During the first glorious days of the Ukrainian summer, well-dressed women
wearing impossibly high-heeled shoes strolled down the stylish streets of
downtown Kiev. Music students sat in front of the famed golden domes of the
refurbished St. Michael Monastery singing Ukrainian folk songs as they plucked
the strings of the traditional bandores – a wooden lute-like instrument – hoping
for a few coins from passing tourists.
And inside the opulent Kiev
Intercontinental Hotel in the upscale center of the Ukrainian capital, rabbis,
priests, imams, one Buddhist priest and a few hundred lay people of different
faiths gathered to discuss the new challenges confronting religions and their
role in democracies and secular societies at the Kiev Interfaith Forum’s Second
International Faith Conference. Hosted by Ukrainian Member of Parliament
Oleksandr Feldman, who is one of the founders of the Forum, the conference was
meant to give religious leaders an opportunity to discuss the role of religion
in a time of widespread social and political changes.
For Jewish
participants the conference was also a chance to reassess the status of
Ukrainian Jews in the land where some of the bloodiest pogroms and Nazi
massacres against Jews took place.
“I am happy I live here in a time when
anti-Semitism is looked on as a sign of bad taste,” says the well-dressed and
debonair Feldman, 52, a small black kippa clearly visible on his short-cropped
dark hair. “I can’t say we don’t have a problem; these anti-Semitic attacks are
something that happens, but they are stopped by the police and are dealt with by
intervention even of the president.”
Feldman, who is also president of
the Ukrainian Jewish Committee and rediscovered his own Jewish roots only a
decade ago, concedes, nevertheless, that there are still some political parties
that play on anti- Semitic biases for political gain. On the other hand, he
says, one small act by Israel – the reciprocal removal of visa restrictions on
travel to and from the Ukraine – has actually done a lot to counter these
biases. “People are reacting to rhetoric less and less,” he asserts.
So
while some European leaders have come out against Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych because of accusations of corruption and suppression of political
opponents, it seems the Ukrainian president has been good for the Jews. Indeed,
the Passovereve attack on an Orthodox Kiev resident notwithstanding, Chabad
Rabbi Jonathan Markovitz, who has served the Kiev Jewish community for 12 years,
says the current Ukrainian government has made fighting anti-Semitism a top
priority. In fact, says Markovitz, Yanukovych immediately and strongly condemned
the attack on the young Jewish man.
“Everything has changed. If
two years ago the government disregarded anti-Semitism, the current president is
trying very much to move toward the Jews,” says the 42-year-old emissary who was
born in Kiev and moved to Israel with his family when he was
three.
“Every year before the Jewish holidays he addresses the Jewish
community. I don’t usually hear any anti-Semitic remarks from people when I walk
down the street.”
Although he doesn’t normally run into anti-Semitism as
he goes about his business in his dark suit, hat and long bushy beard, which
mark him as a Jew, he can’t say that anti-Semitism has been purged from
Ukrainian society, Markovitz adds. Just recently, he notes, a youth accosted him
with a Nazi salute and “Heil Hitler.” Markovitz, whose own grandparents perished
at Auschwitz, often goes to schools to talk about the Holocaust.
“The
hardest thing is when I speak to older people and they try to justify what
happened,” he says. “They say it was war.”
Through his work in the
parliament and the Kiev Interfaith Forum, Feldman has done a lot to bring the
issue of religious tolerance to the forefront, at least, of Ukrainian politics,
notes Markovitz.
Outside the hotel a small group of Ukrainian Orthodox
women were voicing their opposition to dialogue between religions – even among
different Christian denominations.
Mainly kerchief-headed grannies and
middle-aged women, they stood stern-faced and stoic, reciting prayers as they
clutched icons of Jesus and Mary, prayer beads and posters.
“We are
Christians and any unity of religions only brings about the anti-Christ,”
explains one woman in halting English, as another looks on with visible disdain
towards a journalist asking questions. “We don’t believe in dialogue with
others. We are Orthodox and all the other religions are not the proper way.” The
women were from a tiny rogue conservative faction of the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church, and their protest against the participation of one of their bishops in
the conference stemmed from an internal political-religious schism between the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Young
Ukrainian journalist Vlad Golovin, who moderated one of the conference sessions
and identifies himself as a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, assures
that the women represent only a very marginal and inconsequential segment of the
Church.
For him, he said, the long Christian history of his country –
which was only interrupted for 70 years during the takeover of the Soviets – is
one of tolerance. He insists that there were some priests in Kiev who spoke out
against pogroms targeting Jews.
“We are a different society. We can see
and understand, we can find information about different societies,” he says. “In
the 19th century you could tell me to hate the Jews but in the 21st century you
tell me the same thing and I can check the facts on the Internet to find out the
truth.”
His country, he says, is more tolerant than it was in the past.
“We are not the only religion. I have friends from all different
churches,” he says. “Those who think otherwise are a very small number of people
and they are not significant.”
But for people with a strong sense of
Ukraine’s dark past, the ethnocentric closed-mindedness expressed by the women
demonstrators awakens fears of a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Taking into
consideration the location of the conference, the history of brutal
anti-Semitism here is hard to ignore.
Not far from all this resurrection
of religious devotion and talk of dialogue and tolerance – all of which would
have been inconceivable some two decades ago under the Soviets – lie the deep
ravines of the lush Babi Yar forest, which only some dozens of years ago were
soaked with Jewish blood in a two-day Nazi orgy of mass murder in which an
estimated 34,000 Ukrainian Jews were forced to undress and shot to death at
close range on September 29-30, 1941. Thousands more Jews and other Ukrainians
were murdered there in the ensuing months.
In all, it is estimated that
some 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were killed during the Holocaust – both in Nazi
concentration camps and in the hundreds of ravines and gullies dotting the
forests throughout the Ukraine, not only by the Germans but also at the hands of
Ukrainians who were only too eager to collaborate.
According to an
estimate by Vladimir Danilenko of the State Archive of the Kiev Division, at
least 100,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in violent pogroms from the start of
the last century until World War II and thousands more were killed in the
previous century, when until 1913 Jews constituted up to 30 percent of the
population of Kiev.
With its three synagogues, one mikve and one kosher
restaurant, which serves up a mean borscht, the Kiev Jewish community is lively
and warm, says Markovitz, but it is still only a shadow of the vibrant community
it once was before World War II , when there were some 40 synagogues and Jewish
centers of learning scattered throughout the city. “Today I stand here and I
think we have won,” says the rabbi during a break in the conference, sipping tea
as two Orthodox bishops chat nearby. “It is not just me personally who is an
answer to anti-Semitism, but I can be proud of the Israeli army and I can say
kaddish and blessings and the Ukrainian army will stand by my side for
protection.”
Though the variety of activities for today’s Jewish youth
may not be as diverse as that in London, for example, the atmosphere for the
young Jews of Kiev has indeed improved since the 1990s, notes Jewish activist
Victoria Godik, the 29-year-old president of the Ukrainian Union of Jewish
Students (UUJS). Young people are not afraid to walk around the city wearing a
Star of David necklace or a kippa, but there is still more to be done, she
says.
“It still is not enough. I want to stay Jewish and raise my
children in a Jewish environment,” she says, noting however that a move to
Israel is not in the picture for her in the near future. Though the days of
quaint Jewish shtetl life may be gone, the big cities can still be thriving
centers of Jewish life, Godik believes. “I think the Diaspora has a right to
exist and if we have a strong Diaspora, we have a strong Israel and vice
versa.”
Nevertheless, sitting in one of the large conference rooms of the
hotel, she notes the proximity of Babi Yar and adds that despite the apparent
integration of Ukrainian Jews into Kiev society, the Holocaust, including the
story of Babi Yar, unfortunately still remains a topic relegated only to the
Jewish realm. The history of the forest massacre is taught only in Jewish
schools. Indeed, the only memorial dedicated specifically to the Jewish victims
of the atrocity was put up after the fall of the Soviet Union by the Ukrainian
Jewish community.
Despite the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of the older
generations, Lyudmyla Sukhareva, 23, event coordinator for the UU JS, says she
has been lucky in her young life not to have experienced any outward
anti-Semitism, although undeniably there is the passive “cultural”
anti-Semitism, which exists and is experiencing a resurgence in Europe, she
says. “We simply do not have proper education in Ukraine,” says Sukhareva. “In
order to combat anti-Semitism, we have to start in the schools and here we are
not even discussing that.”
Galina Pechayko, a 35-year-old organizational
powerhouse, is the deputy director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee and
Feldman’s right hand. She is not Jewish. When she applied for the position of
his assistant, she was unaware she would be working in a Jewish organization,
but it was irrelevant for her anyway, she says. “I’ve always been friendly with
Jews but for me there is no difference between people of different faiths,” she
says in a rare moment of rest during the conference. “If you don’t know Jews,
then maybe there are traces of some traditions of anti-Semitism, but it is not
rational.”
At the historical Kiev Pechersk Lavra Monastery compound
scores of young Ukrainian Orthodox seminarians and young priests joined by
faithful members of the Church lined the entrance, eager to greet Jerusalem
Greek Orthodox Patriarch Teophilos II, a key speaker at the conference, who was
also scheduled to lead a mass at the ancient compound.
As the patriarch
was showered with flowers and a warm welcome, other conference participants were
led by perky red-haired tour guide Natalie Markova, 21, on a tour of the
compound. They craned their necks to view the icons painted on the inside of the
monastery’s historical hospital chapel.
Markova, who is Ukrainian
Orthodox, cheerfully bounced through groups of tourists and worshipers, as she
led her charges back onto the bus. “For me there is no difference between
religions. It’s all part of our history,” she says, sporting a little girl’s
backpack with a pink-haired rag doll on her back, so her troupe can identify her
among the other groups of tourists.
On the last day of the conference,
which took place in a special parliamentary session, an Azerbaijani Muslim
clergyman sat at a roundtable almost directly across from an Armenian Orthodox
Christian priest. Despite the political tensions between the two nations, they
addressed each other cordially.
Pakistani imams shared the table with an
Israeli rabbi, a Catholic priest from Jordan, a Buddhist monk from Russia and a
representative of the Orthodox Church of the United States.
There were
only two women among the conference speakers, but in a country where tourist
maps include photographs of women with abundant cleavage and pouty lips
advertising exclusive “men’s clubs,” it appears that the issue of equality of
the sexes is being left for a later time.
“I don’t feel any difference in
the way I am treated,” Forum founder Feldman tells The Jerusalem Report. “At
least there is no difference at the high levels. Probably there are some people
who still harbor anti-Semitic sentiments but it is not a big problem. We
are working on it. We are a very new republic with a young history and with a lot
of time ahead of us.”