100 years of Jewish life in Ukraine

The men in the early 20th-century black-and-white photograph are elegantly dressed, as is the only woman in the picture. An open horse-drawn carriage is also part of the motif that the photographer captured around 100 years ago. It shows a Jewish family in front of their home in the small town of Boryslaw. The idyllic scenery in the exhibition “Voices. A Mosaic of Ukrainian-Jewish Life” in the Jewish Museum Augsburg catches the eye right at the beginning of the tour.

It is the introduction to the history of Ukrainian Jews from the 1920s to the present. The story is about everyday life in the shtetl (the Yiddish word for town; Settlements in Eastern Europe with a high Jewish population, ed. editor) before the Second World War, about the unspeakable suffering of the Holocaust, about the struggle for an appropriate culture of remembrance against the background of the anti-Semitic politics of the Soviet Union and about the rebirth of Jewish life in independent Ukraine. Jewish emigration abroad in the 1990s and 2000s is also discussed.

Ukrainian curators

The idea of ​​giving different voices from an entire century a chance to speak came from the director of the Jewish Museum in Augsburg, Carmen Reichert. The concept for the show was ready in early 2022, but when Russia invaded Ukraine it was clear that it needed to be revised. The creators didn’t want to shed light on the life of Ukrainian Jews without at the same time including current events in the country.

Two experts were brought on board who are not only familiar with Ukrainian reality, but also with the history of the Jewish communities in Ukraine: the historian Daria Reznyk and her colleague Andrii Shestaliuk, both had previously worked in the memorial museum of totalitarian regimes “Territory of Terror”. worked in Lviv, western Ukraine. Now they are curating the exhibition in Augsburg together.

“Originally, the Jewish Museum wanted to show exhibits from Ukraine that illustrate the life of Jewish communities in different periods of history,” says Shestaliuk. Because of the war, however, they could not be brought to Germany. That is why the museum relies on oral traditions from contemporary witnesses. They report on events that have had a major impact on the lives of Ukrainian Jews.

Partners of the exhibition are the organization “After Silence”, founded in Lviv in 2021, and the media archive there, as well as the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. They compiled video recordings, which were later supplemented by the curators with interviews. These are talks with Ukrainian Jews who have emigrated to Germany and with those who, despite the current war, have not left Ukraine. A total of 16 people tell their very personal stories. The exhibition is supplemented by photographs that were taken both before the Second World War and in the present.

Life in the shtetls

“Our family had a small shop right in the house where we lived. We weren’t rich, but we lived well,” Weiss recalled in a film interview. He was born in Boryslaw near Lviv in 1926. At that time, this part of western Ukraine belonged to Poland. Jewish families traditionally devoted themselves to crafts or trade and adhered to their religious traditions. At the same time there was a lively exchange with Ukrainians and Poles.

In Weiss’ childhood memories, everyday life in the shtetl comes to life again. “On the whole, the relationship was normal. I went to a Polish school and went to school with Polish classmates,” he says. “The Jewish children waited for Christmas, then they went from house to house, sang Christmas carols and got presents. And the Polish children waited for the Jewish holidays of Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah or Passover, to which all our neighbors, both Poles and Ukrainians, treated them with respect, just as we respected their holidays. You could say we lived together and apart at the same time. We kept our values ​​and the Poles and Ukrainians kept theirs. All this ended with the start of the war on September 1, 1939.”

The Holocaust was kept secret

At the entrance to the exhibition is an interactive map of Ukraine. It shows censuses from different eras. The first dates back to 1897-1900, when Ukraine was partly part of the Russian Empire and partly part of Austria-Hungary. The last one is from 2001, when Ukraine had been independent for ten years. “If you look at the development of the Jewish communities, you can see that it is going negatively. The number of Jews is steadily declining,” notes Andrii Shestaliuk.

World War II and the Holocaust almost completely wiped out Jewish life in Ukraine. Around 2.7 million Jews lived there by 1941, more than in any other European country. According to various sources, 1.5 to 1.9 million Ukrainian Jews perished in the Holocaust, about 70 percent of the Jewish population. But in the Soviet Union this tragedy was kept silent: socialist ideals and the definition as “Soviet people” left no room for the memory of the persecution of the Jews.

Although there was no official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, Jews were discriminated against. The Jewish religion and culture could not be practiced openly, Yiddish should not be spoken. Sofia Taubina from Cherson, who now lives in Augsburg, reports that her family was not able to bury her father according to Jewish tradition. They secretly placed the tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, in his coffin.

Saving Ukrainian-Jewish History

When Ukraine became independent in 1991, Jewish life was free to develop again. People remembered their roots, synagogues were opened, Jewish educational organizations emerged. “One was absolutely proud to be a Jew,” recalls Yevhen Kotliar from Kharkiv, a professor at the Kharkiv Academy of Art and Design. He created the stained glass windows of a large choral synagogue in Kharkiv, which was restored in the 1990s.

The last part of the exhibition tells about Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. One of the photos shows the Holocaust memorial Drobyzkyj Yar in Kharkiv, which was damaged by Russian troops shelling. Another documents residents of Kharkiv taking the subway to escape Russian bombing raids. People sit on the floor, on mats, sleeping bags or on folding chairs. “It’s the first time in my life I’ve faced something like this,” says Kotliar.

When the air raids on the city in eastern Ukraine began, he and his family fled to the safer west of the country. The way to get there passed through small villages in the Cherkassy region, where there used to be Jewish shtetls. “For Jews, these are holy places, they are very mythologized. This is a separate dimension of the Jewish heritage, actually a pilgrimage map of Ukraine. This is where the Hasidic movements originated (an ultra-orthodox current in Judaism, editor’s note.)” says Kotliar.

On his trip to western Ukraine, Kotliar felt on the one hand as a refugee and on the other hand as a scientist who ended up in a region of Ukraine that is very important for Judaism. In the city of Medzhibish, where the founder of the Hasidic movement Baal Shem Tov lived, Kotliar left his family at a cafe and went to the Jewish cemetery to photograph old tombstones. “I thought the war could reach this place and destroy everything. For me, past and present merged at that moment. I’ve never felt anything like it in my life,” says Kotliar.

“Every story matters”

During a tour of the exhibition, curator Andrii Shestaliuk was once asked which of the many stories he felt was the most important. “I couldn’t answer that question. Every story is important,” he emphasizes. It is not for nothing that the exhibition is called “Voices. A Mosaic of Ukrainian-Jewish Life”. “Every story is part of a mosaic that makes up one big picture,” explains Shestaliuk. That’s what makes them so valuable.

The exhibition in the building of the former Kriegshaber synagogue in Augsburg runs until February 26, 2023. The organizers are currently working on a digital version and hope that the film interviews and other materials will be available on the museum’s website in spring 2023.

Adaptation from the Russian: Markian Ostapchuk