8 | MARCH 10 • 2022 

PURELY COMMENTARY

opinion

Ukraine’s Jewish History 
Is Filled with Trauma
T

he first time I recall 
hearing someone 
describe a relationship 
akin to that between Eastern 
European Jews and the former 
Pale of Settlement was when 
my late African 
American 
uncle spoke of 
Mississippi.
Many immi-
grant groups 
in America — 
including those 
with roots in 
Ireland, Japan and Mexico — 
take pride in the lands they or 
their ancestors lived in before 
migrating to the new world. 
For Jews, the matter is differ-
ent. Many a pizzeria proudly 
flies an Italian flag. Very few 
bagel shops fly a Polish flag or 
a Ukrainian one. Though my 
family has always identified as 
proudly Litvish, meaning that 
we come from areas where the 
Litvish dialect of Yiddish was 
spoken, I cannot recall any 
of that pride being set aside 
for the nations of Belarus or 
Lithuania.
These were lands we left for 
good reason.
But they were also the lands 
where our families lived and 
our history happened. They 
are where our ancestors were 
born and buried, even if — too 
often — in mass or unmarked 
graves. Seeing that land 
bombed and invaded evokes a 
difficult sensation that deserves 
to be sorted through.
It would be a mistake to 
reduce Jewish history in 
Ukraine to suffering. Through 

the late 19th century, many 
Jews from around the Russian 
Empire migrated to Ukraine, 
drawn to the region’s relatively 
strong economy (the Israeli 
novelist Amos Oz’s father, for 
example, came to Odessa from 
Lithuania). Out of this melting 
pot emerged one of the richest 
stews of Jewish life, impact-
ing Jewish politics, religion, 
literature and language. Cities 
now under siege or threatened 
— Berdichev, Kyiv and Odessa 
— stand every inch as proud 
as Warsaw, Vilna or New York 
as centers of modern Jewish 
culture before the Holocaust. 
This is the land that produced 
the Ba’al Shem Tov, Golda Meir 
and Hayim Nahman Bialik, 
that was home to dozens of 
Hasidic dynasties. It is the 
backdrop to many of the sto-
ries of Sholom Aleichem. Tevye 
the Dairyman was a Ukrainian 
Jew.
And yet, the traumas associ-
ated with Ukraine are real, and 

the worst of the traumas have 
emerged in Ukraine’s many 
bids for independence. Bohdan 
Khmelnytsky remains among 
the greatest villains in Jewish 
history for the massacres his 
forces perpetrated in the 17th 
century. Even approximate fig-
ures for the death toll are hard 
to come by; Israeli historian 
Shaul Stampfer estimated that 
18,000 to 20,000 Jews, nearly 
half the Jewish population of 
Ukraine at the time, were killed 
by Khmelnytsky’s forces.
Worse yet were the pogroms 
inflicted by the Ukrainian 
Directorate under Semyon 
Petliura in the aftermath of 
World War I, when 50,000 to 
100,000 Jews were killed by 
Ukrainian nationalist forc-
es before their defeat at the 
hands of the Red Army. This 
was the greatest killing of 
Jews prior to the Holocaust 
20 years later. The details of 
the pogroms were so striking 
(mass rapes, extensive use of 

torture and, of course, kill-
ings) that when a Jew named 
Sholem Shwartzbard assas-
sinated Petliura in Paris in 
1926, a French court found 
Schwartzbard not guilty — 
because the French court 
believed the action justified. If 
not for Hitler and the Nazis, 
there is every reason to think 
that Petliura and the Ukrainian 
nationalists would be the cen-
tral emblem for evil in Jewish 
collective memory.
And yet, Nazism did come, 
and it found a willing col-
laborator in Petliura’s heirs. 
The overwhelming majority 
of Ukrainians fought against 
Germany, serving heroically 
in the ranks of the Red Army. 
Nearly 7 million Ukrainians 
— including some 1.5 million 
Jews— died at the hands of 
the German invaders. But the 
Ukrainian national movement, 
dominated by the Organization 
of Ukrainian Nationalists 
(OUN) and led by Stepan 

Joshua 
Meyers
Jta.org

An old age home in Nikolaev, 
Ukraine, c. 1928, was maintained by 
local aid societies and the American 
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

COURTESY JDC

