FOREWORD
Collection and preservation of archives and ensuring public access to them are crucial for the culture of human civilisation. Totalitarian and authoritarian polities have stepped from this path, denying access to their official records, keeping them classified, “top secret”, while restraining the creation of private archives. With a certain degree of freedom that emerged in the years of Gorbachev’s “perestroika”, when the Soviet Union was weakening, and expanded during the independence of Ukraine, our society faced a task of accumulating accurate information on the past, collecting and disclosing the archives of both well-known and ordinary people. This was a complex challenge as the twentieth-century wars, as well as political persecutions of prosperous social groups, religion, and multiple ethnic communities, by no means facilitated the preservation of collective memory. The Holodomor and Holocaust terror years erased nearly everything that historical memory could have captured. While West European families often remember their past for many generations, the people who grew up during the Soviet era and their descendants usually are aware of no more than three generations of their ancestors. That is why we at the Center for Studies in History and Culture of East European Jewry decided to start collecting various archives of Ukrainian Jewish history. The Center began to take possession of the archives of prominent Jewish historical figures: politicians, writers, theatre figures, and filmmakers, as well as materials regarding the objects of tangible Jewish heritage (synagogues, books, ritual items, etc.). The next stage was the collection of family archives (letters, photos, and personal documents) that had been preserved despite all historic turbulences. We also started to record oral stories of the older 5
