PSCRP-BESA Reports No 89 (Oct 16, 2024)
Introduction
The history of Jews in Ukraine dates back more than two millennia, starting with the Jewish community that existed in the Greek colony of Panticapaeum, in what is now the town of Kerch on the Crimean Peninsula. The modern, predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish community of Ukraine is descended mainly from migrants who arrived from Western and Central Europe in the late Middle Ages. In the mid-17th century, the Jews of Ukraine were subjected to genocide by Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks: more than half of the Jewish population of Ukraine at that time was exterminated. Mass murders of Jews were also committed by Ukrainian rebels in the middle of the 18th century during the Haidamak rebellion.
Despite this, by the beginning of the 19th century, Ukraine was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, which played a huge role in the Jewish national revival movement that culminated in the creation of the State of Israel. Suffice it to mention the names of prominent cultural, political and military figures of the Jewish state born in Ukraine to understand how great is the historical influence of Ukrainian Jewry on modern Israel.
But the influence of Ukrainian Jews on the politics of Ukraine itself has never been significant, even though Jews constituted quite a prominent share of the country’s population, especially in the west, center, and south. However, the anti-Jewish laws of the Russian Empire effectively prevented Jews from participating in the government. In the western part of Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the proportion of the Jewish population, which formally enjoyed equality in that country, was even relatively higher, but even there their participation in politics was minimal.
The proclamation of an autonomous Ukrainian region within Russia (later Ukrainian People’s Republic, UPR) in June 1917, which granted equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of nationality and religion, and the policy of Symon Petliura’s Directorate, which came to power in December 1918, led to a certain intensification of Jewish participation in the political life of the country. Jews had a significant representation in the Central Rada and in the executive bodies. However, the collective consciousness of Ukrainian Jews remembers the pogroms of 1919, carried out by both Ukrainian peasants and Russians from Denikin’s troops, as well as by Polish troops at the capture of Lvov, and by some units of the Red Army. Bolsheviks of Jewish origin took an active part in the establishment of Soviet power in Ukraine. However, after the establishment of Soviet power in Ukraine, all Jewish parties, including the Marxist parties (Bund and Poale Zion), were dissolved.
The Holocaust, which resulted in the deaths of at least half of all Jews in Ukraine, the exodus of Jews from Ukraine (mainly to Russia), and the policy of forced assimilation, which resulted in campaigns of aggressive anti-Semitism, have sharply reduced the demographic potential of Ukrainian Jewry. If, according to the 1926 census, Jews made up 5.43% of the population of the Ukrainian SSR (without Western Ukraine), then in 1989, just before Ukraine declared its independence, they made up only 0.95%. Mass repatriation to Israel and emigration to the West led to a further reduction in the absolute and relative number of Jews in Ukraine. According to the 2001 census, only 103.6 thousand Jews lived in Ukraine, making up 0.21% of its population. Contemporary estimates by reputable demographers put the size of the “ethnic core” of Ukraine’s Jewish population in early 2022, i.e., prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at 42,500 people, and the “expended Jewish population,” which includes the vast majority of those eligible for Israeli citizenship, at about 200,000 people. Two years later, as of 2023, the number of these two groups was estimated at 33,000 and 150,000 people respectively.
Jews and politics in independent Ukraine
Under such conditions, the Jewish citizens of Ukraine do not represent any significant group of the electorate. Despite intense conflicts and disagreement between different elites and interest groups in the struggle for leadership within the Jewish community, the far-reaching processes of assimilation and acculturation have resulted in the situation where, as in other countries of the former Soviet Union, Ukrainian Jews do not act as a separate force in national politics. This was true even in the first decade of Ukraine’s independence, when the local “extended Jewish population” was still at least 2.5–4 times larger than it is now, and the institutional infrastructure of the country’s organized Jewish community was developing quite rapidly.
With the “abolition” of Soviet-era state anti-Semitism, domestic anti-Semitism also declined. Ukrainian public opinion was quite neutral towards the establishment of Jewish organizations in the newly independent state. As far as the Ukrainian political leadership was concerned, they considered good relations with the local Jewish community and the State of Israel as a means of developing more extensive relations with the West and thus gaining access to its technological markets and financial aid. Especially since there was a liberal faction within the Ukrainian political establishment that sympathized with the national movement of the Jewish people and was not ready to tolerate anti-Semitism of any kind.
At first glance, there was reason to expect that all these factors would contribute to the direct involvement of organized Jewry in Ukrainian politics at large, like other ethnic minority associations. However, Jewish communal leaders initially decided to refrain from this step. Leaders and activists who spoke on behalf of Ukrainian Jews as a politically institutionalized ethnic group very rarely claimed a special spot in Ukrainian public politics. Jews who were members of official and unofficial political structures at both the national and regional levels generally did not position themselves as representatives of the Jewish community and distanced themselves from the organized Jewish movement. At least until Ukraine’s anti-authoritarian “Orange Revolution” in 2004, these leaders relied on personal connections and other informal means of lobbying Jewish communal interests (mainly in the areas of religion, education, culture and historical memory, as well as relations with the State of Israel) as their primary political tool.
However, at the same time, individual politicians of Jewish origin play a large and sometimes even decisive role in the political life of the country. First of all, we should mention Volodymyr Zelensky, who was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. We are talking about a figure of truly epochal scale. Regardless of how the Russian-Ukrainian war ends, Volodymyr Zelensky, who showed personal courage and political talent at a critical moment for Ukraine, will forever remain an iconic figure in the country’s history. At the same time, the Jewish origin of Ukraine’s president has already played and continues to play a prominent role in the political discourse.
It is safe to say that Ukrainian society is marked by a certain “built-in dissonance”: latent anti-Semitic stereotypes coexist with condemnation of public manifestations of anti-Semitism. Thus, a survey on attitudes toward Jews and other ethnic and religious groups in the city of Dnipro, conducted in May 2018 by the team of the “Tkuma” Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies using the questionnaire proposed by one of the authors of this article, showed that one-fifth of respondents felt “irritation, dislike, distrust or fear” toward Jews at that time. Only 12% felt interest and sympathy toward them, and about 70% of respondents had a neutral attitude toward Jews. However, even those respondents who declared their neutral attitude towards Jews often stated that they do not want to see them in power and are not ready to allow the possibility of a Jewish president in Ukraine. (On the whole, about one-third of respondents in the sample).
However, less than a year after this poll, in the second round of the presidential election in April 2019, residents of the Dnipropetrovsk region gave 87.25% of their votes to Jew Volodymyr Zelensky and 10.81% to ethnic Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko. The same trend was also noticeable at the national level: a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shortly before the 2019 presidential election showed that while 70% of Ukrainians were ready to see a woman in the presidential chair, only 36% were ready to support a Jewish candidate. Nevertheless, on average across the country, Zelensky received a three times higher number of votes than his opponent (73.22% and 24.45% respectively).
It is equally telling that at some point Jews or persons with Jewish roots simultaneously held several top political posts in Ukraine: the country’s president (Volodymyr Zelensky), the Prime Minister (Volodymyr Groysman), the leader of the parliamentary opposition (Vadim Rabinovich) and the mayor of the capital (Vitali Klitschko). To these, we can also add Deputy Prime Minister in 2020–2021 and Minister of Defense in 2021–2023 Oleksiy Reznikov. It can be assumed that now that the full-scale war has been going on for more than two and a half years, which inevitably accelerates the formation of the Ukrainian civil nation, considerations of collective social expediency seem even more relevant to Ukrainian society than considerations of ethnic solidarity.
Volodymyr Zelensky himself, while not denying his Jewish origin, avoids publicly positioning himself as a Jew — even in the parts of his private life that are made public. For example, many noticed that Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, whose mother is Jewish, made numerous televised appearances from his office when Russian troops were on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, featuring a Hanukkiah (a ritual nine-candle holder for the Hanukkah ceremony). Volodymyr Zelensky, unlike him, has not been seen speaking against a background of Jewish symbols.
Even more indicative in this sense is the meeting that Volodymyr Zelensky held in 2023 on the eve of Rosh Hashanah with the rabbis of Ukraine. Following this meeting, the Ukrainian president said in a statement to the media: “On New Year’s Eve, I met with representatives of the Ukrainian Jewish community. Thank you for supporting our (emphasis added) country and for believing in our desire for peace, which can be achieved only after Ukraine’s victory.” That is, at a meeting with rabbis celebrating the Jewish holiday, the Jewish president behaved completely detached from Jewry, as if emphasizing with the phrase “our country” that he is the president of Ukraine, he is 100% Ukrainian, regardless of his ethnic roots. And his statements are rather addressed not to Ukrainian Jews, but to the military and political leadership of the State of Israel.
Ukrainian Jewish Politics and the State of Israel
Amid the protracted military confrontation with an enemy that is numerically and financially superior to Ukraine and denies Ukraine’s very right to independent existence, Israel is naturally becoming a role model for many Ukrainians.
The noticeable increase in Ukrainians’ sympathy for Israel was clearly linked to their interest in the experience of the Jewish state, which managed to build a genuine liberal democracy and high-tech economy in the context of an ongoing armed conflict, provide its citizens with solid social security, and build a strategic alliance with the United States and stable relations with the EU. However, first of all, the Israeli experience attracts Ukrainians because the Jewish state has created an effective system of national security.
This was already the case during the anti-terrorist operation in the East of Ukraine in 2014–2015. These trends have intensified after the beginning of full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The idea of Israel as an effective model of a state that faces permanent military aggression and manages to support a developed and generally prosperous society in these conditions is echoed in the speeches of many Ukrainian political commentators, in particular two of the most influential Ukrainian journalists and political commentators of Jewish origin, Vitaly Portnikov and Dmitry Gordon.
Although at the beginning of the Russian invasion in 2022 Kyiv considered Israeli support insufficient, leading some local commentators to speak of a “crisis of inflated expectations,” in general the population’s perception of Israel as the optimal “role model” for Ukraine has not changed much. Thus, according to polls conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), by January 2023, the percentage of Ukrainian citizens who considered Israel a friendly country had hardly decreased compared to December 2021, i.e., before the Russian invasion. In addition, the same poll showed an almost 2.5-fold increase, compared to December 2021 (64% and 27%, respectively), in the share of Ukrainians who supported the Jewish state in the conflict between Israel and Iran.
This positive outlook increased significantly after October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian Arab terrorist movement Hamas breached the Gaza Strip’s borders with Israel and massacred Israeli settlements in the south. Ukrainian society was literally overwhelmed by a wave of solidarity and sympathy for Israel and Israelis. According to a survey conducted by KIIS in November and early December 2023, two-thirds (69%) of Ukrainians surveyed supported Israel in this conflict, 18% supported both sides equally, and only 1% sympathized with the Palestinian Arabs. Comparing this survey with similar ones in the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia (conducted in November and October), Anton Hrushetsky, executive director of KIIS, concludes: “Ukraine is the most pro-Israel” (country in the world).
Political division in the Jewish establishment in Ukraine
Over the past twenty years, the gradual involvement of Ukrainian Jews in mainstream Ukrainian politics has occasionally led to political splits on nationwide issues within the community. This became evident during the anti-authoritarian “velvet” revolutions of 2004 and December 2013 — February 2014 in Ukraine. Kyiv’s two main Hasidic synagogues (one on Shekavitskaya Street in the former Jewish quarter in Podol, led by representatives of the Karlin-Stolin Court, the other — Chabad-oriented Brodsky Synagogue in the downtown area) simultaneously became a symbol of Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution” and marked two political currents within local Jewry and its communal-political elite.
While the first camp supported the Moscow-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovych, the second camp supported the presidential claims of pro-Western liberal Viktor Yushchenko.
In the next round of Ukrainian pro-Western anti-authoritarian protests, the “Revolution of Dignity” in the winter of 2013–2014, the internal divide within the community was less obvious. As Sam Sokol, a Jewish Telegraphic Agency correspondent, observed, Ukrainian Jewish leaders expressed a wide range of views regarding the revolution. Some leaders, especially Orthodox ones (apparently the remaining Jewish supporters of Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych) warned their congregants to stay out of politics. Others were either active supporters of Euromaidan, like Josef Zissels, head of the Vaad of Ukraine, or its critics, like those Jews who were fairly well represented in the pro-presidential camp opposing Maidan, especially in the parliamentary faction of the ruling party.
Apparently, this split had very little to do with Jews as an organized ethno-national or ethno-cultural community. After the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine began, Josef Zissels initiated an open letter by “Ukrainian Jews” calling on Israel to provide military aid to Ukraine. Thus, the co-chairman of the Vaad of Ukraine, in the course of a full-scale war, acts in relation to the Jewish state entirely within the policy of Ukraine’s top military and political leadership, as in the case of the controversy over the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial.
However, not all Ukrainian politicians of Jewish origin have taken overtly pro-Western and anti-Russian positions in the recent past. The most prominent and influential Ukrainian politician defined by the current Ukrainian authorities as “pro-Russian” is Vadim Rabinovich, president and chief sponsor of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, a public organization. Since 2014, he had served as a Verkhovna Rada deputy from the Opposition Bloc, and in 2016 he had founded the party “Opposition Platform — For Life”. On June 18, 2022, Vadim Rabinovich was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship by decree of President Volodymyr Zelensky, under the pretext that he is a citizen of Israel and, accordingly, deprived of parliamentary mandate. A less influential but still prominent pro-Russian Ukrainian politician of Jewish origin was the late head of Kharkiv, Hennadiy Kernes, who served as the city’s mayor from 2010 to 2020 and was a member of the pro-Russian Party of Regions from 2005 to 2014.
The main principles of modern “Jewish policy” in Ukraine
As in other countries of the former Soviet Union, the Jews of Ukraine, as a minority group in local society, have little political, especially electoral, influence. However, on a personal level, Jews are widely represented in the highest political and significant public positions. A pattern that considers the activities of all the listed politicians of Jewish origin, regardless of their political views, is as follows:
First, their political and party affiliation is in no way determined by their Jewishness. There are no Jewish or even “quasi-Jewish” parties in modern Ukraine. The aforementioned phenomenon of “two Kyiv synagogues,” which occurred during the Orange Revolution of 2004 and came to symbolize the division of Ukraine’s Jewish community between pro-Russian and pro-European candidates, both of Ukrainian ethnic origin, can be considered one of the few exceptions to this general rule. Nevertheless, the phenomenon itself — the presence of Jews among the wealthy strata of society, whose representatives in some cases directly convert their financial and other assets into political power and influence — is still present. This partially compensates for the lack of electoral weight of the Jewish population of modern Ukraine.
Second, while “ordinary” Ukrainian politicians of Jewish origin do not hide their Jewishness, ties to Israel and sympathies for it, Jews such as Volodymyr Zelensky, who became president, prefer to distance themselves from Judaism. This is fully in line with the stereotype that a Jew can hold any top government position in Ukraine, but cannot be the president of the country.
Secular Jewish culture, in fact, remains outside the sphere of interest of both the religious-communal Jewish lobby and secular organizations such as the Vaad of Ukraine, which focus on the instrumental use of Jewish themes in the interests of the Ukrainian state.
The situation is rapidly and dynamically evolving. At the time of writing, the end of the active phase of the war between Russia and Ukraine, or the end of war in which the State of Israel was drawn on October 7, 2023, are nowhere near in sight. The consequences of these wars will affect the entire world and certainly the “Jewish politics” in Ukraine. Nevertheless, we can already assume with a sufficient degree of certainty that in the foreseeable future Ukraine and Israel will be in the same military-political camp as “frontline states” of the free world. The inevitable development of cooperation between them under such conditions will have an impact on organized Jewish politics in Ukraine and on Jewish political activity in Ukraine. It is possible that the Jewish lobbying activity already present in Ukraine, which was mentioned above, will intensify and will be channeled in two directions – both to promote Jewish (including Israeli) interests in Ukraine and to promote Ukrainian interests in Israel.