TORONTO – The Jewish presence in Ukraine dates back 2,000 years. A traveling exhibit highlighting and exploring the relationship between the two communities – “A Journey Through the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter from Antiquity to 1914” – was recently mounted by the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter (UJE), which since 2008 has been studying and supporting this encounter.
Alti Rodal, co-director of UJE.
The exhibit was shown on July 8-19, at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada at St. Vladimir Institute in Toronto. It has already been to the Jewish Schwartz/Reisman Community Center, north of Toronto, and to Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Center in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It is going next to Edmonton, Alberta, and then to the Jewish Public Library (UNF) in Montreal.
The Ukrainian and Jewish communities in Ukraine, as pointed out in the exhibit, lived through “long periods of normal co-existence and multi-faceted cultural cross-fertilization.” Yet, because Jewish-Ukrainian relations have also had to bear stereotyping, the exhibit focused on “an integrated narrative of these two peoples… presented in the belief that there is much to be gained by viewing their historical experience together, in all its complexity.”
Canada’s Minister of Finance Joe Oliver.
The exhibit consists of 35 large panels, each dedicated to one or more subjects – for example, the 13th-16th centuries, Russian rule in the 1750-1790s, Hasidism, the 1861 reforms, modernist Ukrainian writers. Where appropriate, two “sides” of the story are highlighted, for example, the city of Uman in Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish Memory.
The exhibit “brings out the complex environment of successive dominating empires and states and demonstrates the transformation of two stateless peoples and how their modern identities were formed.”
The first panels show the beginnings of the historical experience: when Jews came as merchants to Crimea and settled in the southern steppes and with the Greeks in the Black Sea colonies. Some had fled Byzantium, and in the early medieval period some settled in Hungaria, on lands that later became Zakarpattia. In the Kyivan Rus’ period (960-1240) some Jews lived in Kyiv’s Jewish section – Zhidove. The Kyivan princes welcomed the participation of Jews in trade and finance. From the 11th to the 13th century, Kyiv became a refuge for Jews and the Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities.
After the fall of Kyiv, Prince Danylo came to rule in Galicia-Volhynia and invited East Europeans to participate; in the period 1240-1349, Jews helped to establish Lviv as a center of international trade between Europe and the East. In 1600 the Tatars – Turkish descendents of the Golden Horde – established the Crimean Khanate and from 1475 ran a wide-ranging slave trade in the southern steppes of Ukraine, in which the Jews took part.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, Polish kings assumed power over the western and southern principalities of Kyivan Rus’ and brought Volhynia, Galicia and Podilia under royal protection. They also welcomed the Jews who were then being expelled from Western Europe.
Poland underwent territorial expansion, and the Treaty of Lublin in 1573 created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The colonizers were Polish landowners (or magnates), and the rural population became proprietary serfs under them. Some magnates even had their own private towns. The Jews become intermediaries between the Catholic landowners and the Orthodox peasants. This was the birth of the “arenda”– a leasing system to Jews of economic functions via which the Jews were then caught between the landlords’ need for profits and the collection of the burdens placed on the peasants. When the Union of Brest in 1596 created the Uniate Church, this exasperated religious divisions. Whereas the Jews enjoyed a high degree of community autonomy, the cartographer le Vasseur de Beauplan – who produced the first maps of Ukraine – wrote that “the situation of the peasantry is pitiful.”
Under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jewish communities – from 1569 to the 1640s, the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenzi – grew 13-fold and prospered. They built synagogues – many in the vernacular architectural style of Ukrainian wooden churches. The Jews settled in shtetls (small market towns) where the Yiddish language developed and which gave birth to a Jewish folk culture. However, some major Polish cities under royal control obtained a decree forbidding Jews to live or trade there (Kyiv was one of these, receiving a decree in 1619). Because they worked in trade and small manufacturing, Jews were largely an urban population. At the end of the 18th century, Lviv was 32 percent Jewish and only 15 percent Ukrainian.
As the Poles were responsible for protecting the Jewish settlements against the Tatars, they hired peasants to do this and the peasants thus acquired military strength. In mid-17th century, the leader of the Kozaks who had fled the settlements to the steppes, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, led an uprising against Polish rule.
The exhibit takes care to give both stories: Who was Khmelnytsky to Ukrainians? To Jews? In the historical memory of Ukrainians, Khmelnytsky is a dominant figure in Ukrainian national history and is associated with freedom from oppression. The picture of Khmelnytsky for the Jews is based on the chronicle of Nathan Hanover (1653), which portrays the Kozaks as barbaric perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence. However, the text of the exhibit points out that recent scholarship claims that Hanover overstated the number of Jewish victims tenfold and exaggerated the devastation of the community. It also notes that his chronicle is “not merely a chronicle of the events, it sets out a topology of martyrdom and archetypal Jewish responses to persecution and weaves stories attributed to various witnesses into a literary account in which historical accuracy was not the primary objective. Nevertheless, its impact in memory has been deep and enduring.”
The text describes the 1861 reforms in the Russian Empire as the “rise of official anti-Ukrainianism,” but in the panel on “Ukrainian National Awakening” it points out the anti-Semitic elements of the writers Gogol and Kostomarov, and the ambivalent attitude toward Jews by Drahomanov. Under “Pogroms in the Russian Empire,” the text clearly says, “During the turmoil of the first Russian revolution around 650 pogroms occurred, mostly officially orchestrated with the support of the police and the army, and carried out by the Black Hundreds (monarchists, Orthodox, Russian nationalists, anti-revolutionary militants). Pogroms are primarily associated with attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in 1881-1921.”
A panel on “Ukrainian-Jewish Cooperation” points out the modernist Ukrainian writers who were supportive of solidarity with Jews (Khotkevych, Vynnychenko). Another on “Ukrainian-Jewish Political Cooperation” (during the period of the Central Rada) mentions the “Jewish-friendly” governments of the time, notes that Yiddish was accepted as an official language and that there were Jewish members in the government.
The exhibit notes that there is much to be gained by viewing the Ukrainian and Jewish historical experience together, in all its complexity. Despite periods of crisis and intermittent violence, Ukrainians and Jews have lived as neighbors for centuries, creating and sharing enduring cultures that continue to inform their identities today.
“A Journey through the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: from Antiquity to 1914” included live music and a kosher sampling of Ukrainian and Jewish cuisine.
The chair of the UJE is James Temerty, its principal funder. The exhibit was curated by Alti Rodal, a co-director of UJE. A special guest was Minister of Finance Joe Oliver.
A panel of the exhibit “A Journey Through the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter from Antiquity to 1914.”