Jews know well that wars don’t only happen on one front. As well as the horrendous loss of life, there is also a war of rhetoric, like when Vladimir Putin justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with ludicrous claims that the country needs ‘de-Nazification.’
Ukraine’s centrist, Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky, and the pitiful 2% won by Ukraine’s far right in 2019, fly against Putin’s de-Nazification excuse. Putin cynically invoked the fight against Nazism for legitimacy. His other attempts to rewrite history, remarkably suggesting that Ukraine is fake news invented by ‘Bolshevik Russia’, also embolden the global far right. Promises to safeguard purity in the face of monstrosities like liberal democracy or tolerance sound ominously familiar to many Jews.
Far from living in a Nazi state, Ukraine’s Jewish community was thriving including with two great progressive communities that I visited a few years ago. Putin's invasion, meanwhile, has prompted thousands of Jews to flee. One of my fellow rabbis, who leads a Progressive Jewish congregation in Odesa, has fled along with her child and more than half a million other citizens. Another colleague has stayed in Kyiv, like other men between the ages of eighteen and sixty have been urged to. Citizen-soldiers resisting with makeshift resources against a gigantic army? It sounds like 1942, not 2022.
My own affinity with the region is personal, collegial and familial. My ancestors came to Britain from Lithuania, another heartland of the imperial Pale of Settlement where Jews were allowed to live. Some of my husband’s family were from Odessa, once a centre of Jewish cultural life and today Ukraine’s third city. Seeing the country besieged tears our hearts.
Jewish communities have suffered immeasurably in living memory during times of war and aggression. When we have been forced to leave places we kept alive the traditions, cultures and stories we developed there in our hearts. It should be unimaginable to once again witness this familiar displacement in 2022, in a democratic country in Europe.
For Jews, Ukraine has a legacy of pogroms stretching back generations. During the Holocaust, some Ukrainians enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis – infamously in one of the largest mass killings, at Babi Yar – although there were those who protected Jews too.
Modern Ukraine has been facing its past, though. President Zelensky, who was elected on a tolerant and anti-corruption platform, has spoken publicly about his family’s experience during the Holocaust, when many of them were murdered. The growth of a pluralistic civic identity respecting Ukrainian-speakers and Russophones has also been a positive track. Today's far right has found far less support in Ukraine than in Russia and much of Europe (take France, where this stands at around 35%).
In the 1980s, we fought for oppressed Soviet Jews to be allowed to emigrate. The many Ukrainians among them are now watching compatriots in their free and sovereign home nation be brutally attacked.
Seeing the love and goodwill towards Ukrainians from all over the world reminds me of the power of solidarity. I was moved by President Zelensky's appeal in his native Russian language to Russians, and by how many people are taking risks to oppose the invasion in unfree Russia.
In our outrage, let’s remain vigilant lest we become numb to the actions of totalitarians and invaders. As we learn from Jewish history, bullies will falsify and distort on every front. As a Jew I refuse to be a pawn in Putin’s incitement. I pray that this assault on Ukraine will end and that freedom and democracy will prevail.
