(Jewish Group) Ukrainian Jews have thrived under democracy. I pray my ancestral country endures

[Behind the Aegis]

In 1929, my great-grandfather was given two weeks to leave Ukraine. Soviet authorities were intent on seizing his business.

My great-grandfather Avrum owned a house in Uman and a dacha— a summer home — in Crimea. He was a NEPman— one of the successful traders who sprung up under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Like the kulaks (peasants rich enough to own considerable land and hire labor), NEPmen like my great-grandfather were soon deported, arrested and sentenced to death all over the USSR.

Avrum took the warnings seriously, taking his wife (my grandmother), along with her three siblings and two nieces, to Cuba, where they waited two years for US visas. They wore fur coats on their exit from the country, knowing that everything else would be stolen at the border.

Avrum’s brother Beryl, who was also his business partner, refused to leave. He was never heard from again.

more...

[Ghost Dog]

1. Do many Jews consider these and neighboring areas as ancestral lands

dating from the (European) early middle ages, may I please ask?

The Khazars[a] (/ˈxɑːzɑːrz/) were a semi-nomadic Turkic people that in the late 6th-century CE established a major commercial empire covering the southeastern section of modern European Russia, southern Ukraine, Crimea, and Kazakhstan.[10] They created what for its duration was the most powerful polity to emerge from the break-up of the Western Turkic Khaganate.[11] Astride a major artery of commerce between Eastern Europe and Southwestern Asia, Khazaria became one of the foremost trading empires of the early medieval world, commanding the western marches of the Silk Road and playing a key commercial role as a crossroad between China, the Middle East and Kievan Rus'.[12][13] For some three centuries (c. 650–965) the Khazars dominated the vast area extending from the Volga-Don steppes to the eastern Crimea and the northern Caucasus.[14]...



Khazaria long served as a buffer state between the Byzantine Empire and both the nomads of the northern steppes and the Umayyad Caliphate and Abbasid Caliphate, after serving as the Byzantine Empire's proxy against the Sasanian Empire. The alliance was dropped around 900. Byzantium began to encourage the Alans to attack Khazaria and to weaken its hold on Crimea and the Caucasus and sought to obtain an entente with the rising Rus' power to the north, which it aspired to convert to Christianity.[15] Between 965 and 969, the Kievan Rus' ruler, Sviatoslav I of Kiev, as well as his allies, conquered the capital, Atil, and ended Khazaria's independence. The state became the autonomous entity of Rus' and then of Khazar former provinces (Khwarazm in which Khazars were known as Turks, just as Hungarians were known as Turks in Byzantium) in Volga Bulgaria.

Determining the origins and nature of the Khazars is closely bound with theories of their languages, but it is a matter of intricate difficulty since no indigenous records in the Khazar language survive, and the state was polyglot and polyethnic. The native religion of the Khazars is thought to have been Tengrism, like that of the North Caucasian Huns and other Turkic peoples.[16] The polyethnic populace of the Khazar Khaganate appears to have been a multiconfessional mosaic of pagan, Tengrist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim worshippers.[17] Some of the Khazars (i.e., Kabars) joined the ancient Hungarians in the 9th century. The ruling elite of the Khazars was said by Judah Halevi and Abraham ibn Daud to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century,[18] but the scope of the conversion to Judaism within the Khazar Khanate remains uncertain.[19]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars

[Behind the Aegis]

2. I am going to take this question as one of good faith.

I will, however, caution you because you are in very 'dangerous' territory in regard to bringing in the Khazars. This "theory" is often used to claim the Jews of Europe, especially the Ashkenazi, are not "real" Jews and it is used as anti-Semitic propaganda, especially regarding Israel and Black Israelites. That said...

The ancestral land in question here is Ukraine. For many Jews, it is an ancestral home, in the way many others call England, Norway, France, their ancestral homes. They have family that lived there for decades, if not centuries. My father's grandparents (at least one) comes from Podolsk the other from a Ukranian shtetl that probably no longer exists. Prior to WWII, many Jews called that part of The Pale of the Settlement home...for centuries. When my great, great-grandfather came, Podolsk was considered a Russian city.

[Ghost Dog]

3. Thanks for the understanding. It's just history I'm interested in, respectfully, ,

and so I hear you when you say that these fine lands are of great ancestral significance, thanks.

[Behind the Aegis]

4. No problem. I am familiar with some of your posts, so I figured it was an honest question.

The Khazar Theory, though, is something that can be very divisive and used in really bad ways. The Pale of the Settlement spanned many countries and many countries swapped borders over the years. Trying to do my father's genealogy has been a MAJOR pain in the ass because of cities shifting nationalities, spellings from non-Latin languages, and just general bad acting over the past centuries from anti-Semites has made tracing Jewish genealogy difficult.

[Ghost Dog]

5. Yep. I see there has been much turmoil in the region over the centuries,

no doubt because it is such good land!

I think that, thousands of years ago, the Sea of Azov and Black Sea area was a cradle of civilisation.

[Ghost Dog]

6. Let me add that it seems both my Grandmothers

were born into Jewish families from somewhere in or near the Pale of Settlement, who would have emigrated in the 1880s to South Yorkshire, where coal-fired steam powered wool-weaving mills, in the North of England. Both married quite well, to gentiles. I felt always a certain sadness about them, though, as a child. There is no Jewish tradition in my immediate family now.

[OilemFirchen]

7. It's eerie and, for the moment, pleasantly surprising to see their emigration to Poland.

Poland is my maternal family's ancestral home going back many generations. They escaped the pogroms and all emigrated here. Post-WWII Poland has not been at all friendly to the Jewish people and modern Poland is especially hostile.

Here's hoping that the emigres are treated respectfully into the future.