Should Jews support Ukraine?
Such a weird question.
A sovereign nation has been invaded by a dictator
bent on overturning its government
and crushing its population.
And a heroic President is leading a determined nation,
and fighting for their freedom.
Of course Jews should support Ukraine!
Well, as it turns out, I've heard a bit of uneasiness
in some Jewish hearts and minds when it comes to Ukraine.
"Oh, Ukranians?
They're a bunch of anti-semites, aren't they?"
"Weren't they the worst of all during the Holocaust?"
Didn't so many of the pogroms happen on Ukrainian soil?
I'm Noam Weissman, the head of content at Unpacked.
And I'm obsessed with exploring interesting questions
about Judaism and Israel.
So, let's explore together.
What is the history of the Jewish people
and the country of Ukraine?
And how can that history inform how people
should view Ukraine today?
Let's pull the band-aid right off
and start with the one and only Bohdan Chmielnicki
a guy synonymous with evil in Judaism,
yet quite the hero in Ukrainian lore.
Dude even has a statue in Ukraine.
In 1648, Bohdan Chmielnicki led an army of Cossacks
and Tatars across Ukraine in a rebellion
against the Polish Nobles who ruled the land.
On his way he slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews.
The stories are brutal.
Men were burned, flayed, and drowned,
mothers watched their babies roasted
and brought to them as food.
And, to make matters worse,
because he rebelled against Polish domination,
Chmielnicki is a hero to Ukrainians.
Because I am kind of a weird guy,
I once randomly asked my refrigerator repair man,
who happens to be Ukrainian, what he thought of Chmielnicki,
and he told me straight up, he's considered a hero.
I was like, woah, you and I learned
very different histories.
So, with those memories,
Jews could be right to turn off the TV
and say good riddance.
Though of course, while we're at it,
we should say good riddance to Poland and Russia,
Germany, France, Spain, England, Italy.
The list of terrible times in all those countries
goes as long as the Jewish people's exile.
But as Jewish Historian Salo Baron pointed out,
our history is not just a cycle of books and pogroms,
pogroms and books.
Life is more complex than that.
There were times of flourishing, accomplishment,
and peace in those countries,
and arguably nowhere more so than in Ukraine!
Jews have lived in relative peace in Ukraine
since at least the 10th century.
By the 14th century, most of Ukraine was ruled
by Polish nobility
and the land was worked on by Ukrainian peasants.
The Jews served as middlemen.
They collected taxes for the Polish nobles
and leased the rights to mills.
It was a good time for the Jews in Ukraine,
but the Ukrainians were feeling the bite of servitude.
And here's where Chmielnicki shows up.
Groups of unhappy Ukrainian peasants
became known as Cossacks.
They were fierce horse-riding warriors
who fought against Tatar horsemen
employed by the Ottoman Empire.
And when they turned to revolt against the Polish nobility,
it was the Jewish middlemen who suffered horribly.
But when it was over, peace returned,
and the Jews flourished again with surprising speed.
Besides those flare-ups of horrible violence
for hundreds of years,
Ukrainians and Jews essentially lived side by side.
They traded recipes and customs.
Yiddish, the language of Jewish life in Europe,
is peppered with Ukrainian loan words.
Even such intimate words as Tatte and Zeide
come from Ukrainian and other Slavic languages.
Most traditional Ahkenazi Jewish foods
are just a few ingredients
away from traditional Ukrainian foods.
Like Latkes?
Try Deruni.
Like gefilte fish?
I don't.
They call it RYBA PO-YEVREIS'KY, or "Jewish Fish."
Like Ptchah?
Probably not.
And we can't blame you.
It's basically meat and garlic flavored jello.
Nobody likes it except old-school jews
and old-school Ukrainians and me.
I actually like it a lot.
Though they call it Holodets.
In the 17th century, Eastern Ukraine
became a part of Russia, and over the next 200 years
Jews began to suffer again
under state-sponsored antisemitism, forced assimilation,
and even pogroms of the Russian Czars.
Still, it continued to produce cultural heroes.
The Baal Shem Tov, who founded Hasidism was born
and died in Ukraine, and early Zionists, like Jabotinsky,
Bialik, and Ahad Ha'am arose in Ukraine
seeking an antidote to repressive Czarist rule.
From 1917 through 1921,
after the fall of the Russian empire
and the end of World War I,
Jews in Ukraine lived under both poles of human experience
at the same time.
When Ukrainians first took a stab
at creating their own modern country,
the Ukrainian People's Republic,
Jews were welcomed into the grand project
of nation building.
Yiddish was an official language
and a minister of Jewish Affairs served in the cabinet.
The first banknotes the fledgling government produced
were printed in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish,
and, look right there on the bottom,
in Hebrew lettered Yiddish.
But it wasn't all so wonderful.
Not even close.
In those same years there was civil war and strife,
and the country's soldiers,
untethered from their idealistic government,
were committing massive pogroms against Jews.
By 1921 the government had collapsed,
and most of Ukraine had become a Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1941, Hitler invaded Ukraine.
Ukrainian nationalists who had suffered under Soviet rule
were particularly violent in their attacks on Jews.
Many older people's memories of Ukrainians
come from those times, when Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
participated eagerly and gruesomely in the Holocaust,
and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews
throughout the country.
Under the Soviets, Jews lived better.
The Soviets took great pride in their roles
as anti-Nazi liberators.
It's a line that Putin himself used
in his invasion of Ukraine.
And yet the Soviets suppressed any acknowledgement
of the terrible deeds the Nazis did to Jews
just because they were Jewish.
But this brought Jews and Ukrainians together.
From the 1960s on, Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents
began to find common cause in their opposition
to Soviet rule.
After the fall of the Soviet Union,
many Ukrainian Jews emigrated to Israel, but many stayed.
And since then, as always,
Jews have faced incidents of antisemitism.
There's a rising far-right nationalist party in Ukraine,
and anti-semites do fight
in Ukraine's valorized Azov Battalion.
And yet, they've had jewish mayors, governors,
a prime minister, and in 2019,
Ukraine elected its first Jewish President, in a landslide.
In the last 300 years,
Ukraine has gone from Chmielnicki to Zelinsky.
With all of that in mind,
our question seems so binary now, doesn't it?
Should Jews Support the Ukrainian cause?
It assumes that Ukrainians were good or bad,
positive or negative.
It flattens a millennium of time
and millions of people into a nice black and white box.
Jews, however, are used to complexity.
In a time of increasingly black and white thinking,
a Jew can proudly stand up and shout "It's not so simple!"
The truth is that Jewish life in Ukraine was complex.
The terrible moments are necessary to acknowledge
and learn from.
Early Ukrainian Zionists knew that,
that's one of the reasons
they created the Jewish State of Israel,
as protection against the cycles of anti-semitism
that flare up in the diaspora.
But the good times must be acknowledged too.
And maybe that's why so many Jews return to Uman
to spend a month praying at the sites
of their holiest rabbis, like Rebbe Nachman,
who, you guessed it, is buried in Ukraine.
Here's how I try to think about it.
As a Jewish person, you can be aware of the tragedies
of your history within a nation,
you can come to terms with them
and still continue to hold Jewish oppressors accountable.
And as a Jew, you can still support that nation
in its fight against oppression and unprovoked war.
You can fight for democracy against dictatorships.
It's a strange position to be in,
but no one's better suited for it than the Jewish people.
Huge thank you to Dr. Henry Abramson
for teaching me so much of this history.