The freezing wind cut through my thin leather jacket and tattered Yankees cap as I ducked my head low between my shoulders and hugged my arms for warmth. My sneakers crunched Kiev’s December snow as I made my way through the Ukrainian capital, intent on reaching the city’s central square, known as the Maidan. Ahead of me a line of minibuses stretched perpendicular to the street, blocking off access. I continued my slow march through the frigid conditions, placing one numb foot in front of the other, intent only on skirting the blockade when an armored member of the Berkut, Ukraine’s riot police, yelled something in unintelligible Russian and motioned for me to head back. “What the hell am I doing here?” I wondered as I turned away, searching for a clear path between my hotel and the site of Ukraine’s second popular revolt in less than a decade.At the time I was the Diaspora correspondent for The Jerusalem Post with a beat that encompassed Jewish communal, religious and political life on several continents. I had been lured – or more accurately, had lured myself – to this former Soviet republic’s capital by the promise of a story involving antisemitism, neo-Nazis, and a violent revolution that had many of the country’s approximately 70,000 Jews in the grips of existential fear. I would soon learn that things were rarely that simple.
Before entering the Maidan proper, however, I was determined to enter the beast’s lair, as I grandiosely thought of it at the time: the Kiev city council building, which had recently been taken by fighters loyal to the far-right nationalist Svoboda party and turned into a makeshift protest headquarters.It was primarily my interest in Svoboda that had brought me to Kiev. How, I wondered, was the local Jewish community faring during a revolution in which neo-Nazis were playing such a prominent role? They certainly weren’t the majority in any sense, but they were a highly visible presence on the streets.
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if(window.location.pathname.indexOf("656089") != -1){console.log("hedva connatix");document.getElementsByClassName("divConnatix")[0].style.display ="none";}Blocking the doors of the imposing Soviet-era municipal building were several masked men wearing Svoboda armbands and orange construction helmets, one of which was emblazoned with the Wolfsangel, a Germanic symbol popular among neo-Nazis. I joined a line of protesters and we moved forward, as one by one the helmeted nationalists allowed us through the wooden and glass doors into the building’s lobby.Barely breathing as I walked past Svoboda propaganda plastered across the foyer’s walls, I made my way through the crowd and up a grand marble stairway to the second floor, where helmeted men were rolling up fire hoses on the slick tiles next to the windows overlooking the street below.I was far from the only journalist who covered the protests and subsequent war from a Jewish perspective, but as the conflict dragged on and increasing numbers of Jews were displaced, the number of my colleagues continuing to travel to Ukraine rapidly decreased. I, however, felt compelled to continue covering the conflict, seeing my mother and grandparents in the miserable refugees who had lost everything to a war in which both sides used the specter of antisemitism as a propaganda weapon, but really could not care less about the Jews.
It was during a visit to the city of Dnipropetrovsk (now called Dnipro) in September 2014 that I decided to write a book.
I had just interviewed Andrei Frumkin, an IDP (Internally Displaced Person) from Donetsk. As the war intensified, Andrei and his sister began considering aliyah, but decided to remain in Ukraine out of concern for their mother, who was all but immobile due to illness and age.While he had initially vacillated, Andrei’s subsequent experience with the shelling convinced him that flight was his only option. Walking down the street one day, he heard the whine of incoming shells and threw himself to the sidewalk. As he hugged the ground, the rough pavement pressed against his body, he saw a woman struck by shrapnel. He was scuttling over to offer assistance when she suddenly stood up, one of her arms severed completely, and walked off, evidently in shock. After that, he told me, “It became impossible to be in the city anymore.”He made arrangements to leave, hiring an ambulance to transport his mother through the lines into government-controlled territory. Arriving at a checkpoint controlled by the separatists, he was initially refused passage but was eventually allowed to continue his journey, only to find himself caught in the crossfire. Arriving later in Dnipropetrovsk, Andrei descended and looked at the ambulance. There were six bullet holes in the side.The next evening, going through my notes, I realized that I had significantly more material than I could possibly fit into a news dispatch. I had a great deal of sympathy for my interview subjects, stemming from my own family history. Both of my grandparents had fled to the Soviet Union following the German invasion of Poland. There my grandfather survived on the margins as an economic criminal, dealing in boots and other small items on the black market. My grandmother wasn’t as lucky. She was pressed into hard labor by the communists, forced to work long hours in an asbestos mine. After the war, they both ended up in a Displaced Persons camp in Ulm, Germany, where they met, married and had my mother. She was born a refugee.I also knew, from personal experience, how terrifying huddling in a shelter with one’s family during a bombardment could be. Several months earlier, Hamas had kidnapped and brutally murdered three yeshiva students in the Etzion settlement bloc. In response, the Israeli military had initiated a wide-ranging crackdown on the terrorist organization. Refusing to sit still while its operations in the West Bank were dismantled, Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip began firing rocket barrages into Israel, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis, including my family, to take refuge in shelters. It became a familiar, if always terrifying, ritual. The siren would go off, we would grab the children and huddle in our mamad, the concrete and steel reinforced safe room built into every Israeli apartment since the Gulf War.Given my affinity for the topic and the large amount of material I was collecting, I thought it might be a good idea to write a book chronicling the travails of Ukraine’s Jews. From now on I would collect as many testimonies as possible when reporting, and in the course of time, maybe something would come of it. My decision made, I realized that it was getting late and that I ought to turn in. That night I dreamed that I was on the sidewalk with Andrei Frumkin watching people get blown to bits. I woke up screaming, my body drenched with sweat.In his seminal novel Babi Yar, Ukrainian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov described the reasons which impelled him to risk his life and freedom to write truthfully in the face of Communist censorship. I think that his words, printed during the height of the Cold War, ring true today in our age of hybrid conflict, and perfectly capture my own emotions, all these decades later.“I did not write this book simply to recall the past,” Kuznetsov wrote of the German occupation of Kiev. “I am writing today…because the same sort of thing is happening now; and there is no guarantee whatever that even more sinister events will not occur tomorrow. Not the slightest guarantee… The world has learned nothing. It has become only a more gloomy place. It is crammed with misguided puppets and unthinking blockheads who, with the light of fanatical conviction in their eyes, are ready to shoot at any target their leaders may command, and trample underfoot any country they are sent to; and it is frightful to think of the weapons they have in their hands today. If you tell them out loud, to their faces, that they are being deceived and that they are no more than cannon fodder and tools in the hands of scoundrels, they won’t listen. They will say it is only a malicious slander. And if you produce facts, they just won’t believe you. They will say: ‘Such things never happened.’”But it did happen. And it is still happening. Caught between the torments of the dead, who have been denied the minimal dignity of accurate remembrance, and the suffering of the living, cursed with the burden of exile, there was simply no way that I could turn away and remain sane. And so I write.
The above was adapted from Sam Sokol’s book, Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews. (New York: Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, 2019)
From a fascist junta to a Jewish presidentUkraine has come a long way since the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity,” when pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and an interim government (which included several members of the far-right, antisemitic Svoboda Party) took over running the country. On April 21, Ukrainians streamed to the polls to vote for their second post-Maidan president, choosing Jewish comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky.
A political neophyte, Zelensky was well known to Ukrainians for playing accidental President Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko on the hit satire “Servant of the People.” Zelensky’s election makes Ukraine the first state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish president and Jewish prime minister (Volodymyr Groysman was chosen as prime minister in 2016). However, aside from some anxiety among some sectors of the Jewish community that Zelensky’s ascension could provoke antisemitism, most of the community doesn’t particularly see it as a significant development.
Certainly, the election showed that Ukraine has made great strides since the pogroms of the 20th century, and that Russian propaganda painting Ukraine as a fascist state is unfounded. But there is little hope in Ukraine’s Jewish community that Zelensky will govern as a Jew or take their concerns into special account.
There are already indications that he will likely soft-peddle the more offensive aspects of Ukraine’s historical memory policy, which has seen widespread efforts to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators, and there is a decent chance that he will work to cut Kiev’s ties to militant nationalist groups such as Azov and the National Corps. But such moves have little, if anything, to do with his ethnic and religious background.
Still, given how voters repudiated incumbent Petro Poroshenko and his penchant for waving the flag and engaging in nationalist excesses, many Ukrainians are will likely be happy to see a more moderate leader chart their nation’s course, whatever his religion.