Exhibition explores 100 years of Jewish life in Ukraine

A black-and-white photo (see image above) shows an idyllic-looking scene of a Jewish family standing in front of their house in the small town of Boryslav in western Ukraine in the early 20th century.

It is part of an exhibition on Ukrainian Jewish life from the 1920s to the present, one that examines the unspeakable suffering of the Holocaust and antisemitic Soviet policies as well as the rebirth of Jewish life in independent Ukraine.

This often tragic history is brought to life through the exhibition, "Voices: A Mosaic of Ukrainian-Jewish Life," which is now on show at the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia in southern Germany.

The curators aim to give voice to Ukrainian Jews who have variously spoken Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish over the past century.

It begins with insights into the intercultural relations and community life in the pre-war shtetl — the Yiddish word for small towns in Eastern Europe with a large Jewish population — before reflecting on the near-destruction of this community under two totalitarian regimes.

Contemporary voices also speak to Ukrainian Jewish emigration abroad from the 1990s through to the current Ukraine war — 50% of today's Jewish community in Augsburg, for example, has Ukrainian roots.

Ukrainian Jews tell their story

Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia director Carmen Reichert had already had the idea to showcase diverse Ukrainian Jewish voices over the past century before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The curator then decided to also shed light on the lives of Ukrainian Jews in the midst of war by adding two Ukrainian historians to the exhibition team, Daria Reznyk and Andrii Shestaliuk.

Both are familiar with contemporary Ukraine, as well as the history of local Jewish communities, through their work at the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes in Lviv in western Ukraine. 

With the Jewish Museum in Augsburg unable to transport exhibits from Ukraine due to the war, the museum decided to include more oral histories from contemporary witnesses — including survivors of the Shoah — that were conducted by Reznyk and Shestaliuk. 

Also helping to collate material for the exhibit is the Lviv-based organization "After Silence," which archives the testimony of victims of the Nazi and Soviet regimes, as well as the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv, which commemorates the victims of the 1941 massacre of Jews in the Ukrainian capital.

Among the 16 people who tell their very personal stories are Ukrainian Jews who emigrated to Germany. Photographs taken throughout the past century also complement the multimedia exhibits. 

Cross-cultural life in the shtetls

"Our family had a small shop right in the house where we lived. We weren't rich, but we lived well," Aaron Weiss recalls in one video interview.

Born in 1926 in Boryslav, a part of western Ukraine that once belonged to Poland, he talks of a time when many Jewish families devoted themselves to crafts or trades and observed religious traditions. There was a lot of exchange with non-Jewish Poles and Ukrainians too.

"I went to a Polish school and squeezed in with Polish classmates," says Weiss. "The Jewish children waited for Christmas, then you went from house to house, sang Christmas carols and got presents."

"The Polish children waited for the Jewish holidays Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah or Passover, which all our neighbors, Polish and Ukrainian, treated with respect — just as we respected their holidays."

This experience of "preserv[ing] our values" of living as Poles and Ukrainians "together and separately at the same time," he explains, ceased very suddenly.

"All that ended with the beginning of the war on September 1, 1939," — the day of the German invasion of Poland.

The Holocaust was concealed

An interactive map of Ukraine at the exhibition entrance shows how censuses recorded a fast-declining population. 

In 1941, about 2.7 million Jews lived in Ukraine, more than in any other European country.

But the Second World War and the Holocaust almost completely wiped out Jewish life in the country. Depending on the source,  between 1.5 and 1.9 million Ukrainian Jews, about 70% of the Jewish population, diedduring the Holocaust .

However, for a long time this tragedy was kept silent by the Soviet authorities as commemoratingJewish persecution did not fit into the narrative of Socialist ideals and the definition of a "Soviet people."

Though there was no official antisemitism in the Soviet Union, Jews were discriminated against in the post-war era too.

Sofia Taubina from Kherson, who now lives in Augsburg, reports that her family could not bury her father according to Jewish tradition. They secretly placed a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, in his coffin.

Rescuing Ukrainian Jewish history

When Ukraine became independent in 1991, Jewish life was once again able to develop freely. People started exploring their cultural roots, synagogues were opened, Jewish educational organizations reemerged.

"People were absolutely proud to be Jewish," recalls Yevhen Kotliar from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and a professor at the Academy of Design and Fine Arts there. He created the stained glass windows of the large Kharkiv Choral Synagogue, which was restored in the 1990s.

But the blossoming of Jewish life in Ukraine came under threat with Russia's invasion in February.

One of the photos in the exhibit shows the Drobytsky Yar Holocaust Memorial in Kharkiv, which was damaged by shelling by Russian troops.

Another documents how residents of Kharkiv took refuge from Russian bombing in the metro.

"For the first time in my life, I was confronted with something like this," said Kotliar.

When the air raids began, he fled along with with his family to the west of the country, which was considered safer, through small villages in the Cherkasy region where there were once many shtetls.

"For Jews, these are sacred places," he explained. They have become part of a "pilgrimage" through Ukrainian Jewish heritage.

Some Ukrainian survivors of the Holocaust  also fled when the war began, including to Germany.  

'Every story is important'

During a guided tour of the exhibition, curator Andrii Shestaliuk was once asked which of the many stories was for him most important.

"Every story is important," he emphasized. "Each story is part of a mosaic that makes up a huge picture."

The exhibition in the building of the former Kriegshaber Synagogue in Augsburg runs through February 26, 2023.

The organizers are currently working on a digital version and hope that the film interviews and other materials will be available on the museum's website in spring next year.

This article was translated from the Russian original.