History of the Jews of Ukraine
Once Europe's largest Jewish community, Ukraine has had a major influence on the development of Ashkenazi Jewish culture.
The history of the Ukrainian Jewish community goes back over 1,000 years. Located in the Pale of Settlement, a territory at the western edge of the Russian empire where Jews were forced to live beginning in the late 18th century, the country was once home to over 1 million Jews and was among the largest Jewish communities in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. The country has played a significant role in Ashkenazi Jewish history as the birthplace of the Hasidic movement and a major locus of Yiddish culture prior to the Holocaust. The Baal Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidism), Yiddish playwright Sholem Aleichem, Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, and Israeli prime ministers Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir were all born in Ukraine. And for centuries Jews thrived there, despite repeated episodes of antisemitic violence that culminated in the Holocaust, which saw an estimated 1.5 million killed in that region alone and many more displaced.'>>>
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