The Jews, Ukraine and my family (English version)

 The Jews, Ukraine and my family

 

In 2018, the Spanish magazine Raíces published a "Letter from Caracas" written by me about the Sephardic saga of my father's family. I recently forwarded it to a good friend and she asked me, what about your mom's family??

 

Ukraine

 

I find it complicated and sometimes difficult to understand the Central European history of the Middle Ages. It is not my expertise but I will try in a simple way to tell the story… and whoever reads it may let their imagination run wild!

Finnish and Slavic tribes around the year 900 settled in central eastern Europe and, led by Prince Oleg of Novgorod, founded the powerful Kievan Rus state, which occupied more than a million km2, a rectangle from the Baltic Sea to the shores of the Black Sea. The Dnieper River crossed it almost in the middle from north to south, originating in what is now central-western Russia, descending through Belarus and Ukraine until reaching the Black Sea. Organized into several principalities, they would have their capital in Kyiv on the banks of the river in the center of the territory. 

They prospered for little more than two centuries but domestic wars, the appearance of the crusades that deteriorated the trade routes between East and West and 35 thousand horse archers of the Mongol Golden Horde decreed the fall of Kievan Rus’ in the year 1240. Three Slavic states were created, the Republic of Novgorod, the Principality of Moscow and the Kingdom of Ruthenia (Ukraine) that gave rise to three nationalities, Belarusian in the northwest, Russian in the northeast and Ukrainian in the south. After little over 100 years Novgorod fell under the Russian Principality and the Kingdom of Ruthenia in the hands of the Republic of the Two Nations or Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Principality of Moscow spread to the east and prospered until Prince Ivan IV the Terrible, considered the creator of the Russian state, in 1533 became its first Tsar. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which included the current Baltic countries as well as Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and part of Western Russia, originally tolerant and politically liberal, progressively divided until in 1795 it disappeared from the European map divided between the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. And it all started with the Khmelnitski rebellion….

The Cossacks were originally semi-nomadic Slavic tribes who settled shortly before the Mongol invasion in the Ukrainian steppes who, together with disaffected local peasants, eventually established a semi-military state in Zaporizhia to the south, on the east bank of the Dnieper River. The Polish nobles were large landowners and Catholics. The exploitation of labor and the suppression of the Orthodox Church produced in 1648 a popular uprising led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky, a kind of "Taras Bulba", considered the creator of the first Ukrainian state of modern times. He achieved the independence of the Kingdom of Ruthenia from the Poles, committing heinous crimes along the way, some of which I will relate. This Ukrainian autonomy was only temporary because, in exchange for military sponsorship 10 years later, they submitted to the Russian Empire from which they briefly freed themselves after the First World War to be incorporated by the Bolsheviks into the Soviet Union in 1921. Finally, after the fall of the Berlin Wall they achieved their independence in August 1991.

The Jews

 

“History depends more on the period in which it was written than on the period it purports to describe”… Julius Wellhausen

 

And also about who writes it, many would say….

 

Turkic tribes settled around the year 500 between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, spread north into what is now western Russia and eastern Ukraine, and founded the Khazar Khaganate. After a period of splendor, the Khazarian Empire fell into the hands of its Arab and Byzantine neighbors and of our Prince Oleg of Novgorod who finished conquering them to found the Rus of Kyiv. What was left of them was swept away by the Mongol on horseback.

Legend has it that Joseph, Khazarian Khan, converted to Judaism in the year 751 along with his entire kingdom. They recognized themselves as descendants of a grandson of Noah. Some historians linked them to the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel. The truth is that there is no concrete historical evidence of this conversion taking place. What is indisputable is that there were Khazarian Jews in Kyiv at the time Oleg arrived. Oleg was killed in a local war and Volodomir I, his brother, became ruling Prince.

 Volodomir wanted to convert to one of the "holy scripture" religions. To make the decision he convened a court of representatives of Islam, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Christian Church and Khazarian Jews. The prohibition of alcohol in Islam for those precocious Cossacks was not an option. They decided on the Orthodox Church. Volodomir converted in 988 giving way to the Christianization of Kievan Rus. 

Jewish migration to Central Europe increased by the year 800, the time of Charlemagne, who was tolerant and brought economic stability. They were concentrating around the area of ​​the Rhine, known as Ashkenaz since the time of the Babylonian Talmud. They spoke Yiddish above any other language. The crusades and expulsions in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Jews from England, France and parts of Germany pushed them east to Poland, Lithuania and Russia. Dedicated mostly to trade and finance, they prospered. By the fifteenth century in the Republic of Two Nations, the Jewish community in Poland was the largest in the Diaspora. Among the Ashkenazim, Poland, they used to say, was the paradise of the Jews, the hell of the peasants, and the purgatory of the commoners…, all controlled from the heights by the Polish nobles. In this kingdom the children of Israel enjoyed religious freedom. They were given the exclusivity to distill and sell alcoholic beverages. They also became the administrators of the Polish estates in eastern Ruthenia. The method applied was very simple and petty, the nobles took money from the Jews and then paid them with the debts of the people who worked on their land, leaving the collection of the management to them. Or collecting onerous taxes for usufruct of the land, tolls on bridges even for the use of churches for baptisms, weddings, and etc... in the minds of the peasants their oppressors were the Hebrews and not the princes, who were Poles, noble and catholic…

A rebellion started by disputes between the Prince and the Polish General, Joraczy, and a Cossack leader of the lower nobility who communed like all peasants in the Church of Byzantium, Bogdan Khmelnitski. The rivalry between them caused Joraczy to confiscate half of his assets. Khmelnitsky swore revenge. And well he did…

Under the banner of the struggle against the despotism of the princes and their Jewish allies he raised a legion of 60 thousand men with which he attacked Joraczy's armies. They razed. Rapes, kidnappings, beheadings and looting set the pattern. But against the Jews there was a particular fury. The press today warns first before showing "sensitive" images! I also warn that the next descriptions are terrible and "sensitive"…! I will make a copy paste of Leonardo Padura's "Heretics" from some excerpts that he probably took from the chronicles of Nathan of Hannover: "Drunk with hatred, alcohol and desire for revenge, the Cossacks then gave themselves over to practicing the most incredible ways of provoking suffering and give death. Some men could be skinned and the meat thrown to the dogs; others had their hands and feet cut off and thrown on the road to the citadel to be trampled by horses to death; some more were butchered alive, or cut open like fish and hung in the sun... But the escalation of cruelty had not yet been reached: women, if they were pregnant, had their wombs cut open and their fetuses removed; others had their bellies slit open and cats were put inside, although before they had taken the precaution of cutting off their hands so that they couldn't get out the animals that were squirming in their entrails. Some children were clubbed to death or beaten against walls and then roasted in the fire and brought to their mothers to be forced to eat them, while their executioners announced "it's kosher meat, it's kosher meat, we bleed it first".…

The exact number of dead is not known. Probably tens of thousands. The Nazi holocaust in cruelty, not quantity, pales a bit before these events considered the first genocidal catastrophe in the modern history of the Jewish people.

To this day Bogdan Khmelnitsky is considered the great defender of the Orthodox Church and the father of the Ukrainian Motherland. The 5 hryvnia banknote, the local currency, bears his image as does the obverse of various commemorative coins and Ukrainian stamps. A large statue of him stands in Kyiv in a central district opposite the Saint Sophia Cathedral. If the charismatic Hollywood actor Yul Brynner, who was Russian, had known that Taras Bulba, a character from Gogol's 1835 Russian novel, was going to be associated with Khmelnitsky in that "epic and romantic" film, I don't think he would have accepted that role…

Despite these events, the Jewish communities grew, concentrating in Ukraine above the rest of the Russian Empire. Pogroms also continued. Anti-Semitic sentiments deepened after the assassination of Czar Alexander II thanks to the fact that one of the accomplices was Jewish. From 1821 to 1905 and then between 1919 and 1921 during the War of Independence there were between 30 and 70 thousand Jews massacred and looted as a result of 1,300 scattered pogroms from Odessa to Kyiv. Half perpetrated by the army of the People's Republic of Ukraine, declared as such in 1917, sponsored by its President Symon Petliura assassinated in revenge later in Paris by a Jewish anarchist. The rest, by civilians and members of the revolutionary armies… Half a million Jews were left homeless. In 1921, forced by the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians formed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The so-called "Holodomor", a period of famine between 1932 and 1933 as a result of the "collectivization of agricultural land", caused 10 million deaths from starvation in Ukraine. Whether it was an express policy of annihilation of dissidence or not is still a matter of discussion. But what no one doubts is that the Ukrainians do not forgive the Russians for this genocide. Not even Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, promoter of that policy and one of the executing commissioners...

The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 further deepened anti-Semitic sentiment. As the Red Army withdrew, new pogroms were unleashed in several cities. In Lviv, seven thousand Jews were beaten, kicked and stabbed to death in the streets, previously forced to walk naked and the women raped. In the rural town of Stanesti de Jos, of particular interest to me, and I'll tell you why, in July 1941, hundreds were riddled with bullets. On September 26, 1941, the Nazis occupied Kyiv. There were 200 thousand Jews among the 800 thousand inhabitants. They were ordered to report the next day near a Jewish cemetery. 33 thousand arrived. Also guarded by the local police, they marched to the outskirts of the city, to a ravine called Babyn Yar. Forced to strip naked on the shore, they fell victim to machine gun fire. Within 48 hours they were all killed. The corpses fell to the bottom in that natural pit. It was the beginning of the Holocaust. Over the next two years they eliminated 70,000 more, including a few psychiatric patients, gypsies and prisoners of war. Always with the collaboration of civilians or at least with their indifference.

 

May 2019

 

"Traveling is a remedy against ignorance"... I don't know who said it

 

On May 5, 2019, I boarded a Ukrainian International Airlines plane at JFK airport in New York heading to Kyiv. Upon boarding I had my first contact with Eastern Europe. Full of locals, all friendly. Well cared for, we landed 10 hours later in Boryspil. The large, modern airport was bustling with people and activity. Wi-Fi was fast, free, impeccable. I called a rabbi friend in Caracas whose family was from there. We spoke perfectly. I remember asking him about a young man from our community who was working as a rabbi in the Ukraine but didn't know where. Kharkov told me. It seemed like the end of the world. (I just found out that he arrived in Israel safe and sound with his whole family shortly after the war broke out). Now with the coverage of the russian invasion all those names and their geographic location are familiar. Connectivity always reflects the degree of development of a country. Later I would discover that I was in one of the most technologically advanced in the region. 

I traveled with a maternal first cousin. He was born 3 months before me in Bucharest, where he left at the age of 21 for Paris to finish his studies and finally settle in the USA. We share the same grandparents. We were going to visit the town where my mother was born in the Chernivtsi Oblast in southwestern Ukraine. He currently directs a foundation that rescued and preserves the Jewish cemetery of Czernowitz, the capital of the Oblast, where 900 Jews live today but there are 65 thousand abandoned graves! My cousin had been a couple of times and knew the area; he was the "local guide"...

Millenary Kyiv came as a surprise, vibrant with grand highways and modern buildings added to those from the Soviet era. Orthodox Churches with golden domes almost on every corner. The devotion is unquestionable. The river, the same old, The Dnieper, which is navigable, crosses it through the center. On the west bank there are multiple hills and in one, the Cathedral of Santa Sophia, where the first Volodomir was converted. Across the street, on the edge of a cliff with a view of the valley and the city, the blue Monastery of San Miguel, from where the reporters of all the news agencies give the daily debriefings. A few meters away, a statue of the great “hero” Khmelnitsky symbolically looking towards the East.

 We were in the Independence Square (Maidan), nearby, in the center, imposing, with its water fountains and a monument on a pedestal 60 meters high. Making a semicircle, small mausoleums in commemoration of the two revolts that took place there. The first, the Orange Revolution of 2004 that produced a change of government and the best known, the Europeanist in November 2013, with more than 100 deaths, which ended with the departure of Yanukovych, president at the time. Below, subways, commercial corridors and the stairs to the deepest Metro on the planet. Where people sought refuge from Russian bombs… 

Walking around the area in a nearby neighborhood we stumbled upon a bar celebrating its anniversary with tables on the sidewalk, live music, very good-looking young people. They celebrated with joy, they drank, they smoked everything, they danced in the middle of the street. I have videos! Of course we visited the house where Golda Meir was born. Golda, originally Mayerson, migrated to Wisconsin, USA, with her family at the age of 8 in 1906. A militant of the Zionist movement, she was the first ambassador to the Soviet Union of the new State of Israel in 1948, later becoming its Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974. Shalom Aleichem (Rabinowicz) a prolific writer, humoristin the Yiddish language, author of "Fiddler on the Roof", has a monument in his honor, inaugurated in 1997, in the neighborhood where he lived before moving to New York in 1905. Always escaping pogroms. The Jewish tour ended in Babyn Yar...

I studied elementary and high school at the Jewish school in Caracas. One of the premises of my education was "NEVER FORGET". Every year in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a much-loved Hebrew and Yiddish teacher organized an event for the entire student body. We sang the partisan anthem, recited the names of the camps out loud, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Majdanek, Treblinka…..I never heard the name Babyn Yar. On my visit I found out why.

Those 33 thousand murdered there in the first 48 hours of the taking of Kyiv by the Nazis, the largest massacre of the Einsatzgruppen, plus the rest that added to more than 100 thousand in two years, at the end of the war the USSR recognized them as Soviet citizens, not as a Jewish Holocaust. In their withdrawal, the Germans, trying to erase the traces of the atrocity, exhumed many corpses to burn them. For months Kyiv was enveloped in a cloud with the smell of death! Babyn Yar today is a park, or it was because a Russian missile fell there recently. The ravine is covered by vegetation. There are scattered pathways and tombstones. The public walks with children and bicycles on a giant cemetery. In 1976, a large monument dedicated to fallen Soviet citizens during the Nazi occupation was inaugurated on the site. For them it was a war between fascism and communism where all the victims were equal. Victimizing the Jews was not the idea, especially in an event where the Ukrainians had their share of the blame. The silence lasted until 1991 when Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union. On September 29 of that year, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the massacre, another smaller and more discreet monument, a Menorah, was installed in public recognition of the Jews murdered in that place.

 

The Karpel

We continued the journey towards what was our main destination. I always knew that my mom was born in Romania in 1919. She spoke German and Yiddish. Bukovina was a province of 25,000 km2 located to the northeast of the Carpathians, populated by Slavs since the 7th century, principality of the Kievan Rus, after the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth and Moldavia, the latter under Ottoman tributary rule since 1538. In 1774 the Russian Empire took it from the Turks and then they ceded it in a territorial negotiation to the Austrian Empire. At the end of the First World War it became part of Romania. 

As a result of the famous Molotov Ribbentrop non-aggression treaty between the USSR and Nazi Germany in 1940, the northern half of Bukovina was ceded to the Soviets. Since then it is part of the territory of Ukraine. Czernowitz, the "Vienna of the East", also "The Jerusalem on the Prut River", the prosperous capital of the region had, before the start of the Second World War, 190 thousand inhabitants, 90 thousand Jews, most of them businessmen, intellectuals, writers , teachers, lawyers, doctors, musicians. The rest of the population was divided almost evenly, between Germans, Romanians and Ukrainians. With the start of Operation Barbarossa, before the German invasion, the Russians abandoned this territory to make way for the Romanians supported by the Nazis. They created a ghetto where they crowded 50,000 Jews who were later deported to Transnistria.

 Transnistria was a vast region from Moldavia to the Dnieper River in the Ukraine taken by Romania at the start of the war. Jews from Romania and Ukraine were transferred by train to the towns in the area, abandoned to their fate in barracks, without food, clothing or medical care. About 300 thousand Jews died there of hunger, cold and contagious infectious diseases. The autonomous region or the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, the one that is under threat today, is a much smaller strip located within the eastern border of Moldova.

After a 45-minute flight from Kyiv we landed in Czernowitz, in the south-west, at a rather rustic airport. A member of the small Jewish community of the place was waiting for us. With a population of 250,000 inhabitants, it seemed like a town! The streets were made of stone and a few were poorly paved. Still I liked it. It was a trip to the Austro-Hungarian past. Parks, forests, statues, all very well maintained, in the center a square and two main streets, one converted into a boulevard with some shops, restaurants and cafes with the typical Viennese pastries, where Emperor Franz Joseph used to walk. The buildings and houses of neo-baroque design from the 1900s. Always the monuments of the Soviet era somewhere. The Jewish presence, the Zukerman building, the Leon Schrenzel tiles, the Great Synagogue turned into a cinema known as the “Cinemagoga”… 

Of course we went to “check” the cemetery. The 65 thousand graves were on a raised embankment on the outskirts with a panoramic view of the city. Mausoleums of all sizes, tombstones facing east and west, with flowers, photos of the deceased, in multiple languages, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and a small area with a small obelisk, a waning Moon and a star on top , in memory of eleven Turkish soldiers, Muslims, buried there, fallen in the First World War. They told me that it was the only place that allowed their burial. The Jewish community disappeared at the end of the war. The 900 at the time of our visit were mostly Israeli returnees. Even today it has not been attacked by the Russians and hosts thousands of refugees, many Jews, from the conflict zones.

“Shtetls” were small villages inhabited mostly by Orthodox Jews located throughout Eastern Europe. They were dedicated to commerce and trades, shoemakers, milkmen, tailors and etc…and to the study of the Talmud and the Torah. Many were very poor and lived on charity. There were more than 50 around Czernowitz, Novoseletz, Radauz, Sadagura, Wiznitz, Soroca, names known to many of those who are going to read this story because their parents came from there, to Venezuela! 

We drove out. We crossed the Prut River and entered a region of steppes all planted and roads lined with leafy trees. Everything was green. Ukraine is rightly called the granary of Europe. Traveling south we approached the Carpathian mountain range. The terrain became hilly and wet. It was the end of spring. We stopped at Sadagura. We visited the Synagogue of Israel Friedman, a direct disciple of Israel Ben Eliezer, the "Shem Tov", creator of the Hasidic movement. The Synagogue has a superb reconstruction product of a millionaire investment. Of course there are no Jews in that or in any of the towns of the old Bukovina, they are all inhabited by Ukrainians in relative prosperity. However, hundreds of Hasidic make the pilgrimage for Passover each year from Israel. Friedman had a court with pomp and splendor that generated the envy of Tsar Nicholas I who put him in prison for two years on fabricated charges. Then Wiznitz, where Friedman's grandchildren founded a great Hasidic dynasty with a strong presence in Israel, New York and Canada. 

My family was not from the capital, it was from some Shtetl on the outskirts, Stanesti. On the way back we headed there along a difficult road with more potholes than the “Zaraza-Anaco” (Venezuelan towns). My grandfather Isaac “Aizic” Karpel was prosperous. Very religious. He followed the tradition since Polish times. He sold liquor. He had a little tavern on the south end of his house. More than enough to support the 9 children he had with my grandmother. At the beginning of the year 1941, before the imminent German invasion, the Soviets withdrew and with them deported the most prominent members of the Jewish communities "eliminating the bourgeoisie to improve the society of the proletarians". They say they saved many lives but robbed them of their dignity. They separated the men from the women and children. Grandma Ethel turned up with her eldest daughter and her two young children in Salahart, a town in Siberia north of the Polar Circle. The old man never came. In the family word spread that he starved (maybe) to preserve kashrut (I don't believe it). A married daughter living in nearby Poland was murdered along with her husband and her two children in the nearby woods by the German Einsatzgruppen. Another one who lived in Czernowitz was sent with her husband to Transnistria and they managed to survive. Two men previously migrated to Palestine from the British Protectorate to help found the State of Israel. 

A love affair at the age of 18 forced my mother to move to the house of her older brother who lived in Cuba. In 1939, before the outbreak of the war, she docked in the Port of Havana on some ship before the famous St Louis attempt with its cargo, unwanted by the whole world, of 937 Jewish refugees escaping the Nazi horror. In June 1941, 137 members of the Stanesti community were killed. The perpetrators were their own neighbors! They did it with their work tools, rakes, shovels, hammers and machetes… My family was no longer there.

We finally arrived. A single main street, paved. The surrounding areas were dirt. Well planted fields in the surroundings. A drizzle was falling. We found the house, our house. Large, rectangular, two-tier. It belonged to the municipality. There was a public library and on the site of the tavern was a pharmacy. The upper level was abandoned. We continued in search of the cemetery. As one of the dirt roads ran out we had to continue walking through open, cultivated country. In the distance we saw a perfectly delimited box of two or three hectares, greener due to the tall and wild undergrowth. Hidden among the branches were the tombstones. A Jewish cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Impossible to walk it. We saw the tombs on the outskirts. We found a relative, Peril Karpel. They were all almost the same. The inscriptions in the Hebrew alphabet. Some, possibly from a Cohen, had a pair of hands engraved in relief, the palms of which faced forward and blessed the visitor from eternity...

 

Final thoughts

 

“Man is man's greatest enemy”… David Hume

 

There is no reason that justifies persecutions of any kind, much less genocide. Peoples evolve. Eradicating anti-Semitism will depend on its leaders acknowledging “yes we did it”. This is how it worked in Germany. There are no images of Hitler there. He is prohibited by law.

 

In Ukraine, before World War II, the Jewish population was 2.1 million. One and a half million, 70%, were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. At the time of my visit in 2019 there were 280,000, 200,000 mixed but considered Jews by the State of Israel and 80,000 according to Halacha (religious laws), including Volodomir Zelensky.

 

In a 2019 survey the Pew Research Center found that 5% of Ukrainians rejected Jews as citizens of the country compared to 23% of Lithuanians, 22% of Romanians, 19% of Czechs, 18 % of Poles and 14% of Russians and Hungarians.

 

I can't help but sympathize with the Ukrainians when I see on TV, live, how they became victims of war crimes, invaded by the Russians for no reason. In the documentary “Winter on fire” about the 2014 protests, it can be seen the police brutality with which they tried to stop the demonstrations in Kyiv. Much worse than the repressions in Venezuela in 2014 and 2017. Also the fierceness of the confrontation between the civilian population and paramilitaries. They honor their history. It is not surprising that they are defending themselves as they do against the current aggression.

 

After traveling the journey from Oleg to our Volodomir today, it would have seemed very difficult for Ukraine to have been able to elect a Jewish president. The stagnant economy, corruption and an unresolved war in the east of the country lead this young political outsider to be chosen thanks to his television popularity and social networks. He won on April 21, 2019 and took office in the same month as my visit.

 

Zelensky turned out to be a heroic and inspiring leader not only of Ukraine but also of the free world. His diplomacy is frank. He shows it in his speeches and when he recently declared that the visit of the Chancellor and the President of Germany would not be well received. Churchill would have done the same.

In his message to the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) he highlighted the righteous Ukrainians who protected the Jews during the Nazi occupation. Many Holocaust survivors would ask themselvesand what about the complicity of the majority of the people in those crimes? The Kremlin's narrative of accusing the Ukrainian government of neo-Nazis is absurd and is supported by that collaboration. Pointing out a Jew for being a Nazi or, at its extreme, saying that Hitler had Jewish blood is equivalent to accusing the Jews of their own genocide. The height of anti-Semitism!!

 

 

Alberto Salinas Karpel, Surgeon in free retirement

In Miami, May 6, 2022, the third year of the pandemic, the year of the reappearance of war crimes.

 

 

 

 

 

PS: On May 27, 1939, the transatlantic ship “St Louis” docked in the port of Havana from Hamburg with 937 Jewish refugees, all with visas. Writing a shameful page in the history of Cuba, President Federico Laredo Bru annulled their landing permits. After two weeks of failed negotiations they were returned to Europe. Only 28 made it down. On their return trip they tried to disembark in the USA and Canada where they were also rejected. 288 were accepted in England. The rest finished their journey in Antwerp and half of them were exterminated in concentration camps. Shortly before, in February 1939, two ships, "Caribia" and "Koenigstein" also sailed from Hamburg with 251 Jewish passengers escaping from Nazi Germany. After being denied refuge in Barbados, Trinidad and French Guiana docked at La Guaira. The asylum they requested was immediately granted by the President of Venezuela Eleazar López Contreras. They were received with enthusiasm and warmth…

 

Some famous Ukrainian Jews: Leon Trotsky, Zeev Jabotinsky, Golda Meir, Shalom Aleichem, Vladimir Horowitz, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Schneerson, Mila Kunis and of course Volodymir Zelensky..