Remembering

By Volodymyr Kish

The Ukrainian community in Toronto had a most interesting visitor from Lviv this past week, His name is Meylakh Sheykhet and he is the Director of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union.  From a small office in what used to be the Jewish quarter in Lviv, he leads a crusade to try and preserve both historical Jewish cemeteries as well as to properly memorialize the site of mass graves that were the result of Nazi mass killings in Western Ukraine during the Second World War.

As part of his effort, he is reaching out for support from the large diaspora Ukrainian community in Canada.  This past weekend he spoke with members of that community at the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation’s KUMF gallery on Bloor Street West, the cultural heart of Toronto’s large Ukrainian population.  The event was organized through the efforts of Borys Wrzesnewskyj, a prominent Ukrainian Member of Parliament, and Mark Freiman, head of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Mr. Sheykhet has also been engaged in discussion with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress since last fall on assistance with a specific project to preserve a historic Jewish cemetery in the town of Sambir near Lviv.

This initiative is an encouraging sign in what has sometimes been an uneasy relationship between Ukrainians and Jews, despite the fact that we share a thousand year history in the area that now comprises Western Ukraine.  Jews, fleeing persecution from elsewhere, started settling in Ukraine as early as 800AD.  At the dawn of the Second World War there were some 1.5 million Jews living in Ukraine.  In Lviv, they comprised almost a third of the population of the city.  Of course, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 changed that drastically.  By the end of the war, there were almost no Jews left in Ukraine.  Some half a million to a million were exterminated on the spot by special German Einsatzgruppen extermination squads, while the rest were transported to and perished in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. 

After the war, most signs of the once thriving and vibrant Jewish communities in Ukraine disappeared. Synagogues that were not destroyed during the Nazi occupation were either demolished or co-opted for other use by the Soviets.  Jewish cemeteries disappeared through neglect or conversion to other use.

During my years of living in Ukraine, I personally saw many examples of this.  I was particularly moved when I was shown in the town of Horodenka, just east of Ivano-Frankivsk, how the Soviet authorities had used tombstones taken from the once large Jewish cemetery there, and used them as building blocks to build a stone barn for the local collective farm.  To add insult to injury, the barn was used to raise pigs.

I recall too that my father had told me how as a young boy he remembered that his village of Sokoliwka near Brody had a large Jewish population numbering in the many hundreds, with a fine synagogue and cemetery.  By the time I finally visited the village in 1990, there was not the slightest sign that Jews had ever lived there – no synagogue, no cemetery, no monuments or plaques to testify to the centuries long existence of that community.  In Zhovkva, northwest of Lviv, I was once given a tour of the decaying  shell of what had once been a large and magnificent synagogue.  During Soviet times it had been converted for use as a warehouse or storage facility.

This story is repeated thousands of times throughout the territory of Ukraine.  Meylakh Sheykhet is trying to do something to ensure that a thousand year old heritage does not disappear entirely into the mists of time.  In particular, he is fighting with local and national Ukrainian authorities to preserve and restore Jewish cemeteries as well as to properly identify and recognize for historical posterity the sites of Jewish mass murders and burials during the war.

In this Jews and Ukrainians share a common cause – both were victimized in tragic ways by both the Nazis and Soviets during the previous century, with history being suppressed and rewritten to try and hide genocidal crimes.  In the interests of justice and honouring the victims we cannot allow that to happen.

It is true that in our mutual histories, there have been tensions and tragic misunderstandings between Ukrainians and Jews.  Nonetheless, sharing both similar sorrows and persecutions, perhaps we can find in dialogue and understanding, a common basis for cooperation that can lead to a better relationship between our historically linked communities.