A Stellar Autumn…
The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter has been very active with several cultural initiatives in Ukraine and Canada this past autumn. The season started in early September with UJE at the 6th Annual International Poetry Festival Meridian Czernowitz poetry festival in Chernivtsi, the capital of Bukovyna. Immediately afterwards, UJE had a prominent presence at the very busy Lviv Book Forum in Halychyna’s capital with the sponsorship of numerous panel discussions with a distinguished array of guests on a wide variety of topics, including the Shoah, Jewish heritage and museum issues, art in totalitarian conditions, and the challenges of translation, as well as book presentations, and a staged reading. An additional initiative took place at the Molodist International Film Festival in Kyiv with the global premiere on October 29 of the documentary film Finding Babel, which was made possible with significant funding from UJE.
As it has for several years now, UJE was also present at the Toronto Ukrainian Festival, where a record number of attendees visited the UJE booth. Autumn proved important as the UJE-produced film Saved by Sheptytsky was shown at Limmud FSU in Ukraine and Canada. The film tells the story of three Jewish children who were saved during the war because of the efforts of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, who headed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from 1901 until his death in 1944. The film will be shown in Israel and the U.S. in coming months.
Stay tuned for additional reports on these and other events to be presented on our website. We wish our readers a Happy Holiday season.
