Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the Soviet Jews and Myself

Nadene Goldfoot                                                 

Born June 6, 1975, Lt. Col. Alexander Semyon Vindman  is a United States Army lieutenant colonel who was the Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC) until he was reassigned on February 7, 2020. Vindman came to national attention in October 2019 when he testified before the United States Congress regarding the Trump–Ukraine scandal.

Commissioned in 1999 as an infantry officer, Vindman received a Purple Heart medal for wounds he received from an IED attack in the Iraq War in 2004. Vindman became a foreign area officer specializing in Eurasia in 2008, and assumed the position of Director for European Affairs with the NSC in 2018.  He has a twin brother, Yevgeny S. who is also a Lt. Colonel in the army.  

                                                                           

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was fired by President Donald Trump.  He said about this:  "I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine,” Ukraine's history was horrid towards Jews and now it was known for as being corrupt.  They had a new untried president.  Trump was also new and untried.  

Update: 1/29/21:   Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a decorated Army officer who served as the National Security Council’s director for Ukraine, told lawmakers in October that Ellis and Eisenberg were the ones who decided to move the record of Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky into the NSC’s top-secret codeword system—a server normally used to store highly classified material that only a small group of officials can access.  Vindman was one of the officials who listened to the call, in which Trump asked Zelensky to investigate the Bidens and Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, and went to Eisenberg and Ellis afterward to register his concerns about the conversation. In early February, Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny were fired from the NSC and sent back to the Pentagon. On Monday, the White House withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker, who had questioned the Ukraine aid freeze, to be the Pentagon’s comptroller.  https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/03/trump-loyalist-national-security-council-119416

My question as been, was he Jewish, because I am Jewish and an amateur historian.  The Washington Post wrote that he was born a Soviet Jew from Ukraine. 

"Wikipedia is a little more direct.  "Alexander Semyon Vindman (né Aleksandr Semyonovich Vindman) and his identical twin brother, Yevgeny, were born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union.   After the death of their mother, the three-year-old twins and their older brother, Leonid, were brought to New York in December 1979 by their father, Semyon (Simon)." 

 It was 1980, the next year when I made aliyah to Israel and met so many Soviet Jews, also immigrants to Israel like me.  We had many differences and one was that they could speak many languages and I only spoke English and a smattering of Spanish.          
                                                       

"They grew up in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood." It's a well-known Russian-Jewish neighborhood referred to as "Little Odessa".  The twins appear briefly with their maternal grandmother in the Ken Burns documentary The Statue of Liberty.   Vindman speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian.   He graduated in 1993 from Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School. "  I note that a report said that Alexander spoke English with a Ukrainian official, but is fluent in Russian and Ukrainian.  He probably learned that from living with his father , who would have had a harder time picking up English and being in his neighborhood.  This seems to have caused some people to think he was a Russian spy.  I think it was because Alexander wanted any reporters on the spot to understand what was being said.  

Alexander tells us that he was three and a half when he immigrated.  His mother died before that.  Simon, his father, would have had a hard time continuing any Jewish culture in their home as the mother does so much.  
                                                    

Alexander Vindman's family

Lots of Soviet Jews wanted and did immigrate to Israel when they were able.  I was there when many arrived.  Others opted for the USA.  Here's why they needed to get out of Russia.
                                                  

The Pale of Settlement was a western region of Imperial Russia with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden.

"Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian Empire’s anti-Semitic segregation policies trapped Jews in the “Pale of Settlement,” a region roughly comprising present-day Belarus, Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine and Moldova. Having anti-Semitism as the official state policy resulted in the exodus of millions of Jews. " 

My grandparents came from this same area.  Nathan was from Lithuania and Zlata was from there from the town of Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania which was then taken over by Poland, so all her records were from the latter. USA Census information  would say they were from Russia.  It really depended on the year they came here as to where they were from.  Europe's geography was quick to change, but towns and people would remain the same.  I have found many DNA cousins, 3rd-5th cousins, from Ukraine though the surname was Goldfus/Goldfoot and Jermulowske of Lithuania.  Wars forced many Jews to flee in that direction as I understand it.  

Ukraine, and Alexander Vindman was born in Kiev, was quite different in that religious Jews came historically from Lithuania while Ukraine was looked upon as more secular as far as religious Jews  thought.   Probably this is because it was always a very anti-Semitic center.  Horrid pogroms occurred in 1905 and again from 1918 to 1920. 

 The Russians tried to turn Ukrainian Jews into farmers after a history of being urban people, kept out of farming as they were never allowed to own land.  Horrid stories have come out of Ukraine during WWII of hatred for Jews.  Yet this was a part of the Pale where Jews fled to from Khazaria, the Caliphate and Byzantium during the 9th to 12 centuries.  

Ukraine had 840,000 Jews in 1959, a decrease of almost 70% from 1941 (within Ukraine's current borders). Ukraine's Jewish population declined significantly during the Cold War. In 1989, Ukraine's Jewish population was only slightly more than half of what it was thirty years earlier (in 1959). The overwhelming majority of the Jews who remained in Ukraine in 1989 left Ukraine and moved to other countries (mostly to Israel) in the 1990s during and after the collapse of Communism.

"Anti-Semitism under the Soviet Union flowed under the regime’s anti-religious policies. Jews were murdered during the Stalinist purges in the name of ridding the U.S.S.R. of “class traitors” and religious fanatics. The Soviet Union forcibly repressed the expression of all things Jewish, and Jewish culture all but disintegrated."

Tens of thousands of Jews wanted out of Russia but were not allowed to leave and they were then called "Refusniks."  The first group I met in Israel was in 1980, the year I immigrated from Portland, Oregon.  My Hebrew teacher, Sarah,  in my Ulpan had been writing to one in prison in Russia and told us about him.  She was teaching him Hebrew through her letters.  

As of 2012, Ukraine had the fifth-largest Jewish community in Europe and the twelfth-largest Jewish community in the world, behind South Africa and ahead of Mexico. The majority of Ukrainian Jews live in four large cities: Kiev (about half of all Jews living in Ukraine),  Dnipro, Kharkiv and Odessa.  In 2010 they had 71,500 which was a drop of 28.5%.  By 2014 they had 67,000-a drop of 6.3%.  Jews are still only a population in the world of 0.02%.  World population seems to be divided between Christians and Muslims.  
In retrospect, one of my friends reminded me that "LTC Vindman is not a COL. Rank means something. The courtesy of leaving off the LT in spoken word does not in any way grant him the honor of being referred to in writing as a Colonel. The duties and obligations of each grade are significantly different. The honor afforded each is also significantly different. 

He is no hero. He violated the oath he took and his position of trust. He should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. 

. He is not deserving of any form of respect as a soldier. So long as he keeps his rank, he can have the general courtesies afforded to any LTC. He violated quite a few rules and law in speaking publicly regarding anything he encountered within the NSC. "

Edited: 2/17/2020 
Resource: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/19/what-lt-col-vindmans-critics-get-wrong-about-jews-who-fled-soviet-union/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Vindman
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Letters From Israel by Nadene Goldfoot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Ukraine
https://heavy.com/news/2019/10/alexander-vindman-family-wife-parents-brother/