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JEWISH UKRAINE AFTER MAIDAN by JOSH TAPPER VOLUME 19 NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2018 critical/constructive JEWISH UKRAINE AFTER MAIDAN by JOSH TAPPER IN THIS The Book Three Hebrew in The Art of ISSUE: Smugglers Profi les America as Richard An Excerpt LIAM a Zionist McBee DAVID E. FISHMAN HOARE Enterprise RABBI DAVID GEDZELMAN CRITICAL / CONSTRUCTIVE he Spring issue of CONTACT explores the past, present, and potential future tapestries of Jewish life in communities spanning the globe. Opening with a lead story by Josh Tapper, VOLUME 19, NUMBER 1 / SPRING 2018 we survey the landscape of the Ukrainian Jewish community Eli Valley in the years following the protests that erupted in Kiev’s Editor T Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in 2013 and the confl icts with Ari L. Goldman pro-Russian separatists that followed soon after. Facing upheaval, migration, Editorial Consultant economic uncertainty, and burgeoning nationalist anti-Semitism, the Jewish Erica Coleman community is rebuilding its institutions and strengthening its cultural roots Copy Editor while respecting Jewish memory in its home in Ukraine. Yakov Wisniewski Design Director CONTACT then turns to language, with an evocative essay by Rabbi David Gedzelman on how teaching Hebrew in America can help strengthen Jewish THE STEINHARDT FOUNDATION identity and connect Americans more broadly to Israeli culture and society FOR JEWISH LIFE — and he urges the Israeli government to do its part to make Hebrew Michael H. Steinhardt education in America a reality. We visit three Jews helming initiatives to Chairman enhance Jewish experience, nourish Jewish memory, and recommit to the Sara Bloom Jewish value of social justice. We excerpt from David E. Fishman’s award- Vice Chair winning new book, The Book Smugglers, telling the gripping high-wire tale Rabbi David Gedzelman of the “paper brigade” — inmates of the Vilna ghetto who rescued thousands President and CEO of rare books and manuscripts from oblivion during the Holocaust and, Eli Schaap afterwards, during the Soviet era. And we close the issue with a glimpse into Senior Vice President the lush, richly textured paintings from Biblical and Midrashic narrative by CONTACT is produced and distributed by The Steinhardt Foundation the incomparable Richard McBee. for Jewish Life, 729 Seventh Avenue, 9th floor, New York, NY 10019. Finally, inside this issue of CONTACT is a survey to learn your thoughts, All issues of Contact are available for download opinions and refl ections on CONTACT magazine. As we work to improve at www.steinhardtfoundation.org/journal.html CONTACT in its role as a vital forum for critical and constructive explora- Individual subscriptions are free of charge and are provided as a service to the community. tions of Jewish life, your input is essential. Thank you very much for To subscribe, please send your name and completing it. We can’t wait to hear from you. mailing address to [email protected]. Phone: (212) 279-2288 Fax: (212) 279-1155 Email: [email protected] in this issue Website: www.steinhardtfoundation.org For media inquiries about The Steinhardt JEWISH UKRAINE AFTER MAIDAN Foundation for Jewish Life, please contact Dan 3 Josh Tapper Gerstein at [email protected]. Copyright © 2018 by The Steinhardt Foundation 7 HEBREW IN AMERICA AS A ZIONIST ENTERPRISE for Jewish Life. Rabbi David Gedzelman The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life is dedicated to strengthening and transforming 9 THREE PROFILES Ameri can Jewish Life to ensure a flourishing, Liam Hoare sustainable commu nity in a fully integrated free society. We seek to revitalize Jewish identity through educa tional and cultural 12 THE BOOK SMUGGLERS: initiatives that are designed to reach out to PARTISANS, POETS, AND THE RACE TO SAVE all Jews, with an emphasis on those who JEWISH TREASURES FROM THE NAZIS are on the margins of Jewish life, as well as to David E. Fishman advocate for and support Hebrew and Jewish literacy among the general population. THE NARRATIVE LUMINESCENCE Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs in 14 this issue are courtesy of contributors. Cover OF RICHARD MCBEE photographs by Brendan Hoffman. 2 Aaron Kaganovskiy landscape JEWISH UKRAINE AFTER MAIDAN by JOSH TAPPER aron Kaganovskiy had lived in the coastal city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine for Anearly six peaceful years before the fight- ing began. One day in the early months of 2014, he noticed that the Ukrainian flags once flying above the city had been burned, replaced by those of Russia. Constant mortar shelling clapping in the distance soon provided an unsettling soundtrack to his life as a Chabad emissary and teacher in the local Jewish school; once, during a Rosh Hashanah service in 2014, he counted 56 rockets fired on the city. Sparked by a surge of pro-Western protests on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti in late 2013, violence quickly migrated eastward by the following spring, engulfing Ukraine’s eastern regions in a deadly slow-burning conflict between Ukrainian and pro- Russian separatists that simmers to this day. When armed separatists entered Mariupol’s synagogue after a prayer service and asked if the community needed security, Kaganovskiy and his fellow wor- shippers politely declined, explaining to the men with guns that they could take care of themselves. “When the situation started, we didn’t want to leave,” Kaganovskiy, 32, said of his wife, Chaya, and three children, all under ten years old. His confidence dissipated, however, even as the Ukrainian army fought back separatist forces and seized control of Mariupol in June 2014. Kaganovskiy recalled the day the Ukrainian army decisively pushed the separatists out of the city. As a group of rebel fighters retreated in the direction of his house, bullets flew underneath one of his windows. Kaganovskiy’s children hid in- side. When they asked “Daddy, are we going to die today?” he knew it was time to leave. I met Kaganovskiy on a cold and wet afternoon last November, at a housing settlement for Jewish refugees from eastern Ukraine on the outskirts of Kiev. The previous night, he told me, his car had flipped in a near-collision with an oncoming vehicle and he was suffering the numbing effects of a likely Josh Tapper is a journalist and doctoral student in Jewish history at Stanford University. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Tablet, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among other publications. SPRING 2018 PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRENDAN HOFFMAN 3 landscape concussion. Some 150 people live in the build a wooden synagogue, an elementary 56,000 in 2016. fledgling settlement, which was founded school, a turf soccer pitch and a cluster of Compounding the problems of a two years ago by Moshe Reuven Azman, concrete apartment blocks amid swaths of sputtering economy and demographic the Chabad rabbi of Kiev’s Brodsky syna- golden cabbage fields. Kaganovskiy in- precariousness is what Eduard Dolin- gogue, to absorb the stream of Jewish tends to keep his family there, where life, sky, Executive Director of the Ukrainian refugees fleeing from Ukraine’s east. The he said, is finally calm. Jewish Committee (UJC), a Kiev-based Kaganovskiy is among the 1.8 mil- lobby group, calls a “worsening moral lion people displaced by the conflict, condition.” In the wake of the Maidan according to United Nations figures. To protests, which took off five years ago say that the Maidan protests, the ensuing in response to the pro-Russian president revolution, and the now-frozen conflict Viktor Yanukovych’s reluctance to re- in the Donbass have upended Jewish orient Ukraine westward, both politic- communal life in the country is to state ally and economically, the country has the obvious. Beyond internal migra- witnessed a program of state-led de- tion, which has seen thousands of Jews communization, as well as an upsurge in resettle from the Donetsk and Luhansk Ukrainian nationalism. These forces have regions in cities like Kiev, Dnipro (for- fostered a discourse within some seg- merly Dnipropetrovsk), Kharkov, and ments of Ukrainian society that promotes Odessa, thousands of others have left the anti-Semitism and, most alarmingly to country altogether. Nearly 7,500 Ukrain- Jewish activists like Dolinsky, the his- ians made Aliyah in 2015, according to torical whitewashing of Ukrainian com- the Jewish Agency, a 230 percent jump plicity during the Holocaust. from 2013. While the number dropped Through the government-funded Eduard Dolinsky to around 5,500 in 2016, representatives Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, from the Jewish Agency told the Jeru- the country has attempted to revise the settlement was named Anatevka, a nod salem Post last year that they anticipate anti-Semitic image of the World War to both the fictional village of Sholom the annual total to increase once again, II-era Organization of Ukrainian Na- Aleichem’s stories and the actual village, fueled in part by a country-wide eco- tionalists (OUN) and its military faction, Hnatevka, in which it is located. nomic crisis that includes rising inflation the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Though the Ukrainian army has se- and meager pensions. The total number In 2015, during the height of fight- cured Mariupol, implementing relative of Jews in Ukraine is difficult to assess; ing against Russian-backed separatists, stability in the city, Kaganovskiy insists the European Jewish Congress estimates Ukraine passed a law, widely condemned that he “never wants to go back.” At Anat- roughly 360,000 while Israeli demog- among western scholars, outlawing pub- evka, Azman has raised enough money to rapher Sergio DellaPergola tallied only lic disrespect toward the OUN and UPA, 4 both of which the Institute of National Memory enforcement and general prosecutors do not reply landscape trumpeted as supporters of Ukrainian national- and do not react to anti-Semitic acts.” ism nonpareil. For some, the government’s laissez-faire ap- In this climate of historical revisionism, in- proach to Ukrainian nationalism and its attend- “I don’t feel cidents of anti-Semitism have taken on an even ant anti-Semitism reinforces the notion that the anti-Semitism darker hue, Dolinsky told me when we met problem is not, in reality, a serious one.
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