CHERNIVTSI, Ukraine – In the elegant, slightly faded lobby of the Hotel Bukovyna, a group of gray-haired, eccentrically-dressed academics sipped cognac and argued in Yiddish. The collective represented just a handful of the over 100 scholars, enthusiasts, and Jewish community advocates from 12 countries around the world that assembled earlier this month for the International Commemorative Conference of Yiddish Culture and Language in western Ukraine.

The Ukrainian port city of Odessa, once home to hundreds of thousands of Jews, is experiencing a ‘golden age’ - with modern Israel proving an unlikely inspiration. If you know where to look, the ghosts of Odessa’s Jewish past are everywhere, haunting and playful: in the pizza restaurant blaring “Hava Nagila” across from the Potemkin Steps; in the forshmak (chopped herring), tzimmes and gefilte fish served in the city’s oldest eating establishments; in the Jewish jokes and Yiddish words that pepper local patois; to the sign above an overgrown courtyard that reads “The State of Israel was born here.”

Volunteers have rescued dozens of Jewish headstones used to pave a street in the western Ukraine city Lviv.

“The whole street is made from ‘matzevot,'” Sasha Nazar, director of the Lviv Volunteer Center of the Hesed Arieh All-Ukrainian Jewish Charitable Foundation, told Jewish Heritage Europe, using the Hebrew word for gravestones.

They came dancing into the Brodsky Choral Synagogue, a giant Romanesque building in downtown Kiev, tallit-covered Torah scrolls in their arms.

Since last year the official symbol of Victory Day in Ukraine has been the red poppy, an international symbol honoring all victims of war.

Speech of the Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, co-President of the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations (Vaad) Ukraine Andrei Adamovsky, March 23, 2015.

Like all conflicts, the one in eastern Ukraine has driven people from their homes. As of mid-February, over a million Ukrainians were refugees within their own country, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which tracks such figures worldwide. Among them, two groups face a particularly complicated life.