{"id":14357,"date":"2019-08-12T19:50:07","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T19:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=14357"},"modified":"2019-08-12T19:55:10","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T19:55:10","slug":"keynote-address-by-ned-president-carl-gershman-at-the-kyiv-jewish-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/keynote-address-by-ned-president-carl-gershman-at-the-kyiv-jewish-forum\/","title":{"rendered":"Keynote address by NED President Carl Gershman at the Kyiv Jewish Forum"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Carl Gershman, President of National Endownment for Democracy, gives a keynote speech at the Kyiv Jewish Forum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[Editor\u2019s note: More than 500 leaders from Israel, the United States, Europe and Ukraine participated in the inaugural Kyiv Jewish Forum held in the Ukrainian capital from 5-7 May 2019. Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy, gave the keynote address at this <\/em>important event<\/em><\/a>, which was organized and held in partnership with the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, the World Jewish Congress, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and other influential international organizations. In keeping with UJE\u2019s mission to forward the Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue, we are reproducing Gershman\u2019s address, which originally appeared on the NED\u2019s <\/em>website<\/em><\/a> and is reprinted with the organization\u2019s permission.] <\/em><\/p>\n

Democratic Ukraine and the Struggle Against Antisemitism<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I want to thank Boris Lozhkin and the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine for inviting me to speak to you today. This forum is taking place exactly five years after the \u201cThinking Together\u201d conference that Tim Snyder and Leon Wielseltier organized here in Kyiv in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity and the subsequent Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas. It was an historic moment, and I was honored to take part in that important demonstration of solidarity with Ukraine.<\/p>\n

I said in my remarks to that conference that the Euromaidan revolution in 2014 was part of \u201ca process by which Ukraine is becoming a democratic and united nation.\u201d I knew that Ukraine faced overwhelming challenges, since it had to defend itself against Russian aggression while simultaneously reforming a corrupt system that was still mired in the detritus of Soviet totalitarianism. It was not at all clear that Ukraine could survive, let alone prevail. But we all strongly believed at the time that Ukraine could succeed, especially after the heroic struggle on the Maidan.<\/p>\n

A sign of hope for the future came from an unexpected quarter after Putin launched a vicious smear campaign, charging that the revolution was no more than a \u201crampage of reactionary, nationalist, and antisemitic forces.\u201d A group of more than two dozen \u201cJewish citizens of Ukraine,\u201d as they proudly called themselves, wrote an open letter to Putin charging him with spreading \u201clies and slander.\u201d Even the most marginal of the nationalist groups, they said, \u201cdo not dare show antisemitism\u201d because they are \u201cwell-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government \u2013 which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis who are encouraged by your security services.\u201d The only threat to Ukraine\u2019s stability, they told Putin, \u201cis coming from the Russian government, namely \u2013 from you personally,\u201d and they concluded by \u201cdecisively\u201d telling Putin to stop \u201cdestabilizing the situation in our country and to stop your attempts of delegitimizing the new Ukrainian government.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Jewish signatories of the open letter did not claim to speak for all the Jews of Ukraine. Ukrainian Jews had diverse views on the current situation, they said, \u201cbut we live in a democratic country and can afford a difference of opinion.\u201d\u00a0 They added that \u201cwe have a great mutual understanding with the new government, and a partnership is in the works.\u201d<\/p>\n

The open letter to Putin from Ukrainian Jews had the effect of validating Ukraine\u2019s new democracy. Their voice carried special weight and credibility because they spoke for a minority that had suffered grievously in the past and could not countenance any illusions or wishful thinking about the threat of extremism and antisemitism. If they felt confident that Ukraine was on the right path, then very likely it was.<\/p>\n

Looking back over the past five years, we can also now say that they were right. Ukraine is still in the midst of a difficult democratic transition, but it\u2019s remarkable how far it has come on so many different fronts in such a short time. As Alexander Motyl has noted, during the five years of Petro Poroshenko\u2019s presidency, Ukraine built an army and fought the Russians and their proxies to a standstill; reformed the police and the banking sector; stabilized the currency; rationalized energy prices; devolved authority and resources to local government; won independence for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church; deepened political and economic ties with the West; and helped keep the E.U. and the U.S. united on continued sanctions against Russia. All this has happened without any backtracking on democracy and liberal rights and freedoms, as has occurred in other countries in the region. Civil society and independent media have remained strong, and along with 14 international missions and almost 100,000 local observers, they helped ensure that the recent presidential election was peaceful, free, and fair.<\/p>\n

The election itself was emblematic of Ukraine\u2019s extraordinary progress as a democracy. The candidate of the far-right Svoboda party received just 1.6% of the vote in the first round, which confirmed what the signatories of the letter to Putin had said about the limited influence of radical nationalist groups. President Poroshenko promptly and graciously conceded defeat, showing the world a model of democratic civility and restraint in contrast to Putin\u2019s thuggish authoritarianism. And the landslide victory of Volodymor Zelensky was extraordinary on so many different levels, leading him famously and appropriately to declare: \u201cTo the countries of the former Soviet Union: look at us, everything is possible.\u201d\u00a0 The fact that Zelensky\u2019s Jewish background played \u201czero role<\/a>\u201d in the election, according to Igor Shchupak, an historian of the Holocaust from Dnipro, was an unintended yet still stinging rebuke to Putin.<\/p>\n

Ukraine is now the only country outside of Israel where both the President and the Prime Minister are Jewish, and by one measure, according to a recent Pew survey, anti-Jewish attitudes in Ukraine are among the lowest in the region. No one could have predicted such progress. This is not a reason for complacency, and I know that minority problems persist in this country as they do elsewhere. As the American Abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said, \u201cEternal vigilance is the price of liberty.\u201d\u00a0 Still, the democratic changes that have taken place in Ukraine represent a welcome and important development, especially at a time when democracy in the world faces greater danger than at any time since the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n

As aptly stated by The Prague Appeal for Democratic Renewal<\/a>, a statement signed by more than 300 public intellectuals and democracy activists, \u201cLiberal democracy is under threat, and all who cherish it must come to its defense.\u201d\u00a0 This crisis manifests itself in many ways: the rise of resurgent authoritarian powers like Russia and China; the backsliding of former democracies like the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary; the growth of illiberal nationalism and populism in many established democracies; and the widespread erosion of belief in democratic values and in the efficacy of democratic institutions.<\/p>\n

Since the state of Jewish security is often taken as a barometer for measuring the stability and well-being of a country or of the world more generally, it is not surprising that this crisis of democracy has been accompanied by a rise of antisemitism in Europe and throughout the world. Last September Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said in a debate on antisemitism in the British House of Lords that antisemitism becomes dangerous when three things happen: when it moves from the fringes of politics to the mainstream of a party and its leadership; when that party sees that its popularity with the general public is not thereby harmed; and when those who stand up to protest are vilified and abused for doing so. \u201cI never thought I would see this in my lifetime,\u201d Rabbi Sacks said, but now all three of these factors exist in Britain.<\/p>\n

He called antisemitism \u201cthe world\u2019s oldest hatred,\u201d saying that it\u2019s \u201cthe hardest of all hatreds to defeat because, like a virus, it mutates.\u201d Speaking on this theme to the European Parliament in 2016, he explained that throughout history, \u201cpeople have sought to justify antisemitism\u2026by recourse to the highest source of authority available in the culture. In the Middle Ages, it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science. So we had\u2026Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel \u2013 the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and independent judiciary \u2013 is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and attempted genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

An example of this appalling development is that on March 18 in the UN Human Rights Council Israel was assaulted in seven biased reports and five hostile resolutions. There was nothing presented to the Council on any other country in the world \u2013 not on Algeria, where the protests leading to the eventual ouster of the corrupt and repressive Bouteflika regime had begun a month earlier; not on China, where more than a million-and-a-half Muslim Uyghurs are being held in concentration camps and the Beijing regime is committing in Tibet what His Holiness the Dali Lama has called \u201ccultural genocide;\u201d not on Venezuela, where the economic and social implosion under the illegitimate Maduro dictatorship has caused more than three million Venezuelans to\u00a0 flee, ten percent of the country\u2019s population; not on Cuba, which has been a totalitarian dictatorship for six decades and is now propping up the Maduro regime with twenty thousand troops and intelligence officers; and not on North Korea which is still the most closed and repressive country in the world, with a gulag that rivals the Stalinist model. The list could go on \u2013 Syria, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and so forth.<\/p>\n

Why is Israel being singled out, if not because the U.N. has been overtaken by a mutated version of historic antisemitism? The great historian Walter Laqueur, who died last September at the age of 97, wrote in a book on antisemitism published a decade ago that \u201cAccording to peace researchers, 25 million people were killed in internal conflicts since World War Two, of them 8,000 in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which ranks forty-sixth in the list of victims. But Israel has been more often condemned by the United Nations and other international organizations than all other nations taken together.\u201d\u00a0 If this is not antisemitism, what else could it be?<\/p>\n

Despite all the troubles that Ukraine has, and I know that there are many, what has happened here over the past five years stands out as a hopeful example of democratic progress at a very uncertain moment in world history. There are positive changes taking place today in some other countries, such as Armenia, Ethiopia, and Malaysia, but the transitions there are fragile and have only just begun. Ukraine is much farther along and seems able to sustain the progress that has been made.<\/p>\n

This is extremely important, not just for Ukraine but for the entire post-communist region and the world. At the \u201cThinking Together\u201d conference five years ago, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt said that Ukraine was \u201cthe epicenter of the global struggle for democracy,\u201d meaning that if Ukraine were to succeed in becoming an independent democracy, it would deter Putin\u2019s reckless expansionism and even offer the prospect that Russia might become a more normal and democratic country. This is a point that the late Zbigniew Brzezinski often made, saying that \u201cwithout Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.\u201d I and others at the \u201cThinking Together\u201d conference also emphasized that the model of a democratic Ukraine would have a powerful democratizing influence in neighboring Russia.<\/p>\n

The importance of Ukraine\u2019s democratic experiment leads me to my final point, which is that the democratic opening that is underway may offer a new opportunity to confront in a critical way the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust in this country. This is a subject that is still not well understood or thoroughly researched, though important work has been done by Father Patrick Desbois. His seminal book, The Holocaust by Bullets<\/em>, is based on interviews he conducted throughout the country with eyewitnesses to the mass killings, which began as the invading German army moved east in 1941 and its mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen<\/em>, rounded up all the Jewish children, women, and men, shot them, and buried them in mass graves. Desbois\u2019 book documents the accounts living eyewitnesses, records the locations of hundreds of gravesites, and also addresses the extremely fraught issue of Ukrainian participation in this gruesome process, most often under compulsion in Desbois\u2019 view, though that is an issue on which there is great debate and disagreement.<\/p>\n

I have thought long and hard about whether I should address this issue in my remarks today. I know how sensitive and complex this issue is, that I speak as an outsider, and that I don\u2019t pretend to be an expert on the Holocaust. But Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee, who has done pioneering work on the issue of remembering and memorializing the victims of the Holocaust in Ukraine, has encouraged me to speak about it. With all due modesty, I think that there are four reasons why it\u2019s appropriate for me to do so.<\/p>\n

The first is that for 35 years I\u2019ve led an institution \u2013 the National Endowment for Democracy - that has made support for democracy in Ukraine one of its chief priorities. From the moment the Rukh was founded in 1989, and even before that, we\u2019ve done whatever we could to aid the movement for human rights, democracy, and sovereign independence in Ukraine. Our grants program supporting Ukrainian NGOs has totaled almost $60 million and was guided since 1987 by the late and beloved Nadia Diuk, who received the Order of Princess Olga from President Poroshenko before her death last January. I feel almost a part of the Ukrainian struggle and therefore justified in speaking out about an issue of such importance to the well-being of the country.<\/p>\n

The second reason is that I have spoken many times about the Holodomor, which Ukrainians regard as their own holocaust. Speaking on the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the Holodomor in 1983 as the US representative in the UN\u2019s Third Committee, I called it one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, \u201ca disaster that claimed some four million lives and was the direct consequences of Stalin\u2019s effort to\u2026crush the nationally conscious Ukrainian peasantry.\u201d Significantly, the agenda item under which I spoke was \u201cThe Right of Peoples to Self-Determination.\u201d I made two follow-up interventions on the issue when the Soviet and Ukrainian representatives denied that the Holodomor had ever happened. My concern about remembering the Holocaust does not involve any neglect of the horror of the Holodomor.<\/p>\n

My third reason for speaking about the need to remember the Holocaust in Ukraine is that last August the rabbi of the synagogue I attend in Washington, Shmuel Herzfeld, led a delegation of thirty members of our congregation to Ukraine to visit Holocaust sites. I became convinced that this is an issue that has been badly ignored, and that I needed to understand it better. I\u2019ve since talked about it with a number of people, including Nadia Diuk before her death, and my speaking about the issue today is part of this process of learning and understanding.<\/p>\n

The final reason I\u2019m speaking today about the Holocaust in Ukraine is that my father, who came to the United States with his family as an infant in 1900, was from Proskurov - now Khmelnytskyi - which is located along the path of the advancing Einsatzgruppen<\/em>. More than 9,500 Jews were murdered there.<\/p>\n

Through Rabbi Baker and the Polish-American historian Jan Gross, I have established contact with Aleksandra Wroblewska, the coordinator of the Protecting Memory project that was initiated by the American Jewish Committee and is funded by the German Government through the Foundation Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe.<\/p>\n

The project takes a number of important steps to memorialize the victims of the Nazi killing machine. It seeks to work with local populations in Ukraine to identify gravesites; to establish information displays and pedagogical programs involving local teachers and their students; to link the sites to the local communities so that they can become a visible and meaningful part of the of the local geography and cultural memory; and to take coordinated actions to ensure the long-term protection of the sites and the proper remembrance of the people who were killed there. Another objective of the pedagogical program is to make this history more available to a wider range of citizens as well as to travelers and visitors.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies led by Anatoly Podolskiy has been the closest partner of the project for many years, and it has implemented much of the educational work and built up an important network of teachers. Dedicated Ukrainian civil society activists, architects, and lawyers, whom Aleksandra calls \u201ca great treasure,\u201d have given the project energy and ideas.<\/p>\n

Aleksandra has informed me that on June 18 and 19 the project will be dedicating three memorial sites of Roma who were murdered in the Zhytomyr region. On June 20 two additional Holocaust sites will be unveiled in the same region, and the families of Holocaust survivors will join the ceremonies. Memorial ceremonies for eleven other Holocaust gravesites will be held at nine different locations between September 13 and September 21. Those wishing to attend the ceremonies or press-conference can register by sending an email to Aleksandra Wroblewska\u2019s work account which you can obtain from the conference staff (Aleksandra.Wroblewska@stiftung-denkmal.de<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I asked Aleksandra what steps should be taken to carry this work forward, and she had five recommendations:<\/p>\n