Our guest in the “Encounters” studio is Andrii Pavlyshyn, a Lviv-based historian, translator, and lecturer at the UCU [Ukrainian Catholic University]. In 2015 he became the first Ukrainian translator in the last sixty-five years to…
Ukrainian folk songs and Hasidic music. Mutual borrowings between the Ukrainian and Yiddish languages. Striking similarities in the architecture of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues and Ukrainian wooden churches. A fascinating new book, The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural…
Welcome to Ukrainian Jewish Heritage on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio. I’m Peter Bejger. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. An astonishing new film called Shimon’s Returns proves the point in a…
The historian Vitaliy Nakhmanovych talks about Babyn Yar in the postwar period, the Kurenivka mudslide, the 1966 demonstration, and the 2016 commemoration of the executions in 1941. Andrii Kobaliya: Please explain to our listeners why in…
Ukraine aroused a much bigger interest among Israelis in 2014-2017 than in previous decades. The events of the Maidan in Kyiv, the crisis in Crimea, the military conflict in Donbas, as well as the achievements…
[Editor’s Note: On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the State of Israel. It was a date that Zionist leader Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky would not live to see. Some eight years earlier,…
More than a thousand Israelis attended the third annual “Ethno-khutir” Ukrainian cultural heritage festival in Tel Aviv on 12 May 2017. The non-profit organization Israeli Friends of Ukraine, with the assistance of the Canadian charitable…
The Western Ukrainian town of Brody is on my mind today. This historic town has always been in the minds of several generations of Jewish traders, writers, rabbis, and immigrants to the New World. Boris…
The participants of a recent presentation on Ukrainian-Jewish relations were direct and unambiguous when asked about their perceptions of Ukrainians: Ukrainians are anti-Semites. Most cooperated with the Nazis during World War II. They carried out…
There is a classic expression that asserts “when cannons roar the muses fall silent.” In times of distress and upheaval, creativity and art may falter. However, there are always those artists who quietly and stubbornly…