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Essays and viewpoints
PURELY COMMENTARY
essay The Surprising Power of Diplomacy
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Several years ago, I joined the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council/American Jewish Committee (JCRC/AJC). Much of the organization’s mission spoke to me then and continues to do so, maybe even more, now as I have joined the executive committee. Part of the mission of the nonprofit is to represent the Metropolitan Detroit Jewish community, Israel and Jews throughout the world to the general community, and to establish collaborative relationships with other ethnic, racial and religious groups. In addition, JCRC/AJC educates and advocates on important issues, seeking consensus with a commitment to Jewish values.
One of the important ways we embrace this mission is through our Diplomatic Committee, which I have been blessed to co-chair for the last two years alongside my able partner Howard Brown, who has been engaged in this work for going on two decades.
Through our team’s efforts, we meet with consuls general and honorary consuls general representing an array of countries with offices in the Midwest. The goal of this outreach, which we do in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee, is to build long-term relationships and mutual understanding and support through which actions or changes are more likely to occur.
Via meetings and events, our lay leaders promote dialogue and communicate concerns about critical issues related to Israel and world Jewry.
Said Howard Brown, “Diplomatic work is very important and meaningful to me. It is not every day you get to meet with a local consul general to discuss important policies and issues facing us like the NO HATE Act, COVID19, locally and in their countries, local and world events, our beloved Israel, the United Nations and community relations near and far.”
Prior to the pandemic, we would meet with the local individuals in person. Obviously, things have changed in the last two years, and many of our meetings have had to move to Zoom, which has been a bit of a blessing in that we have had the opportunity to meet with a greater number of diplomats. However, there is something special that is lost by not meeting in person and that something can best be illustrated by this:
Last fall, several JCRC/AJC lay leaders and staff were having lunch with the Consul General of Japan outside at the Soul Cafe in West Bloomfield. It was the first time during the pandemic that we held a meeting in person — and it made all the difference.
Before lunch was served, Friendship Circle Rabbi Benny Greenwald came to me, quietly asking if he could have a private word with the Consul General. I was surprised that he could tell that is who we were meeting with and, therefore, must have had a questioning expression on my face. The rabbi persisted, holding up his phone, clearly wanting to share something that was on there. I agreed quietly and introduced the rabbi to the Consul General, who was sitting next to me.
After introductions, Rabbi Greenwald then showed all present a picture of his grandfather, sharing that Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania during World War II, saved his grandfather’s life during the war. In fact, he
helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas so they could travel through Japanese territory. In doing so, he risked his job, as well as his life and that of his family. In 1985, Israel honored him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, the only Japanese national to hold that honor. The Consul General was Carol Ogusky visibly moved by this revelation, and we could see how important a moment this was for both him and the rabbi. Frankly, it was a very emotional moment for us all. Said Rabbi Greenwald, “Seeing the Consul General brought to the forefront of my mind, and my heart, the power one individual can have. My grandfather was a Chabad yeshivah student. On the outside, there was no connection between him and the Japanese diplomat. However, with God’s help, Mr. Sugihara’s self-sacrifice brought me here today, and for that I’m forever grateful. It was powerful for me to be able to express gratitude to the Consul General.” Thanks to this one man who let his conscience guide him, it has been estimated as many as 100,000 people alive today are the descendants of the recipients of Sugihara visas. As, hopefully, the pandemic continues to lift, I grow eager to see how many more experiences like this that the Diplomatic Committee will have the blessing to witness.
JCRC/AJC
JCRC/AJC’s Diplomatic Committee with Rabbi Benny Greenwald (standing, third from left) next to the Consul General of Japan (seated) at the Soul Cafe last fall
Carol Ogusky is an executive committee member of the Jewish Community Relations Council/American Jewish Committee. She also is a past president of Hadassah Greater Detroit and sits on several other local boards.
essay
Europe’s ‘Bloodlands’
William Brawer, my maternal great-grandfather, was born in a village just outside the Galician town of Rohatyn. An acquaintance has devoted herself to preserving the history of that shtetl — erecting a memorial, creating a vast digital archive, retrieving matzevot (sacred pillars) unearthed during construction projects. She and her husband, both from California, even relocated to the nearby city of Lviv, and my wife has regularly lobbied for a visit to Rohatyn. “We’ll be so close,” she said a few months ago about my upcoming work in Poland. “You really need to go back to Ukraine.”
Like millions of American Jews with Ashkenazi roots, I can link my family to the troubled lands that now fill our newsfeeds each morning, though the complex borders of Eastern and Central Europe can frustrate those seeking ancestral connections.
For many years, I accepted what the Ellis Island and census records said: that my great-grandfather was from Austria, and even imagined him waltzing in Vienna. In fact, over his 84 years, Pomonieta changed hands five times: surrendered from the Austrian empire to Poland after the First World War, overrun by the Soviets as part of its 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, conquered by Hitler’s forces in 1941, and then “liberated” by Stalin’s army in 1944 — a brutal shotgun marriage endured for five decades.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that small village an hour from Lviv at last became part of an independent Ukraine. At the time of this writing in midMarch, Pomonieta, about 100 miles from the Polish border,
Rob
Franciosi Grand remains under Ukrainian Valley State control, though missiles have University rained down near Lviv. Each day I read news of the conflict. And each day I remember my visit to Kyiv in 2016. That trip across Eastern Europe, sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation, attracted me for two reasons: we would work in neglected Jewish cemeteries, and we would visit the
The Babyn Yar Memorial in Ukraine
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Ukrainian capital. I had read a great deal about what was perpetrated at BabynYar, the ravine in Kyiv where in September 1941 more than 30,000 Jews were murdered in two days, but never expected to stand there.
As soon as we arrived in Kyiv, however, I noted the complex and conflicted relationships faced by those seeking traces of Jewish life. Concerned mostly with the past, we were faced with a city scarred by reminders of recent history in the making. Independence Square had always been a gathering place for celebrations, like our Times Square, but in 2013-14 it was the site of anti-government protests after the country’s leaders, under pressure from Russia, rejected a widely supported pact between Ukraine and the European Union. Shooting erupted on Feb. 18, and nearly 100 protesters and 13 police were killed. These events, known as the Revolution of Dignity, toppled the government and reasserted the Ukrainian desire for European democracy instead of Russian autocracy.
THE ‘NEW’ UKRAINE
The emergence of a new Ukraine, however, one hoping beyond hope to join NATO, was met with early manifestations of what we are now witnessing. Within weeks of the overthrow of the Russianbacked government in Kyiv, Vladimir Putin sent troops to Crimea and began supporting separatists in Ukraine’s east. The conflict between them and the Ukrainian army was still raging when we arrived in the summer of 2016.
On our visit to Independence Square, we viewed memorials to those who died during the February revolution. Further up a hill that frames the square was a long wall of photographs in tribute to fallen soldiers on the Ukraine-Russia border. There were hundreds — as well room for many, many more. Looking at the mostly young faces on that wall, none of us could have imagined that they represented just the first rippling of the deadly wave that now engulfs their countrymen.
And while our quest for Jewish history remained central to our travels, encounters at museums and sites in Kyiv reminded us that Jewish life there had not existed in a vacuum. Signs of the country’s tragic past were everywhere. We visited the powerful museum to the Holodomor, the deliberate famine ordered by Joseph Stalin which took the lives of some 3 million Ukrainians. We also contemplated the gigantic Motherland Monument, 50 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, whose sword-bearing figure holds a shield emblazoned with the communist hammer and sickle — a “gift” from the Breshnev era which many have called to be dismantled.
At Babyn Yar the story was doubly tragic, as for decades the fate of the murdered Jews had been erased, with an enormous Soviet-era statue memorializing only the “victims of fascism.” A menorah-shaped monument near the site was erected in 1991, 50 years after the massacre, but what some have termed a high-tech Holocaust Disneyland is now being built nearby — and according to Ukrainian reports, several Russian missiles have struck near the area.
Thinking about Babyn Yar and of Ukraine’s desperate plight, I keep returning to one realization: the land now being fought over, what historian Timothy Snyder terms Europe’s bloodlands, was both home and hell for the Jews who lived there. Decades before Hitler, many thousands had been murdered by Ukrainian nationalists in waves of pogroms between the 1880s and the 1920s, victims of the persistent violence that convinced those like my great-grandfather to seek a better life, a safer life, in America. As for the genocidal complicity of their Ukrainian neighbors in small cities and towns during the Holocaust, that remains another bloodsoaked stain on Jewish memory of these strife-ridden lands.
The dual catastrophe of Hitler and Stalin, however, could not extinguish Ukrainian longings for autonomy and freedom. Nor could the darkness of the 20th century snuff out Jewish life in a land where it had flourished for a thousand years. Before the war — the current war — an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 Jews resided in Ukraine, the fifth-largest community in the Jewish world, though many have fled to Israel and other places of refuge. Who knows how many will return.
At least the election — and heroic leadership — of Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky offers a glimmer in the darkness. Will the world continue to support a free Ukraine, one capable of facing its troubled past while striving for a brighter future? Time may tell, but history will judge.
Robert Franciosi is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Grand Valley State University.
letters
Regarding “Beacon of Strength” in the March 10 Detroit Jewish News, I met Alan Yost along with the Congregation Beth Achim team at the initial meeting with the Adat Shalom Synagogue team for merger discussions in 1998.
The merger was a resounding success in no small part due to Alan’s efforts in unifying the membership of both congregations.
Those of us that took part in the merger effort know Alan’s incredible work within Adat Shalom to welcome the Beth Achim family as if they were always members of the Adat Shalom family.
The teams and united members within Adat Shalom Synagogue wish Alan a yasher koach and, along with Beverly, a long and happy retirement.
— Ed Kohl West Bloomfield
Proud of Carl Levin’s Role in Ukraine
Over 30 years ago, in January of 1992, the late Sen. Carl Levin traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine, to ensure that the nuclear missiles stored there were dismantled. Many times, it is years after something positive is done that we see the benefit. Sen. Carl Levin, may his memory be for a blessing.
— Joel E. Jacob West Bloomfield
Thanks so much for the excellent series of articles, “Standing with Ukraine,” including ‘A Modern Maccabee,” about Ukrainian President Zelensky, in the March 10 Jewish News.
continued on page 10
PURELY COMMENTARY
opinion
What Zelensky Gets Wrong About the Holocaust in Ukraine
In his March 20 speech to Israeli lawmakers, Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky invoked the Holocaust as analogous to what his country is currently experiencing. “I have the right to this parallel and to this comparison,” he said in his video address. But as a historian of the Holocaust in Ukraine, I know how problematic this comparison is. Zelensky, who played a history teacher on TV, should know better, too.
The war is horrific, and Russia’s apparent deliberate targeting of civilians is abominable. But like most wars, this war is being fought over the political control of a territory and the sovereignty of a people; unlike the Holocaust, it is not an attempt to murder every single member of an ethnic, racial or national group. In contrast to Zelensky’s assertion, the threat is not the same.
For example, Zelensky could, theoretically, turn over the power of government to a Russian appointed puppet and allow his people to live as a Ukrainian minority within an oppressive Russian state. It’s not a good choice, but it is a choice. The Nazis provided no such option for the Jews of Europe. There was no choice that led to physical survival, no offer to surrender.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, too, has invoked the Holocaust when justifying his invasion of Ukraine, claiming that it was his intention to “denazify” the country. That, too, is disingenuous. Ukraine is a free and democratic state, with a government that was popularly elected and that has, for the most part, protected the rights of all its citizens.
It is little wonder, though, that the Holocaust has such resonance in Ukraine. Over one-quarter of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, approximately 1.5 million people, were killed within the territory of what is now Ukraine. Millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians also perished under German occupation as prisoners of war, slave laborers, soldiers, partisans, and ordinary townsfolk and peasants. Zelensky is right that the war was “a tragedy for Ukrainians, for Jews, for Europe, for the world.”
Jeffrey Veidlinger JTA
Urging Israel to provide more military aid to Ukraine, Zelensky asked the “people of Israel” to make a choice, just as Ukrainians made their choice 80 years ago. With 2,673 Ukrainians recognized by Yad Vashem for
HISTORICAL ARCHIVES/WARSAW
A photo of one of the German army mobile killing units, or Einsatzgruppen, shooting Jews near Ivangorod, Ukraine, in 1942 was mailed from the Eastern Front to Germany and intercepted at a Warsaw post office by a member of the Polish resistance collecting documentation on Nazi war crimes.
their efforts to save Jews, Zelensky can legitimately boast that “Righteous Among the Nations are among us,” as he did in his speech. But this claim obscures the role that far more Ukrainians played in collaborating with the Germans and facilitating the murder of their Jewish neighbors.
The Germans knew that Ukraine would be fertile ground for their exterminationist plan. As I show in my recently published book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, only 20 years earlier, Ukrainians opposing Bolshevik rule had murdered tens of thousands of their Jewish neighbors. The Jews and the Bolsheviks, they had falsely claimed, were one and the same.
The Nazis purposefully revived this myth. They enticed Ukrainians to assist in murder as revenge for the crimes the Bolsheviks had inflicted in Ukraine — mass arrests and executions, and, most notably, forced grain requisitions that had resulted in a famine killing 3.5 million people in 1932-1933.
A QUICK HISTORY
In Lviv, the first major city the Germans captured in Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers recruited from abroad with the false promise of German support for Ukrainian statehood, rounded up Jews and threw them to the crowds. “They were beating up Jews, killing Jews, beating them to death on the street,” recalled one witness. German special units with the collaboration of Ukrainian auxiliary police and militia killed between 2,000 and 5,000 Jews in the city in July 1941.
Similar scenes were repeated elsewhere. During the first month of the German invasion, between 12,000 and 35,000 Jews were killed in eastern Galicia and western Volhynia — two regions that the Soviet Union had taken from Poland in 1939. Many of these massacres were perpetrated by locals, and some without even a German pres-
PURELY COMMENTARY
student corner
Just Call Me 42
When I was 6 years old, a random act of strangeness changed my life. It all started when my dad picked me up from gymnastics practice. I got in his car and randomly said to him, “From now on, call me 42.” My dad was beyond confused and still, to this day, we’re perplexed as to where it came from. Nevertheless, ever since that car ride, the number 42 has become my number. It appears everywhere for me, following me around wherever I go. Whether on a receipt or on a clock, I find great comfort in spotting this number in many aspects of my life.
Until recently, I did not think of 42 as having any significant meaning, other than being lucky for me. That changed a few weeks ago when I came across an article from The Times of Israel titled “Forty -Two Journeys to the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” This article revealed to its readers the vast and powerful connections that the number 42 has to Judaism, and more specifically, to Kabbalistic tradition.
For instance, in the Torah portion Massei, (Numbers 33-35), the 42 locations that the Children of Israel camped at after the Exodus from Egypt are illustrated. Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, a Jewish mystic from Poland who is regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism, interpreted this by explaining that “The forty-two ‘stations’ from Egypt to the Promised Land are replayed in the life of every individual Jew, as his soul journeys from its descent to Earth at birth to its return to its Source.”
Not only is the number 42 embedded in the lives of all Jews, but according to the Zohar Chadash — a Kabbalistic book — G-d brought the Jews out of Egypt with the mystery of his 42-letter name, just like how heaven and Earth were created. The universe was created with this specific name of G-d, and it just happens to be the significant ineffable 42-lettered name.
Another instance of 42 in Judaism appears in the wellknown prayer, Ana BeKoach. This prayer, dating back to the first century, was created by a Kabalistic rabbi — Rabbi Nehonia. Ana BeKoach is composed of seven lines, each having six words, totaling 42 words in the prayer. When taking each first letter of every word, the result is a 42-letter name, which is said, by Kabalistic scholars, to be the essence of the creation,
Aliyah and the name of G-d. For these Lofman reasons, and many others, Ana BeKoach is regarded in the mystical tradition as no less than “a portal to the power of creation itself and to creation’s source.” Coming across all of these connections and interrelations between my lucky number and my religion was enlightening and substantiated my realization that there had to be a bigger reason as to why I embraced this number at such a young age. Maybe it was not so random after all.
letters
continued from page 7
I just watched and listened to Zelensky speaking to Congress on March 16, which included the incredibly powerful video which showed some of the horrors that Putin’s Russian army has inflicted on Ukraine and its people. I am relieved that the U.S., NATO, and so many countries have banded together to give money and weapons to Ukraine as well as inflicting strong economic sanctions on Russia. Still, I can’t help thinking about Schindler’s List, the horrors of the Holocaust, and remembering Schindler’s memorable line, “I didn’t do enough!”
We sit back in our comfortable homes in the United States, watching calamities night after night on our TV screens and feel awful and futile in the face of such devastation. It is great that democracies have come together, and that Democrats and Republicans are mostly united against Putin. But when a heroic and desperate Zelensky admits that “today, my age stopped when the hearts of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths,” my heart and millions of others virtually stopped for a few moments as well.
It is commendable that every U.S. senator voted to condemn Putin as a “war criminal.” But if the words from the Talmud, “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire,” are even vaguely true, then we, even after all of our donations and thoughts and prayers, must still accept the truth that we didn’t do enough.
We didn’t do enough.
Aliyah Lofman is a junior at Frankel Jewish Academy.
— Arnie Goldman Farmington Hills CORRECTIONS
• Despite reports in the March 10 JN, the rocket that damaged the Kyiv TV tower in Ukraine did not, in fact, harm the Babyn Yar memorial, located in an adjacent area, according to a veteran Israeli journalist, Ron Ben Yishai, who toured the site and saw no signs of damage.
• In “A Lone Soldier’s Story” (page 22, March 17), Joseph Icikson’s age and rank were incorrect. Joseph Icikson is 22 and an active soldier in the IDF. Also, Icikson was drafted into the IDF; he did not volunteer.
WHAT ZELENSKY GETS WRONG
continued from page 8
ence. “The ones that did the shooting, and the ones that did the arresting, and the ones that carried out these atrocities were not Germans; this was the local Ukrainian police,” recalled Simon Feldman of Boremel.
As the Germans moved further east into Ukraine, they intensified their massacres. In hundreds of locales with the assistance of local Ukrainian collaborators, they gathered Jewish men, women and children, marched them to the outskirts of town, stripped them naked, and shot them in ravines or trenches. Locals were then permitted to scavenge the clothing of the dead. The organization Yahad in Unum, which has been mapping Holocaust-era mass graves, has identified nearly 1,000 such sites in Ukraine.
The largest is Babyn Yar, in the suburbs of Kyiv, where over 33,000 Jews were killed on Sept. 29-30, 1941. Weeks before Babyn Yar, 23,600 Jews were executed in the fortress town of Kamianets-Podilskyy. By January 1942, some 500,000 Jews had been killed in Ukraine.
After an initial wave of killing during the German advance, the German military established some 250 ghettos in Ukraine and required Jews to wear armbands with stars. Ukrainian police enforced the regulations. In contrast to the walled ghettos established in Poland, in Ukraine ghettos tended to be more porous, marked by barbed wire and sometimes only with signs. They were never intended to be permanent. By spring 1942, most of the ghettos were liquidated, and another 500,000 Jews were murdered.
Because so many Jews were killed at close range, near their homes, by conventional weapons, historians have termed German atrocities in Ukraine the “Holocaust by Bullets.” Indeed, by the spring of 1942, before most of the death camps in German-occupied Poland began operating, nearly twothirds of Jews in territories now part of Ukraine had been exterminated.
Addressing lawmakers around the world, Zelensky has repeatedly sought to invoke traumatic moments in each country’s history — the London Blitz in his speech to the British parliament, 9-11 and Pearl Harbor in his address to the U.S. Congress and the Berlin Wall in his address to the German Bundestag.
It’s understandable that Zelensky is making use of whatever reference points he think will help his country. It’s also true that Jews like Zelensky who grew up behind the Iron Curtain didn’t learn this history in the same way or on the same timeline as Jews living in the rest of the world. And I’m sympathetic to the idea, expressed by Israeli leaders to rebuff criticism of Zelensky after his speech, that we can all cut some slack to a world leader in a situation of life and death.
Still, Zelensky’s voice matters. And when he utters untruths about the Holocaust, it’s important not to let them stand.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust.
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