LUGANSK, Ukraine — In an unheated synagogue with no running water, a dozen Jews are trying to keep warm as temperatures here veer toward the single digits.
LUGANSK, Ukraine — In an unheated synagogue with no running water, a dozen Jews are trying to keep warm as temperatures here veer toward the single digits.
My meeting with Right Sector’s Borislav Bereza, newly elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, took place on a sunny Friday morning. We met at a table with a magnificent view of the Dnieper River on the third-floor food court of the Sky Mall in Kiev.
Ukraine’s 450-seat parliament elected on Thursday its first Jewish Speaker, as it convened for the first time since the embattled country’s elections in October.
With his gray beard, AK-47 assault rifle and camouflage fatigues, Asher Joseph Cherkassky looks like an Eastern European version of Fidel Castro. But Cherkassky’s look is no attempt to emulate the Cuban revolutionary or any of his bearded associates. Rather, it is the result of his being an Orthodox Jew who is also a fighter in the Dnipro Battalion — a Ukrainian paramilitary force tasked with blocking any Russian advance from the east.
Andrey Boltushenko, a security guard of the "Menora" Jewish center, was buried on October 20, 2014 in the village of Peschanka in the Dnipropetrovsk region. He fought against terrorists and Russian troops as a soldier...
Igor Kolomoisky is not a man to trifle with niceties. The third-richest citizen in Ukraine – and suddenly one of the most influential politicians in the torn country – enjoys discomfiting people who meet him for the first time.
Aleksandr Zadov recalls the last time war forced him out of his home in Donetsk. The year was 1941, and Nazi troops were occupying the eastern Ukrainian city. He and his parents escaped under the cover of darkness to Kazakhstan.
Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski and Garik Zylberbord had been close for years. Zylberbord was one of Vishedski’s earliest friends and supporters when the rabbi first arrived in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 1993. The two remained in close contact as the conflict in the eastern part of the country, which began back in February, burned into war and forced the rabbi to flee to Kiev just two weeks ago.
Ukrainian supreme court forbade the municipality of Lviv from going ahead with controversial plans for commemorating Jewish heritage sites. The Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine issued its ruling Wednesday against the city’s plans to design and build projects that would commemorate three Jewish sites instead of restoring them.
No longer just a World War II scenario, in the past weeks several hundred Jews from pro-Russian rebel Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine have fled their war-torn cities with little other than the clothing on their backs. Their unlikely “displaced persons camp”? A Chabad facility for children in western Ukraine’s Zhitomir, a two-hour drive west of Kiev.
Ukrainians and Jews have lived as neighbours for centuries, creating and sharing enduring cultures that continue to inform their identities today. Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE) is proud to present Part 1 of an integrated narrative of these two peoples in the belief that there is much to be gained by viewing their historical experience together, in all its complexity.
Since its launch in September 2022, the UJE Timeline has earned international recognition by winning eight international awards:
The 'Encounter' prize aims to build on the common experiences of Ukrainians and Jews over the centuries, expressed in literature and nonfiction. The Prize will be awarded annually to the most influential work in literature and nonfiction (in alternate years) that fosters Ukrainian-Jewish understanding, helping solidify Ukraine's place as a multi-ethnic society and giving truth to the motto, "Our stories are incomplete without each other."
The goal of the richly illustrated catalogue is to present an integrated narrative that looks at the experience of these two peoples together, in all its complexity — through periods of crisis, as well as long stretches of normal co-existence and multifaceted cultural interaction from antiquity to 1914.
