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Dec 1, 2023
About common pages of Jews and Ukrainians. Nations are far away from each other, but some historical facts are really interesting.
There is a legend that saint Andrew, the disciple of Christ, came to the Dnipro hills and said a great city would be built there. There are no historical proofs of that, but the first ever document mentioning Kyiv as a city was found in Cairo, Egypt. It was written by a Jewish merchant who got imprisoned in Kyiv for not paying the debts and asking friends to pay debts for him. Before Vikings came, Kyiv was under the influence of Khazars, a Turkic state that adopted Jewish faith. And Khazarian Cahanate was destroyed by Kyiv Rus when it got stronger.
In Middle Ages, Jews were accepted to Cossacks ranks, there are many documents about that (https://lnkd.in/dQvJjiW4). Cossacks were very diverse society by the standards of those days, there were lots of Tatars, Poles, even some Moscovites. There was a condition though: to be accepted you had to read the Lord’s Prayer in Ukrainian. So you still had to be assimilated into local culture.
In WW2, Jews and Ukrainians were among the most suffering nations. 6 million Jews were killed, and the population of Ukraine was reduced by 14 million. Only Germany, Russia and China had bigger losses, and Poland had a similar scale. Many Jews lived in Poland and Ukraine, so these losses are overlapping. I was curious about my mother’s lineage, started searching by her surname (which I thought was Polish) and discovered 3 Jews with the same surname that were killed in Auschwitz. In Kyiv, we have a place called Babyn Yar, where Jews and Ukrainians were executed by Nazis.
The state of Israel has an official list of “Righteous Among the Nations”, people who saved the Jews in WW2, and Ukraine is in 4th place by the number of people listed (after Poland, Netherlands and France). For comparison, Russia has 12.5 times fewer people in those lists (2,673 vs 215), and if you take into account the proportion, it appears that Russia has 41 times fewer “Righteous ones” per capita (see here: https://lnkd.in/d-j8BwFg).
In the city of Uman, there is a grave of Nachman of Breslov, one of the founders of Hasidic Judaism. It’s a place of pilgrimage for Hasidic Jews, so they are coming to Ukraine every year, even now at time of war (see the photo). Once I had a flight at the day when they were returning to their homes, whole airport was full of them.
Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister during Yom Kippur War, was born in Kyiv. Current president of Ukraine is a Jew. Ukraine has the lowest level of antisemitism in Europe, according to recent research. And we had no rallies screaming “from the river to the sea”, I can’t even imagine it happening.
And with all this, Russian propaganda is calling us Nazis…
It appears we are again going to be in the middle of the meat grinder if WW3 starts. I personally think it’s started already, but just going slowly…
Original article :
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There are so many Muslims fighting for Ukraine that the army does not have enough Muslim Chaplains for them.
There are less Jews, but many have volunteered and died, including volunteers from Israel. There are some religious Jews from North London in the foreign legion too.
Ukraine has had Jews, Muslims and multiple Christian denominations living there for centuries.
Almost every city has a cultural event each year that celebrates diversity. In Mykolaiv for example, there are no less than 100 ethnic minorities. They include Bulgars, Germans, Koreans, Kurds, Tatars, Yazidis, Dagestanis, Uzbeks, Georgians, Gypsies, Armenians, Chinese, Africans, Circassians, Cossacks, Krymchaks (Crimean Jews), Azov Greeks, Krym Tatars, Turks, Turkmen, Azeris and many, many others.