Some 950 people are expected to gather over this weekend for Limmud FSU Ukraine, the biggest event geared towards the Jewish community in the country. The event will take place in Odessa, one of the most important cities of Jewish and Zionist movement’s history in the former Soviet Union. Today there are about 400,000 Jews living in Ukraine, with more than 45,000 in Odessa.

While driving through the Ukrainian countryside in 1932, Rhea Clyman, a Jewish-Canadian journalist, stopped in a village to ask where she could buy some milk and eggs. The villagers couldn’t understand her, but someone went off and came back with a crippled

14-year-old boy, who slowly made his way to her.

Pupils have met a Holocaust survivor - saved with help from the Church - at the Polish embassy to mark the launch of a new charity. Lili Pohlmann, who was born in Krakow but moved to Ukraine to escape the Nazis, was saved by a German woman, Irmgard Wiet, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern galvanized the audience at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago on February 12 with an engaging presentation on “Jews and Ukrainians, a Millennium of Co-Existence,” a book he recently co-authored with Paul Robert Magocsi, which is distributed by the University of Toronto Press.