A bold experiment: Ukrainian-Jewish relations and the Central Rada (08/29/99)

A bold experiment: Ukrainian-Jewish relations and the Central Rada

"A Prayer for the Government, Jews and Ukrainians in Revolutionary Times, 1917-1920" by Henry Abramson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 1999. 280 pp., maps, illus., ISBN 0-916458-88-1.

With the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, Jewish and Ukrainian political activists in Ukraine worked to overcome a long history of mutual antagonism by creating a new form of government based on the principles of "autonomism", a political theory that attempted to address the unique problems of multi-national states. A Ministry of Jewish Affairs was established within the new Ukrainian National Republic; currency was printed with Yiddish as well as Polish and Russian inscriptions alongside the Ukrainian; and other measures were adopted to satisfy the national aspirations of Jews and other ethnic minorities of the fledgling Ukrainian state.

This bold experiment in nationality relations, however, ended with the anarchic violence that swept the country. Amidst civil war and foreign intervention that resulted in unprecedented cruelty on a mass scale, roving bands attacked various minorities, resulting in the worst massacres of Jews in Europe in almost 300 years.

Paradoxically, some 40 percent of recorded pogroms against Jews were perpetrated by troops ostensibly loyal to the very same government that was simultaneously extending unprecedented civil rights to the Jewish population.

"A Prayer for the Government" explores this paradox, using formerly restricted Soviet archives, the extensive documentation of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and secondary sources in Slavic and Jewish languages. It sheds new light on the relationship between the successive Ukrainian governments and the communal violence, and discusses in-depth the role of Symon Petliura, the Ukrainian leader who was later assassinated by a Jew claiming revenge for the pogroms.

Henry Abramson, a native of northern Ontario, is an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. He teaches in the department of History and the Program of Holocaust and Judaic Studies.

This 280-page work is richly illustrated with period photographs, explanatory maps and graphs. Hardcover ($34.95) and softcover ($18.95) editions are available from: Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138. telephone, (800) 448-2242; fax, (800) 962-4983.

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