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Sunday, June 5, 2022

Israeli Jews From Ukraine

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Ukraine has been a country where many Jews have lived.  A few of them since the end of the 1800s were able to make it to Palestine and after 1948, to Israel.  

Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky

Born in 1880 in the city of Odessa, Ze’ev Jabotinsky grew up completely assimilated. He had no connection to Judaism until he was an adult. He became a celebrated Russian journalist, filing stories from across Europe.

In 1903, the infamous Kishinev Pogrom changed the course of Jabotinsky’s life. Over three days of rioting, beginning on Easter Sunday, hundreds of Jews in the Moldovan city of Kishinev were attacked, injured, and killed. Their property was destroyed and Jews cowered in fear as the murderous mob rampaged unchecked. Hundreds of Jewish women were violently assaulted. It became clear that Jews had little future in Europe. 

Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism, also established the Beitar youth movement and the Irgun, a paramilitary organization in pre-state Israel.

Jabotinsky was convinced Jews needed a Jewish state to be secure and became an ardent Zionist. He helped found the Jewish Legion to help British forces during World War I, and advocated tirelessly for a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Expelled from the land of Israel in 1929 by the British authorities, Jabotinsky continued to advance the cause of Jewish liberation, not only founding the underground Irgun military force but also  insisting on Jewish statehood. He died in exile in 1940.

Golda Meir

Israel’s 4th Prime Minister was born in 1898 in Kyiv. Her family was destitute. She recalled her father looking for work and having only bread and herring to eat. Golda wrote in her memoirs, “Despite everything, on Friday nights our house was always full of people, members of the family mostly. I remember swarms of cousins, second cousins, aunts and uncles. None of them was to survive the Holocaust, but they live on in my mind’s eye, sitting around our kitchen table, drinking tea out of glasses and, on the Sabbath and holidays, singing for hours - and I remember my parents’ sweet voices ringing out above the others.”

Meir went on to become one of the architects of the Zionist movement. She worked for Israel’s Federation of Labor; after World War II she negotiated with the British authorities to let in desperate Jewish refugees, and conducted diplomacy with Jordan’s King Abdullah I, trying (in vain) to convince him to refrain from attacking a future Jewish state.

Golda Meir was one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, and served as Israel’s ambassador to Russia, as Israel’s Foreign Minister (she was the world’s only female foreign minister at the time), and in became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1969, serving until 1974.

Natan Sharansky

The famous former Soviet refusenik and Israeli politician was born in Donetsk, Ukraine in 1948. As a young man he worked as an interpreter for the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. As Natan explored his Jewish identity, he became a spokesman for the Soviet Jewry dissident movement. He became a refusenik in 1973 after his application to emigrate to Israel was denied, and was arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and spying in 1977.

Sentenced to 13 years in a labor camp in Siberia, Natan coped with his imprisonment by focusing on his Jewish life. He later observed that in prison, as he embraced his Jewish identity, he found himself feeling like a free man.

Natan Sharansky was finally allowed to emigrate in 1986. He moved to Israel and later served as President of the Zionist Forum and editor of the Jerusalem Report. He formed a new political party in 1995, and was elected to Israel’s Knesset, eventually serving in various ministerial roles and as Deputy Prime Minister from 2001 to 2003. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018

He was the imprisoned Jew my Israeli Hebrew teacher, Sarah-in Haifa,  was writing to, trying to help him learn Hebrew in 1980s.   It must have helped him.     


In 1924, Hayim Nahman Bialik, born in Russia on January 9, 1873, moved to Odessa, Ukraine when 8,  finally relocated with his publishing house Dvir to Tel Aviv at the age of 51, devoting himself to cultural activities and public affairs. Bialik was immediately recognized as a celebrated literary figure. He delivered the address that marked the opening (in 1925) of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a member of its board of governors. In 1927 he became head of the Hebrew Writers Union, a position he retained for the remainder of his life. In 1933 his 60th birthday was celebrated with festivities nationwide, and all the schoolchildren of Tel Aviv were taken to meet him and pay their respects to him.

Israeli politicians

Israeli military persons[edit]


In 2020, Zelensky said about his Judaism: “Nobody cares. Nobody asks me about it.”  Now, he’s known as the world’s “Jewish hero.” The highest form of proof against Russia’s claims that Ukraine needs to be “denazified.”

Resource:

https://aish.com/11-famous-ukrainian-jews/ 

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/16-jews-from-ukraine-who-changed-the-world/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ukrainian_Jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayim_Nahman_Bialik

https://jewishunpacked.com/who-are-the-jews-of-ukraine/


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