Jews in Ukraine
Ukraine has had a turbulent history, its territory divided several times between Poland, Russia and other states. Although scarred by repeated massacres (particularly in seventeenth-century anti-Polish uprisings, the pogroms that took place within the Russian Pale of Settlement in the nineteenth century, and the chaos that followed the First World War), its Jewish community has a rich history: one Crimean tribe even converted to Judaism in the eighth century. Here were the first shtetls, built by Jews working for Polish aristocrats in the eighteenth century; here Hasidism had its origins.
The Germans occupied Ukraine and murdered 1.4 million of the country’s two million Jews; the Communists suppressed the religious life of those that survived. In spite of this Ukraine remains home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe – some 100,000-300,000 people – and recent years have seen a rebirth in Jewish religious and cultural life.
This material, published by the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad (2005), is based on work funded by them and carried out by the Jewish Preservation Committee of Ukraine.
More detailed information on cemeteries, gathered as part of the same exercise, can be found at the website of the Cemetery Project of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies:
www.jewishgen.org/cemetery/e-europe/ukraine.html
Information on access and ownership in these websites may be out of date.
Contacts
An extensive list of local Jewish and government contacts is given in the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad report (2005).
United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. Jewish Cemeteries, Synagogues, and Mass Grave Sites in Ukraine, Washington, 2005: www.heritageabroad.gov/reports/doc/survey_ukraine_2005.pdf, accessed February 2008