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Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; Danni Christensen; David Finkelstein; Bracha Goldsweig; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; Joseph Pinson; Andy Shefsky and Amy Tipp. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the Federation are: Community Relations Committee, Jewish Community Center, Center for Jewish Life, Jewish Social Services, and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: www.jewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.

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A Day of Distress

ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT

Jewish Press Editor

“We write the Holocaust with a capital H,” a Times of Israel editorial read on March 1, “to emphasize its eternally incomprehensible dimensions—the staggering scale of the killings, the relentlessness of the effort to wipe out our entire people. We protest attempted comparisons, even to other genocides, that would trivialize or minimize its dimensions and impact. But when Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky asks, as he did last night, ‘What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?’ His is no cynical, cheap invocation of our abandoned people’s tragedy eight decades ago. It is a heartfelt, legitimate plea for help to put an end to the new tragedy that has so symbolically now engulfed Babyn Yar.” With the news being bad, tragic, hard-to-comprehend in recent weeks, the bombing near Babyn Yar was a flashpoint for many of us. We know this name, intimately, more so than any other part of Ukraine. It brings instant sadness. We don’t talk about Babyn Yar without being weighed down, without pausing to think about the victims buried there, 90% of whom were never identified. I have been asking myself, is it worse when a rocket lands near one place, versus another? Why does the news of this bombing so close to Babyn Yar hit so hard? Shouldn’t we be equally horrified no matter where the missiles land? I’m not sure I know the answer to that. It probably has to do with the symbolic meaning we attach to a place. In the case of Babyn Yar, that symbolism is undeniably tied to the fact that it took so long for

A missile strikes the main TV tower in Kyiv, Ukraine,

March 1, 2022. Credit: Illia Ponomarenko/Twitter the world to acknowledge what happened there. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union collapsed that the first monuments appeared at Babyn Yar. “The memorial is meant to preserve historical memory following decades of Soviet suppression of historical truth,” Natan Sharansky said, “so that the evils of the past can never be repeated.” Sharansky is the former head to the Jewish Agency and current chairman of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Advisory Board. He’s right, of course; we’ve waited a long time for the Babyn Yar massacre to be acknowledged, for the victims to be given their rightful place in the history books. For Putin to specifically target the area is not just attacking a place on the map. He’s attacking its place in our collective consciousness and memory. I don’t believe Vladimir Putin orders any missile strikes without attaching meaning to where these missiles land. Breaking history, breaking memories, all while creating new and fresh pain for the current citizens of Ukraine. We have to ask: will today’s victims have to fight to be remembered as well? When you disregard history, what does it say about how you will treat today’s events in the future? In other words, does Putin believe he will get away with it because the world at large has proven again and again that memory is short and unreliable? “We must not allow the truth to, once again, become the victim of war,” Sharansky said. It is a reminder: we can watch things happen in real time while we worry about how the world will remember it all when the dust settles. If the dust settles.

Editor’s note: The situation in Ukraine is fluid and changes by the hour. Stories included in the print edition may be outdated once they land in your mail. Please check our website at www.omahajewishpress.com for the latest news.

My Jewish family fled Kyiv in 1989. My heart breaks for the city today.

MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN

JTA I was born in Kyiv. I shy away from calling myself Ukrainian because at the time it was the USSR. And as Jews who eventually fled as refugees, my family didn’t have any ethnonational attachments to the place. Still, it’s where I learned to sort of smile. It’s where my favorite photo of my mom and me was taken, just three years before cancer killed her. I remember the large city park by our apartment and its train for tots in the summer. I remember begging my sister to pull me on a sled in winter despite there being little snow. That I had been born there at all was a function of knowing when to leave — and when to come back. My babushka, my grandmother, fled Kyiv the day before the Nazis came in 1941. Her own grandparents stayed. They were murdered at Babyn Yar. After the war, the antisemitism in Ukraine under the Soviets was intense and repugnant. My father remembers seeing KGB officers snapping photos of men lined up by the synagogue to purchase matzah for Passover — a crime of Jewish expression. Men identified in those photos would be fired from their jobs or worse, my dad and his close relatives would recall years later as we sat in our new home in the United States around a dining room table spread with homemade gefilte fish, salat olivier and chopped herring salad. A mention of a pogrom, the killing of Jewish doctors or total Soviet amnesia that Jews were specifically targeted by the millions in Germany’s invasion of the USSR — all of these would get a knowing and exhausted nod. And so we left again. I still have all the papers that tell our departure story, familiar to so many Jews who left in the 1980s. Our exit visa to Israel. Our United States refugee papers. Our refugee ID numbers. Leaving for Israel, with an official exit visa, was the only way for Jews to get out the USSR. But because Israel and Moscow had no diplomatic ties, all Jews first flew to Vienna. While other families bound for Israel pivoted straight to their flights to Tel Aviv, we remained in Vienna waiting for our permission to enter the U.S. Our tri-national spread of exit and entry visas are stamped by the Dutch (Israel’s representatives in Moscow), the Austrians and the Soviets. After several months in Vienna, the Hebrew International Aid Society secured our flight to New York City. We arrived in the United States as refugees on Feb. 7, 1989. My mom died of an aggressive breast cancer months after our arrival in New York. My family long suspected her cancer was fueled by our proximity to Chernobyl when its nuclear reactor blew. That assumption is scientifically unfounded but played a huge role in my family’s story. Because I was a child in Kyiv when Chernobyl’s core melted and spewed radioactive waste into the sky, my dad feared I was contaminated, too. For my entire childhood, he’d limit my play outside to when the sun was setting and have me in long sleeves and a hat if we were out in the day — so strong was his fear that the sun could trigger something in me unknown to doctors that Chernobyl left behind. I’d like to think that’s why I’m so pale today. We first lived in Midtown Manhattan for a few weeks, in what I believe was a halfway home for recovering addicts (the last time I checked, in the 2000s, it was a hotel). My dad recalls speaking to doctors in a hallway payphone about my mom’s worsening state, his broken English competing for clarity over the commotion in the public space. Once in Brooklyn, I attended a Jewish camp with my older sister — experiences organized for us by a rabbi my dad befriended, in part to distract us from our mom’s demise. Months later, we’d move to Los Angeles, where I remained for most of my life and now live again. According to my dad and a

photo I once took on a return visit, our old neighborhood was festooned with placards that read “patrolled by private police” — an alleged reference to the organized crime figures who kept watch. Despite the trauma of this journey, I regard Kyiv with fondness. My heart breaks for the other children at risk of displacement, the families who may have to flee because of Moscow’s misdeeds. I didn’t think Putin would commit to a full-scale invasion, that he’d instead try to destabilize Ukrain-

Mikhail Zinshteyn's family's exit visa from the USSR, and a favorite picture of him with

his mother and sister taken in Kyiv. Credit: Zinshteyn ian democracy with less force. I had also assumed that, considering both lands are united by the horror of Hitler’s invasion, a Russian blitzkrieg of Ukraine would be beyond the pale. Alas. I quiver that a city that has endured genocidal occupation, nuclear fallout and civil unrest all in the past 80 years must now endure this. It’s not my place to offer solutions. It is my place to say a city’s tragedy 6,000 miles away feels very present and raw.

Mikhail Zinshteyn is an education reporter for CalMatters. He has a master's degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

JOSHUA MEYERS

JTA Many immigrant groups in America — including those with roots in Ireland, Japan and Mexico — take pride in the lands they or their ancestors lived in before migrating to the new world. For Jews, the matter is different. Many a pizzeria proudly flies an Italian flag. Very few bagel shops fly a Polish flag or a Ukrainian one. Though my family has always identified as proudly Litvish, meaning that we come from areas where the Litvish dialect of Yiddish was spoken, but I cannot recall any of that pride being set aside for the nations of Belarus or Lithuania. These were lands we left for good reason. But they were also the lands where our families lived and our history happened. They are where our ancestors were born and buried, even if — too often — in mass or unmarked graves. Seeing that land bombed and invaded evokes a difficult sensation that deserves to be sorted through. It would be a mistake to reduce Jewish history in Ukraine to suffering. Through the late 19th century, many Jews from around the Russian Empire migrated to Ukraine, drawn to the region’s relatively strong economy. Out of this melting pot emerged one of the richest stews of Jewish life, impacting Jewish politics, religion, literature and language. Cities now under siege or threatened — Berdichev, Kyiv and Odessa — stand every inch as proud as Warsaw, Vilna or New York as centers of modern Jewish culture before the Holocaust. This is the land that produced the Ba’al Shem Tov, Golda Meir and Hayim Nahman Bialik, that was home to dozens of Hasidic dynasties. It is the backdrop to many of the stories of Sholom Aleichem. Tevye the Dairyman was a Ukrainian Jew. And yet, the traumas associated with Ukraine are real, and the worst of the traumas have emerged in Ukraine’s many bids for independence. Bohdan Khmelnytsky remains among the greatest villains in Jewish history for the massacres his forces perpetrated in the 17th century. Even approximate figures for the death toll are hard to come by; Israeli historian Shaul Stampfer estimated that 18,000 to 20,000 Jews, nearly half the Jewish population of Ukraine at the time, were killed by Khmelnytsky’s forces. Worse yet were the pogroms inflicted by the Ukrainian Directorate under Semyon Petliura in the aftermath of World War I, when 50,000 to 100,000 Jews were killed by Ukrainian nationalist forces before their defeat at the hands of the Red Army. This was the greatest killing of Jews prior to the Holocaust 20 years later. The details of the pogroms were so striking that when a Jew named Sholem Shwartzbard assassinated Petliura in Paris in 1926, a French court found Schwartzbard not guilty — because the French court believed the action justified. If not for Hitler and the Nazis, there is every reason to

think that Petliura and the Ukrainian nationalists would be the central emblem for evil in Jewish collective memory. And yet, Nazism did come, and it found a willing collaborator in Petliura’s heirs. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians fought against Germany, serving heroically in the ranks of the Red Army. Nearly seven million Ukrainains — including some 1.5 million Jews— died at the hands of the German invaders. But the Ukrainian national movement, dominated by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and led by Stepan Bandera, made every effort to collaborate with Germany in World War II, including the murder of Ukrainian Jews. It is no surprise that many Jews’ first instincts toward Ukraine’s latest push for independence were skeptical. But though past is prologue, it is not fate. The building of monuments to pogromists and Nazi collaborators, including Petliura, has drawn criticism and the existence of the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi national guard division, is a disgrace. Their influence, however, is unclear. The Azov Battalion numbers a few hundred in a military whose regular strength crests at a quarter million. Meanwhile, far more national effort and expense has gone into commemorating the murder of Jews than into lionizing their killers. Pew Polls on antisemitism in Europe have routinely found Ukraine among the least antisemitic countries in Europe. Antisemitic parties such as Svoboda and Pravyy Sektor have performed abysmally at the polls, gaining collectively one seat in Ukraine’s parliament and 2% of the total vote in the most recent elections. By comparison, the far-right Marie le Pen won nearly 34% of the vote in France’s 2017 presidential election while in Germany the Nazi-apologist Alternative for Germany won over 10% of the vote just last year. And Ukrainian voters are not only voting against antisemites, but they are also actively voting for Jews. President Volodomyr Zelensky, whose heroic leadership has impressed the world, is a Jew. The former Prime Minister Volodomyr Groysman is a Jew as well. In neither’s campaigns did their opponents use antisemitism against them, despite a political culture in Ukraine that all too willingly plays dirty. To the contrary, the only attention the media played to Zelensky’s Jewishness was to criticize him for not being sufficiently involved in commemorations for the Babi Yar massacres. Antisemitism still exists in Ukraine, as it does in most countries. But all signs point to it being a minimal force in Ukrainian life. Ukraine has reinvented itself, reborn again without any Khmelnytsky, Petliura or Bandera, without the overwhelming antisemitism that has so long animated its national movement. One of the most sacred rights is the right to self-improvement, to be better today than you were yesterday. It is a right that exists for individuals and for communities. Ukraine has seized that right fully, if imperfectly, committing itself to be a better land than the one our ancestors left. Damn Putin for trying to take that away.

Joshua Meyers is a scholar of modern Jewish history.

An old age home in Nikolaev, Ukraine, c. 1928, was maintained by local aid societies and the American Jewish Joint Distribu-

tion Committee. Credit: JDC

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