Mazel Tov!

By Walter Kish

Back some months ago in early fall, I happened to be at Kyiv’s Boryspil airport waiting to pick up an arriving visitor. I was more than a little surprised to see planeloads of Hassidic Jews arriving, dressed in their characteristic long black coats and hats, hirsute with their distinctive beards and long side ringlets of hair.

Subsequently, I discovered that this was an annual pilgrimage, with thousands coming to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in the country of the Hassidic movement’s birth. The favoured destination was the city of Uman where the tomb of one of the sect’s great historical leaders, the Rabbi Menachem Nachman (b.1772, d. 1810), is buried. It is estimated that in 2004, more than 15,000 Hassidic pilgrims descended on the city, swamping its fledgling hotel and accommodation facilities. Other major pilgrimage locations are Berdichiv and Bratslav.

Rabbi Nachman was the great grandson of the acknowledged founder of the Hassidic movement, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, better known to his followers as Ba’al Shem Tov or the Besht. The Besht too was born in Ukraine, in the Podillian town of Okup, and spent most of his time living and working in the Carpathians, where he came under the influence and teachings of a secret society of practitioners of an ancient set of beliefs known as the Kabbalah. He eventually became a rabbi and gained a reputation as a gifted mystic and miracle healer.

His teachings became the foundations of the Hassidic branch of Orthodox Jewry, which soon spread throughout Eastern Europe and eventually to modern day Israel. He eventually settled in the town of Mezhibozh near the Polish border, which also has become a well-known Hassidic pilgrimage site.

Ukraine, of course, was home to a significant Jewish population, numbering in the millions for most of the past several centuries, and is the origin of much Jewish historical religious, literary and cultural development. There are records of Jewish communities in Ukraine going back over a thousand years. By the 16th century, Kyiv alone was home to over 40,000 Jews.

Aside from the numerous historical rabbinical teachers and thinkers, such well-known Jewish literary, cultural and political figures as Sholom Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Golda Meir, Vladimir Horowitz and Isaac Stern, all came from Ukraine.

The Second World War decimated Ukraine’s Jewish population, though since then the community has been steadily reviving itself. It is estimated that there are currently some 550,000 Jews living in Ukraine, making it home to the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world (after the United States, Israel and Russia). Kyiv accounts for some 100,000 of these, with major populations also found in Odesa (70,000), Dnipropetrovs’k (60,000), Kharkiv (50,000) and Donetsk (18,000).

Similarly, many of the once numerous synagogues that were closed down or converted to other uses by the Nazis or Communists are beginning to come back to life. One of the most famous is the Brodsky synagogue in Kyiv, which was restored and reopened in 2000. During communist times it had been used as a children’s puppet theatre. Currently, there are some 50 to 60 synagogues actively operating throughout Ukraine, with 136 practicing rabbis and 5 theological institutes.

Jewish cultural and organizational life has also enjoyed a revival since Ukraine became independent, with some 261 organizations of all types now active. In 1998, the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine was formed to act as a national umbrella organization for these groups. Approximately 30 Jewish periodicals and newspapers are currently being published in Ukraine, 10 of them in Kyiv. There is also a vibrant active Jewish theatre in Kyiv.

Although there have recently been isolated incidences of anti-Semitism in various parts of Ukraine, including Kyiv, most of the Jewish community here agree that Ukraine has been amongst the most progressive of the former Soviet states in terms of fostering and supporting ethnic and religious tolerance, as well as in combating anti-Semitism. For a nation which under Tsarist and Soviet rule often saw state-initiated and sanctioned discrimination and pogroms, this indeed shows considerable historical progress. We can only add Mazel Tov!