COLEBROOK, Conn. – Since 2011, the Bobriwka campsite in northwestern Connecticut has hosted a weeklong music workshop where children and parents have learned how to play the traditional Ukrainian instrument, the bandura. This year, in addition to the usual bandura lessons, choral rehearsals, nature walks, sports and outdoor activities, the children and parents at the “Bandura at Bobriwka” reunion were privileged to host a very special guest.
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.”
The U.S. is providing military aid to Israel, but in contrast to NATO countries, they have never sent their troops to our country. In an interview published on the Segodnia website, Dan Meridor, the president...
The 11th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies took place in Krakow on July 15–19, 2018. Among the participants of the Congress were 22 Ukrainian scholars (15 are the members of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies), who represented seven institutions from Ukraine (Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv) and three universities from abroad. Due to the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter’s support, three "Ukrainian" panels were organized for this Congress.
Summer is an active time for the descendants of various groups of foreign Jews to travel to towns and cities of Ukraine. What drives these people and what are they seeking on Ukrainian soil? In...
Providentially, UJE Board Member Berel Rodal and UJE Co-Director Alti Rodal participated in a ceremony on July 27, 2018 inaugurating a monument dedicated to the Jews murdered during the Holocaust in Velyki Mezhyrichi, a village...
Historical narratives are built around artifacts—preserved and frail relics from past epochs. Mythology erupts in the absence of such relics, and it is the sort of absence that doesn’t let one alone. Celebrating its first centennial this year, the Jewish Archive at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev is, perhaps, one of the oddest crossroads of history and mythology: It is filled with incredible artifacts of the Eastern European Jewish past, and yet, it hangs suspended within a cognitive void, in the absence of the community that engendered these artifacts.
Rhea Clyman, a Canadian journalist born in Poland, is finally getting more international recognition as the first and one of the few journalists who exposed the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin’s genocidal starvation of 4 million Ukrainians from 1932-1933.
Events took place at the Great Palace of Zolochiv Castle on July 3, 2018 in memory of the Jews who were killed in a pogrom 77 years ago. Among the participants and speakers were Mayor...
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.
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.
