(Jewish Group) The stormy, yet rich history of the Jews in Ukraine

[Behind the Aegis]

Ukraine is in the news. Daily reports pour in about the buildup of Russian troops – as many as 130,000, to the north, east and south of the country. Diplomatic activity is also escalating but without a clear path to resolving the situation. NATO is on alert. Ukrainian civilians are beginning to train militia-style to resist a possible invasion. Worst of all are the projections of massive casualties, especially if the capital city of Kiev is attacked. It is a “night of watching” (Exodus 12:42) for Ukraine.

In the middle of this storm is Ukraine’s Jewish community and remarkably, although only 100,000 Ukrainians are Jews at this moment, the President of the country, Volodymr Zelensky, is Jewish and embraces his identity. Few countries, including the United States, can make that claim. Eight decades ago, members of the Zelensky family were murdered during the Holocaust and others fought in the Red Army.

Another surprising fact about the Ukrainian Jewish heritage is that the novel on which the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” is based, “Tevye the Dairyman”, is most likely modeled on shtetlach in Ukraine where Tevye’s creator, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), grew up. At the end of the 19th century, Ukraine was in the Pale of Settlement, a vast area established by the Czars to quarantine Jews along the western border of the vast Russian Empire. The Pale included not only Ukraine but also Poland and other large centers of Jewish population. Indeed, the territory of the Pale was the site of the largest Jewish population in the world until the Shoah.

Today, it’s hard to know exactly how many Jews live in Ukraine, but it’s believed to be about 100,000, down considerably from 400,000 before the massive waves of Jewish emigration at the end of the 20th century. At its high point, Ukraine had more than a million Jews whose native language was nearly 100% Yiddish.

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[elleng]

1. *Currently, Ukraine has the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe

following France, Great Britain and Russia but ahead or equal to Germany. . .

There is literally a new shtetl-like community in “the old country”, in addition to the massive annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage. . .

Historians speculate that Jews have lived in the Ukraine at least since the 9th century. By 1648, the Jewish population of Ukraine, then part of Poland, was massive and as many as 20,000 Jewish civilians (revised from earlier estimates of as high as 250,000) were killed during the Khmelnytsky Cossack Uprising, 1648-1655. . . The classic writer Sholem Aleichem was born in the shtetl of Pereiaslav, south of Kiev; the “father of the Yiddish theater”, [Avrom Goldfaden[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Goldfaden) (1840-1908), was born in Starokostyantyniv, western Ukraine, and the poet and songwriter Itzik Manger (1901-1969) was born in Czernowitz (Tshernovits), which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but is now Ukraine. . .

Long caught in the crosshairs of history, Ukraine’s Jewish population suffered terribly during the pogroms of the late 19th century, leading to massive Jewish emigration, principally to the United States. They also sparked the development of the Zionist movement. Odessa became a leading port city for early Zionist pioneers on their way to Turkish Palestine, some of whom trained in Jewish agricultural schools in the region. They went on to help create some of the original kibbutzim. Indeed, a number of Zionist leaders including Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Golda Meir and Natan Sharansky were born in Ukraine.'>>>

((Gotta light some candles.))