Anti-Semitism Acts Out Again in Middle of War-Torn Ukraine and Why

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                   

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The fact that Ukraine, a country practicing anti-Semitism heavily during WWII, by aiding the Nazis in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of their Jewish neighbors, also had perpetrated multiple pogroms against Jewish communities in different periods.    

They've also been reactive in these same ways to Blacks and Indians living in Ukraine and trying to get out;  There were many Indian medical students there who have been treated shamelessly in these uncertain moments, and they have complained to their Indian ambassadors.  I suppose they were uneducated about how Jews had been previously treated there.           

 I find that when Ukrainians and others, when under stress, have turned against Jews viciously, using them as their scapegoat.  It never helps their situation, and I would have thought only laid heavily on their shoulders as guilt. Don't they realize that Zelensky had given them comedy, taken away their stress?  Certainly they knew, and it mattered little when times were good.  That helped to get him elected President of Ukraine, and the fact that he was not a tainted politician; not a politician at all!  Now that they might die, they are striking out once again, against Jews.  

The  historical people known as Vikings, who hailed from Scandinavia in Northern Europe, are well-known today for their exploits in the west. But the merchant-warriors also made their way into Eastern Europe, where they helped found a medieval federation in territory now known as Belarus, Ukraine and part of Russia. Their loose federation of principalities called Kievan Rus survived for nearly 400 years, finally collapsing during the 13th-century Mongol invasion.

For four centuries, Vikings held sway over parts of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, with the greatest expansion happening under Prince Oleg the Prophet. 

    A Chabad Jewish fellow who has been studying Torah, before the War of Ukraine-Russia

Well, the guilt wasn't there with this group of Ukrainians who are the 3rd generation since the WWII, and they, I thought, were free of those past horrific slaughterings of innocent Jews, a minority people of Ukraine.  Not so, again, under terrific stress of attack upon themselves, they have turned once more to old behaviors, passed down through the generations through environment and genetics, maybe even from passing Vikings in the area, of instant instincts of attack, kill, blame, scapegoat the nearest minority people-Jews, etc.  How long will it take Ukrainians to rid themselves of these urgings of anti-Semitism?  A thousand years?  

You'd think that looting would be the last thing on Ukrainians minds, but not so.  That's the way Vikings also reacted; slaughtering and killing to gain what they had come for-the loot.                                     

And this is what my son and I are rewarded with after calling our congressman and demanding that they count us in by not receiving Russian oil, which Biden announced this morning that the USA will do; not receive anymore Russian oil.  

NGO says hundreds of Jewish families physically attacked by Ukrainian looters, some of whom had worked in a local Jewish orphanage.                        

Memorial at Babi Yar: which is a ravine outside Kiev where tens of thousands of Jews were killed in September 1941.  The horror of the massacre together with the fact that no memorial was ever erected until the 1980s in memory of the Jewish victims, turned Babi Yar into a symbol of anti-Semitisms.  It was used by the Soviet poet, Evgeni Yevtuschenko in his poem, "Babi Yar" in  1962, later incorporated by Shostakovitch into his 13th symphony.  It was also the subject of a novel by Anatoly Kuznetzov.  

Rabbis decided to stay with their communities, have reported shortages of basic goods. Rabbi rules say that in current crisis, Jewish Ukrainians may leave cell phones on during Shabbat, a Shabbat under heavy security.  Here they knew that they were targets to the Russians if, G-d forbid, they entered, but never realized possibly that they had to beware of their own neighbors in today's war.  

"By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Hundreds of Jewish families in Ukraine were forced to flee their homes not due to the Russian invasion, but because of Ukrainians looting their properties and physically attacking them, Hebrew-language news site 0404 reported Sunday.

The Lev Layeled NGO told 0404 that Jews in the town of Zhytomyr were threatened, harassed, and physically beaten by locals looking to take advantage of the chaos caused by the fighting between Ukraine and Russia.

The Jewish outreach organization Chabad and Lev Layeled manage an orphanage and children’s homes in Zhytomyr and its outskirts.

“On Thursday, the Ukrainians who worked at the orphanage began looting and beating the local Jews,” Lev Layeled said in a statement.

“The Ukrainian authorities called Chabad and told them they needed to [flee] urgently in order to save their lives.”

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel and Rabbi Shlomo Wilhelm of Zhitomir, Ukraine, with two of the 90 children who were evacuated from Zhitomir’s Chabad-run Alumim children’s home on Feb. 24. (Credit: Hadas Porush/Pool Photo)

The organizations scrambled to organize evacuation buses for the children in their care. They were successfully taken to Romania, and then flown to Israel.

But due to the presence of the Chabad institutions in the town, Jews from surrounding communities continued to pour into Zhytomyr seeking refuge.

“The situation deteriorated even further, as hundreds of Jewish families found themselves harassed and beaten by Ukrainians there,” the organization said.

“We got a call at 6 a.m. this morning, asking again for help as more and more families are coming forward to leave everything behind and save their lives — not only because of the bombing, but because of the locals turning against them.”

While Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly invoked the Holocaust in order to urge Israel and Western countries to support Ukraine’s military resistance, the Eastern European nation of Ukraine has a long history of antisemitic violence."

Resource:

https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/5429204/jewish/140-Refugees-From-Ukraine-Childrens-Home-Arrive-Safely-in-Israel.htm

Netflix:  The Last Kingdom;  Vikings

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-last-kingdom-how-historically-accurate-is-the-netflix-drama/

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-last-kingdom-how-historically-accurate-is-the-netflix-drama/

Update:3/12/22

The problem with expressing empathy for the Ukraine

The Ukrainian people played a willing and major role in the destruction of European Jewry before, during, and after the Holocaust. Op-ed.

Ron Jager 

09.03.22 10:00

 

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HolocaustUkrainian JewryRon JagerUkraine War

KyiviStock

Let it be clear: I unequivocally condemn Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine. Russia is grossly violating international law and the principles of the UN Charter. The violence and loss of life that have occurred in various parts of Ukraine over the past days is totally unacceptable.

With that being said, the Ukrainian people played a major role in the destruction of European Jewry before, during, and after the Holocaust.

According to the American Jewish Committee, Jews in the Ukraine today generally do not face acts of violence or public condemnations of Israel, although there are reports of looting and threats in Zhitomyr. Instead, “Antisemitism in Ukraine exists in its old ‘traditional’ and cultural form: the notion that Jews control all money, the media and government, they are greedy, murdered Jesus, and ‘suck our blood,’” said Samuel Kliger, AJC's Director of Russian and Eurasian Affairs. The Eastern Orthodox Church of the Ukraine tends to reinforce classical beliefs of anti-Semitism. It has never expunged the deicide charge from its doctrine and sells copies of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion in gift shops.

For many Jews, the Ukraine evokes memories of pogroms, antisemitism and Nazi collaboration. Between 1.2 million and 1.6 million Jews were killed in the Ukraine during the Holocaust. Moreover, Ukraine has been reluctant to reckon with its role in the Holocaust, including the massacres of Jews by Nazis with the help of eager local Ukrainian collaborators. Almost a million Ukrainian Jews were killed between 1941 to 1944 and buried in thousands of mass graves, including 33,771 Ukrainian Jews who were systematically shot dead and executed by machine-gun fire in a two-day massacre in a ravine just outside Kyiv known as Babyn Yar.

The Jews of Kyiv gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene:

“One after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and over garments and also underwear … Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzmannschaft and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him”

This sordid chapter in Ukrainian history is left out of the public discourse, creating a general apathy about the Holocaust. (Ed. note: When I headed a youth village whose students were mostly Russian immigrants, not one of the highschoolers from Kyiv had ever heard of the Babyn Yar massacre).

Alongside that apathy, Ukrainian lawmakers have pushed to celebrate some Nazi collaborators as war heroes, trumpeting their anti-Communist battles while ignoring their complicity in Holocaust crimes. The Ukraine continues to resist joining the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the 32-country organization that coordinates international educational efforts. It also has not adopted the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.

In the early 1920s, thousands of Jewish child refugees flooded into Moscow from the Ukraine, fleeing a terrifying series of pogroms. Legendary Jewish artist Marc Chagall remembered giving art lessons to some of the refugees at a Jewish orphanage outside the Soviet capital. He recalled the horrifying atrocities they spoke about — their parents murdered, their sisters raped and slain, and the children themselves chased out in the cold, threadbare and starving. Unlike the Holocaust, this earlier wave of anti-Semitic violence has largely been forgotten by history. Yet at the time, it was front-page news.

From 1918 to 1921, more than 1,100 pogroms killed over 100,000 Jews in an area that is part of present-day Ukraine.

One of the earliest recorded pogroms, perhaps the largest single mass murder of Jews in modern history up to that point in time was the pogrom of Proskuriv, a Ukrainian town on February 14, 1919 with 911 listed deaths which historians estimate is only one-third of the actual number of Jews murdered.

The Nikolaev Massacre was a massacre which resulted in the deaths of 35,782 Soviet citizens, most of whom were Jews, during World War II, on September 16–30, 1941. It took place in and around the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv (also known by its Russian name, Nikolaev) and the neighboring city of Kherson in (current) southern Ukraine

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass-murder, primarily by shooting) in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on 6 April 1942, the second day of Passover: As conveyed by an eye witness survivor:

“I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil … His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" … A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious."

Untold numbers of Ukrainians were collaborators: According to German historian Dieter Pohl, around 100,000 Ukrainians joined police units that provided key assistance to the Nazis. Many others staffed the local bureaucracies or lent a helping hand during mass shootings of Jews. Ukrainians, such as the infamous Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, were also among the guards who manned the German Nazi death camps. According to The Simon Wiesenthal Center (in January 2011) "Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator.”

My father, Joseph Jager, of blessed memory, a Holocaust survivor, was born in Košice, Slovakia. His family had originally emigrated from the Ukraine before he was born. After the war, he had heard from distant family members, that Ukrainian Jewish survivors who had returned from the concentration camps to their villages in the Ukraine were murdered by local Ukrainians after expecting to be given their homes back, now occupied by local Ukrainians.

In recent years, the Ukrainian government has not objected to Israel being singled out and condemned by the United Nations and has voted on numerous votes against Israel.

Ukrainian complicity in the genocidal murder of Jews over the past century has been documented without question.

I harbor genuine ambivalence in expressing empathy for the Ukrainian people.

Ron Jager grew up in the South Bronx of New York City, making Aliyah in 1980. Served for 25 years in the IDF as a Mental Health Field Officer in operational units. Prior to retiring was Commander of the Central Psychiatric Clinic for Reserve Solders at Tel-Hashomer. Since retiring has been involved in strategic consultancy to NGO's and communities in the Gaza Envelope on resiliency projects to assist first responders and communities. Ron has written numerous articles for outlets in Israel and abroad focusing on Israel and the Jewish world. To contact: medconf@gmail.com Website: www.ronjager.com