set on fire the 16th century Golden Rose synagogue, the City Synagogue, and the Beth Hamidrash, a house of learning. And the site remained derelict for decades. A fascinating article by the journalist Olesya Yaremchuk in a recent edition of the on-line journal The Ukrainians recounts this destruction and a 21st century Ukrainian response to acknowledge and commemorate this loss. A memorial complex called the “Space of Synagogues,” dedicated last September, now occupies the historic site. Sofia Dyak is the director of the Center for Urban History of East Central […]

Today we begin with a dispatch from the past. “Kiev in the morning. A lot of people are already walking on the main street Khreshchatyk, now called ‘Vorovski.’ Everybody holds under their arm a stick of plain black bread, and everyone picks crumbs from it and drops it in their mouth. This applies to men, to women and to children: constantly, constantly, constantly. Everybody has a stick of plain black bread under their arm, under their suit coat, under their overcoat. And from there they pick: crumbs, crumbs, crumbs. So it goes for an entire city.” This traveler’s account from the Ukrainian capital in the autumn of 1933 hints at the disaster that afflicted the country in those grim years of the brutal man-made Famine. And this rare account comes from one of the very few Westerners allowed into Ukraine at that time. Harry Lang was the labor editor of the Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Daily Forward, or Forverts, published in New York. It was then the largest and most influential Yiddish newspaper in the world and the largest non-English newspaper in the United States. Lang and his wife Lucy spent several weeks traveling freely throughout Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. They […]