After encircling the Soviet Red Army in late
September 1941, Nazi forces captured Kiev and promptly posted notices
ordering Jews to gather near a place known as “Grandmother’s Ravine,” or
“Babyn Yar” in local parlance. Days later, locals watched long columns
of people shuffle past. On Sept. 29 and 30, SS-led forces gunned down
nearly 34,000 Jews — not including children, who were often buried alive
as Nazi policy forbade wasting bullets on them — and dumped them into
the ravine. By the end of the war, some 100,000 dead, including
thousands of Ukrainians and Roma, lay in the mass grave at Babyn Yar. The Nazis were aided at times by auxiliary forces recruited from the local Ukrainian population.
“Any normal human being will have strong feelings on a day like this,” 82-year-old Gennady, a retired engineer, told a journalist on the vast, park-like grounds of the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial on the 80th anniversary of World War II’s deadliest massacre.
“Here, where they killed so many innocents,” Gennady added, “how can you not be sad about it, and feel anger toward those who killed them?”
Jews are thought to have arrived in what is now Ukraine in the fourth century, settling in Crimea and along the Black Sea coast. They soon began to migrate inland, even converting some Turkic tribes of the Khazar Khaganate. After the Rurik Prince Sviatoslav took Kyiv from the Khazars in the mid-10th century, Jews began settling in the new capital of Kievan Rus’ — the motherland of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. Many moved west to Galicia, where they established a thriving and fast-growing community, while the Jews who stayed carved out their own district in 11th-century Kiev. The Rurik leaders took kindly to them, placing some in key administrative and financial posts. When Yaroslav the Wise, Sviatoslav’s grandson and perhaps the greatest of the Rurik dynasty, built three fortified entrances into Kyiv about a millennium ago, he named one of them the Jewish Gate.
Darker days arrived with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the mid-17th century, when Cossacks and Crimean Tatars embarked on a decade long campaign of violence against Jews, as well as Catholics. In the late 18th century, most of Ukraine was included in Catherine the Great’s Pale of Settlement — the vast, underdeveloped region the Russian Empire set aside for Jews.
Despite several brutal Cossack-led pogroms in the 19th century, Ukraine’s Jewish community continued to grow. By 1900, several major cities, including Odessa, Dnipro and Chernivtsi, were more than a third Jewish. But these numbers began to decline as wave after wave of pogroms shook the southern Russian Empire in the early 20th century.
From 1917 to 1921, the period surrounding the Russian Revolution, Jews in Ukraine suffered more than 1,000 pogroms [!!!!], killing as many as 30,000. Two decades later, the Nazis presented their final solution. In the weeks after the Babyn Yar massacre, German-led forces killed 50,000 more Jews in and around Odessa. In the end, no people suffered more during World War II than the Jews of Ukraine: as many as 1.5 million killed, a quarter of all Holocaust dead. The war’s end improved their lot, barely. From its early days, the Soviet Union marginalized Jews, taking away their synagogues, schools and traditions. After WWII, Josef Stalin declared war on “rootless cosmopolitans,” code for Jewish people. Jews across Ukraine and beyond lost their jobs and were refused entry to colleges and universities.
From 2.7 million in 1941, Ukraine’s Jewish population fell to 840,000 by the late 1950s and less than half a million by the fall of the Soviet Union. Finally free to depart, a quarter of a million Jews left Ukraine in the 1990s. Ukrainian emigrants began to dominate the diaspora. Golda Meir, Israel’s only female prime minister, was born in Kyiv. “Fiddler on the Roof” author Sholem Aleichem grew up just outside the capital before fleeing to New York in 1905. Steven Spielberg, Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, Noam Chomsky, Roseanne Barr, Jon Stewart, Carl Sagan, Mel Brooks and many more, also have Ukrainian roots.
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We don't like Putin either - OF COURSE!!
