UKRAINE.

Although Jews have had a long history in ethnolinguistically

Ukrainian territory for millennia, by the turn of the twenty-first century only
a small remnant of this once commanding population remained. In 2001,
Ukraine had a population of 48 million, approximately 75 percent of which
was of Ukrainian ethnicity, with a large Russian minority (some 21%, or 10
million). The exact number of Jews is a matter of some controversy: the 1989
census listed 487,300 Jews, but only 105,500 were recorded in the first postSoviet census of 2001, a figure that is questioned by some but that certainly
reflects the massive emigration of Jews in the 1990s.
History to 1881. Jewish settlement in Ukraine predates the
beginnings of recorded history in the region. Archaeological evidence places
Jews among Greek traders inhabiting the Black Sea coastline in the early
centuries before the Common Era. The eastern portions of Ukraine,
extending all the way to Kiev, were later absorbed into the Khazar kingdom,
with its center just north of the Caspian Sea. The Khazars were a Turkic
nomadic people whose rulers and upper classes converted to Judaism in the
mid-eighth century, perhaps in an attempt to retain political independence in
the face of the growth of the Christian world in the west and Muslim
expansion from the south. Kiev in particular shows significant evidence of
Khazar settlement, and the city may in fact have been founded by the
Khazars as a trading outpost. The story of the Khazar kings conversion to
Judaism, after he had convened a debate among representatives of the major
monotheistic faiths, is later echoed in the Povest vremennykh let (Russian
Primary Chronicle; twelfth century), describing how Prince Volodymyr
(Vladimir) chose Eastern Christianity under similar conditions in the late
tenth century.
Despite its strong initial influence, there is little evidence that the
Khazar Jewish population survived in Ukraine after the Tatar invasion of the
thirteenth century. Nevertheless, the Jewish population left a significant
mark on Kiev, a city that had both a Jewish quarter and a Jewish gate as
early as the eleventh century, and one Mosheh of Kiev is mentioned as a
twelfth-century Talmudist. Travelers reports, including that of Petahya of
Regensburg, describe the Jewish community of Kiev. It is apparent that
Karaism had some influence on the Kievan Jewish community as well. Jews
were expelled from Kiev at the end of the fifteenth century. [See Khazaria;
Karaites.]
Far more significant to the development of Ukrainian Jewry were the
waves of migration from Western Europe, particularly from the Rhineland
region, that began in the thirteenth century. Right-bank Ukraine (i.e., west of
the Dnieper River that roughly bisects the contemporary boundaries of
Ukraine) was subject to Lithuania until 1569, when it was annexed to the
Polish Crown in the formation of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth.
Particularly after 1569, Jews were frequently employed by nobility to manage
the arenda system, under which they sometimes administered large

Ukrainian landholdings called latifundia for absentee Polish landlords. In

such cases, Jews were given the exclusive right to collect taxes, tolls, and
other exactions from the Ukrainian peasantry. Much more often, the contract
was for the local right of propinatsiia, the exclusive privilege of distilling and
selling alcohollucrative trade that fit naturally with the business of
innkeeping and small moneylending. [See Leaseholding; Tavernkeeping.]
While Jews were engaged in a variety of economic pursuits, many as
artisans and merchants, with a smaller number of farmers, income from the
arenda constituted the backbone of the Jewish economy. Under this system,
Jews in Ukraine flourished, reaching a population of approximately 40,000 by
the middle of the seventeenth century. Jews were concentrated in
approximately 200 communities on the right bank of the Dnieper River, in
the provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, Bratslav, Ru Czerwona, and Kiev. By
17641765, about 300,000 Jews lived in these regions. The arenda system,
however, was highly exploitative, particularly when viewed from the
perspective of Ukrainian peasants, who deeply resented the economic burden
imposed on them by the far-off Polish landlords and their Jewish agents.
Ukrainian folk songs record numerous abusive practices from this period,
including a possibly mythical description of the practice of paying a fee to
Jewish authorities to gain access to the church for ritual functions, and the
attempts of Catholic Poles to wean the overwhelmingly Eastern-rite
Ukrainians from their Orthodox tradition.
This resentment boiled over in several revolts, culminating in a major
uprising in 1648 under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, who led a
Cossack army seeking to end Polish domination in the region. Although his
principal targets were Poles, especially noblemen and Catholic priests, the
local Jewish population was far more accessible, and horrific massacres took
place throughout right-bank Ukraine. The devastation of the period, known
among Jews as Gzeyres takh vetat, or the Decrees of 16481649, resulted in
the deaths of up to half of the Jewish population. After the rebellion subsided,
sporadic attacks on Jews continued, including the Haidamak rebellion of
1768, which particularly devastated the Jewish community of Uman. [See
Gzeyres Takh Vetat.]
With the Polish Partitions at the end of the eighteenth century, the
region embracing virtually all of contemporary Ukraine was annexed to the
Russian Empire and eventually was designated part of the geographical
ghetto limiting Jewish residence known as the Pale of Jewish Settlement. An
exception was Kiev, where Jewish residence continued to be forbidden,
although several thousand Jews lived there illegally in the early twentieth
century.
Tensions between Jews and the surrounding Ukrainian populations
continued throughout the nineteenth century, but did not slow the inevitable
process of cultural cross-fertilization that informed much of both cultures. On
many markers of cultural identity, Jewish culture shows evidence of

Ukrainian influence, and vice versa. While both groups retained, for example,
quite distinct languagesUkrainian and Yiddishborrowed terminology is
common to both.
Economically, however, Jews were markedly different from members of
the surrounding population. Ukrainians were overwhelmingly agricultural,
with more than 94 percent living in rural areas even at the end of the
nineteenth century. Jews, on the other hand, were concentrated in urban
settings, where more than 80 percent made their homes. The larger urban
areas in Ukraine were typically evenly divided among Russians, Ukrainians,
and Jews, but Jews dominated even these settings in the western Ukrainian
provinces of Volhynia and Podolia. The 1897 census shows that only 2.66
percent of Jews in the tsarist empire made their living from agriculture; the
corresponding Ukrainian figure is 73 percent. Jews were very strong in
commerce (29.55%) and industrial labor (35.47%), sectors in which only a tiny
number of Ukrainians were active. This strict economic distinction served to
underline many of the other differences between Jews and Ukrainians.
Jewish industrial labor, in particular, grew over the course of the nineteenth
century as the Russian Empire embarked on a course of gradually increasing
industrialization. Large industrial projects in areas of less traditional
settlement, such as Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, drew Jewish internal
migrants, and the establishment of the major port of Odessa in the closing
years of the eighteenth century eventually attracted a large Jewish
population. Overall, in 1897,
Jews made up 30 percent of
the urban population of
Ukraine.
Ukraine was
exceptionally fertile ground
for the Hasidic movement,
particularly for the
dynasties centered in Belz,
Bratslav and Uman,
Chortkiv, Chernobyl, and
Ruzhin. There developed a
Ukrainian type of Hasidism
characterized by the princely
comportment of the rebbes.
Graduating class of the Hebrew-language Moriah School,
Zhvanets, Ukraine., 1910. (YIVO)
[See entries on the Belz,
Bratslav, Chernobil, and
Ruzhin Hasidic dynasties.] Tensions between misnagdim and Hasidim were
substantially submerged with the emergence of an intellectual movement
that threatened them both equally: the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment,
which emerged from Germany in the late eighteenth century. The expression
of Haskalah in Ukraine was, as might be expected, more significant in

western urban regions, but its impact was felt even in the most remote
regions. Ukrainian maskilim pioneered both modern Hebrew and literary
Yiddish. Uman was the headquarters of early Ukrainian maskilim at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Eventually, however, Odessa became
the metropolis of modernizing trends among Ukrainian Jews. Indeed, the
second half of the nineteenth century witnessed considerable internal
migration of Jews in the Pale of Settlement to new settlements in southern
Ukraine, of which Odessa was the most prominent. The burgeoning port city
even attracted settlers from Galicia in the Austrian Empire.
18811914. A major watershed in Ukrainian Jewish history occurred
in March 1881 when Alexander II was assassinated by a grenade thrown by a
member of a small socialist circle. Rumors circulated throughout the tsarist
empire to the effect that the new tsar, Alexander III, had given the people the
right to beat the Jews in retaliation, and violent attacks on Jews continued
sporadically for the next three years, with the greatest concentration
occurring in Ukrainian territory. Recent research indicates that these attacks
were spontaneous and principally carried out by migrant industrial workers
traveling along rail lines throughout Ukraine, stopping regularly to plunder
neighboring Jewish communities.
Compared to later pogrom waves, the human devastation of 18811884
was relatively mild, with reasonable estimates of Jewish causalities under
100. The sheer atmosphere of lawlessness, with the apparent inability or
unwillingness of Russian authorities to control the violence, nevertheless
made a major impact on the psyche of the average Ukrainian Jew, rousing
the population to consider even more seriously several alternatives for their
political self-expression. The pace of emigration, which had begun to swell in
the 1870s, accelerated. The earliest stirrings of modern Zionism occurred in
Ukraine, articulated by the BILU movement (an acronym for Isaiah 2:5,
House of Jacob, Let us Ascend), founded in eastern Ukraine and sending its
first settlers to establish communities in Palestine in 1882. Major Zionist
thinkers such as Lev Pinsker and Ahad Ha-Am were active in the region,
particularly in Odessa, and it was a gathering of Zionists in Ukraine in 1903
that rejected the British offer of African territory as a future national home of
the Jews.
Other Jews felt that leaving the Russian Empire was not a viable
solution to the triple dilemmas of economic hardship, antisemitic violence,
and government inaction. Indeed, the failure of the government to act against
pogroms was slowly becoming a policy of complicity, with Nicholas II openly
identifying with the antisemitic Black Hundreds organization, personally
sponsoring the publication of the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, and even prosecuting a Kiev Jew, Mendel Beilis, on the
absurd medieval charge of kidnapping a Christian child and murdering him
for his blood. A jury of Ukrainian peasants acquitted Beilis in 1913.

Thus, many felt that the problems of the tsarist empire had to be
addressed directly, and through potentially radical change. Thousands of
young Jews were drawn to revolutionary movements, some of which espoused
socialism. Moreover, a wide range of Jewish socialist parties, notably the
Bund, spread throughout the region. Another popular option for politically
conscious Ukrainian Jews was the socialist-Zionist hybrid party known as
Poale Tsiyon (Workers of Zion). These political organizations, which were
initially forced to operate underground, were increasingly active after the
1905 Revolution and the subsequent lifting of selected bans on political
organization. [See Bund; Poale Tsiyon.]
The Jewish political movement that had the greatest initial political
achievement in Ukraine was the so-called autonomist movement (also known
as Diaspora Nationalism), devoted to establishing a secular, modernized form
of Jewish national autonomy in twentieth-century Ukraine. The political
party Folkspartey was inspired by the historian Simon Dubnow, who
imagined a Russian federation in which Jews (indeed, all organized
minorities) would form a parliament to regulate all communal affairs, such as
education and cultural activities, as well as internal religious affairs and the
like. The prime minister of this Jewish parliament would in turn occupy a
cabinet-level post in the state government as minister of Jewish affairs
19141939. Ukraine was a major theater during World War I, with
intense fighting in West Ukraine in particular. After invading Austrian
Galicia at the onset of the war, tsarist troops were beaten back in 1915 by
German forces, and fighting raged in that region for the next two years.
Poorly equipped Russian soldiers were rapidly demoralized, and as discipline
faltered, an increasingly ominous pattern of attacks on local Jewish
populations began. During this exceptionally chaotic period of Ukrainian
history, the region went from the throes of World War I, through two
revolutions (the establishment of the Provisional Government in early 1917,
and its overthrow by the Bolsheviks several months later), a declaration of
Ukrainian independence and a brief SovietUkrainian war, occupation by
German forces, and then a cataclysmic civil war that lasted from late 1918
through 1920.
During this time, and for reasons both pragmatic and idealistic, Jewish
and Ukrainian political activists sought to bring a new harmony to
UkrainianJewish relations in a proposed postrevolutionary democracy.
Jewish participation in the Ukrainian movement was important for giving
the movement both a solid foundation in urban regions as well as a foothold
in the economic life of the country, and also helped Ukrainians argue for
greater independence from the former empires center in Saint Petersburg.
For their part, Ukrainians pledged to implement the major tenets of
autonomism, giving Jews communal as well as individual rights, including
the appointment of a minister of Jewish affairs in the Ukrainian cabinet, the

devotion of a portion of state taxes for Jewish educational and other

purposes, and the declaration of Yiddish as an official state language.
Perhaps surprisingly, much of Ukrainian Jewry embraced a
partnership with the emerging Ukrainian national movement. Across the
spectrum, from Jewish socialism to Revisionist Zionism, Jewish political
parties joined with the Ukrainian Central Rada in Kiev to assert demands for
increased local autonomy. This relationship was tenable so long as the Rada
envisioned itself as part of a federated Russian Republic: once Bolshevik
power was established in Petrograd and Moscow, this clearly became
impossible. The Rada declared independence in January 1918, over the
objections of its Jewish members. Tensions between the Ukrainian and
Jewish political groups were exacerbated in the burgeoning wave of violence
that overwhelmed Ukraine in 1919.
The lofty ideals of political cooperation existed only in the minds of
their creators, the small circle of politically active Jews and Ukrainians in
Kiev and major cities (in fact, as the civil war progressed, the headquarters of
the Ukrainian government was displaced to several passenger cars and a
locomotive, and was ignominiously reduced to fleeing from one town to
another). The dominant experience of Jews in Ukraine during the civil war
period was one of violence, as hordes of pogromists swept across the
countryside. Various military organizations and independent hooligans killed
tens of thousands of Jews in the worst violence ever experienced in the region
to that time. All groups participated in the pillage, from the anti-Soviet
White Army, the anarchists, and even the Red Armybut the largest single
proportion of recorded pogroms, some 40 percent, were perpetrated by
Ukrainian troops, ostensibly loyal to the same government that had extended
such unprecedented rights and privileges to the Jewish population.
The Ukrainian government, led by Symon Petliura, was unable to
control its ragtag troops, which had shrunk from 100,000 volunteers to barely
16,000 by the spring of 1919. Indeed, rather than actively curbing his troops,
Petliura may well have simply turned a blind eye to their anti-Jewish (and
anti-Polish) violence during a few critical weeks in the campaign. Although
he aggressively campaigned against violence later in the civil war, the
damage was done: UkrainianJewish political collaboration was over.
Petliura was later assassinated in Paris in 1926 by a Bessarabian Jew
claiming revenge for the pogroms: after a much celebrated and controversial
trial, the assassin was released without punishment.
Of the major combatants in Ukrainian territory, the Red Army under
Leon Trotskys leadership was responsible for only 9 percent of recorded
pogroms. Indeed, Lenin pursued a determined policy of opposition to
antisemitism. In what historian Zvi Gitelman called the dilemma of the one
alternative, Jews flocked to join the Red Army in such numbers that a
special section had to be set up to train these Yiddish-speaking youngsters
who were probably touching a weapon for the first time in their lives.

Ironically, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Ukrainian perception

that Jews sympathized with the Soviet enemy motivated pogromists to attack
Jewish communities, and the Jewish perception that Ukrainians were
pogromists prompted them to join the Red Army, which in turn fueled the
Ukrainian belief that Jews were overwhelmingly pro-Soviet.
This tendency for Jewish support is also reflected in Communist Party
membership. The Jewish population of Ukraine, according to the 1897
census, was approximately 1.6 million, or 8 percent of the total population.
Statistics for membership in the Communist Party before the revolution are
unreliable, but partial figures from 1917 show that Jews constituted about 4
percent (or fewer than 1,000 people) of the party for the entire tsarist empire.
Looking at Ukraine specifically, Jews made up 13.6 percent of all Communist
Party members in 1922 (53.6% were Russians and 23.3% were Ukrainians).
This statistic declined to 11.2 percent in 1926, still some three percentage
points higher than Jews approximate share of the population. More ominous,
however, is the prominence, especially in the early 1920s, of Jews in various
branches of the Ukrainian Cheka, the Soviet secret police (known later as the
GPU/NKVD). Statistics are generally not available, but anecdotal evidence of
prominent Jewish participation is plentiful.
Ukrainian Jews numbered 1.5 million, or 60 percent of the USSRs
Jewish population, in the 1920s. Despite Marxist ideological questioning of
the legitimacy of Jewish national identity, Jews were included in the broad
scope of the Communist policy of korenizatsiia (indigenization or rooting), a
plan that attempted to allow the various nationalities a degree of cultural
expression while preventing the development of potentially anti-Soviet
nationalist movements. Under the general motto characterizing itself as
nationalist in form, socialist in content, korenizatsiia encouraged the
development of local arts and culture, especially the promotion of languages
that had been repressed or ignored during the tsarist regime.
Conflict between Jews and Ukrainians during this period occurred as
both groups reoriented themselves to take advantage of the changing political
climate. Often competing with each other, they also clashed over some
specific issues, such as the experimental Jewish farms set up in Ukrainian
regions. Since Ukrainians were the dominant nationality in the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), and in keeping with the concept of
korenizatsiia, the government pursued a policy of Ukrainianization, in
which the Ukrainian language was given preference as a state language, the
percentage of Ukrainians in the Ukrainian Communist Party was increased,
and so on. Jews, however, were opting to follow another course by orienting
themselves toward the Russians, a minority in the Ukrainian SSR but the
dominant nationality in the Soviet Union as a whole. Whereas Yiddish was
the mother tongue of an overwhelming 97 percent of Ukrainian Jews in 1897
(a figure that dropped to 76.3 in 1926), only 0.9 percent had adopted
Ukrainian as their mother tongue: 22.7 percent of Jews were educated in

Russian instead. The largest Jewish communities were in Kiev, Odessa,

Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk.
The Stalinist repressions of the 1930s made the prodigious cultural
activity of the 1920s seem like a passing dream for both Jews and
Ukrainians. The national in form aspects of both Ukrainian and Jewish
cultures were brutally and crudely suppressed as writers, actors, and others
were systematically accused of deviation and were often forced to recant
their work publicly. These persecutions often reached absurd proportions.
Taking the example of language once again, Russian replaced Ukrainian in
scores of official settings; publication of Ukrainian dictionaries was
suspended; Jewish schools, theaters, and other cultural institutions were
closed down; and Yiddish language publication of all kinds fell off sharply.
Stalins drive to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union had
catastrophic consequences for Ukraine. Estimates of the number of
Ukrainians who perished in the famine of 19321933 vary significantly, but a
conservative calculation the death toll at a staggering 4.8 million. The
association of Jews with communism in the minds of many Ukrainians
aggravated tensions between the two groups, since the catastrophic fooddistribution polices of the regime must bear considerable responsibility for
the severity of the famine.
The Holocaust in Ukraine. The experience of the Holocaust in
Ukraine varied widely, in accordance with the date of Nazi occupation. Jews
living in the western regions taken under Nazi control in September 1939
were forced into ghettos, followed by deportation to death camps. Jews in the
zone annexed by the USSR between the beginning of the war in September
1939 and Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 were subject to a rapid and
brutal Sovietization, but were shielded partially from the full force of the
Nazis as many managed to escape to the interior of the USSR in the first
chaotic weeks of the German advance.
This escape route, however, was of little use to the hundreds of
thousands of Ukrainian Jews living in the small settlements that dotted the
countryside. Following the German army came two Einsatzgruppen units,
some 1,400 troops in total, which systematically worked their way through
these locales, rounding up Jews, Communists, and others and taking them to
nearby ravines for execution. The most horrific single atrocity by the
Einsatzgruppen occurred outside Kiev at Babi Yar, where more than 30,000
Jews were murdered in two days in late September 1941. [See
Einsatzgruppen; Babi Yar.]
Most Ukrainian Jews experienced the impact of the Nazi onslaught
after Operation Barbarossa in June 1941: the hurried Soviet evacuation,
followed by the Nazi invasion and Einsatzgruppen massacres. Those in
eastern Galicia, incorporated into the Generalgouvernement, had an
experience that was more typical of Polish Jewry: ghettoization followed by
deportation to death camps in 1942. The Nazi invasion of these territories,

which were part of independent Poland between the wars and then subject to
a brief and brutal period of Soviet control between September 1939 and the
summer of 1941, was seen by many Ukrainians as a liberation from a
perceived JewishCommunist oppressor, and spontaneous pogroms against
Jews broke out in many communities after the Soviet evacuation. The Nazis
considered this violence quite advantageous, and in some cases (such as the
infamous Petliura Days of Lviv) actively sought to encourage Ukrainian
attacks on Jews. Ghettos were established in the major communities; the
Janowska ghetto in Lviv was especially notorious for its brutal treatment of
the Jews
Accurate demographic calculations of the extent of the Holocaust are
difficult to achieve, but a realistic estimate of the number of Ukrainian Jews
killed would be approximately 1.5 million: 60 percent of the total prewar
population. This figure is massive, but at the same time very unusual in that,
with the exception of Poland, Ukraine had the largest single population of
Jews in any country completely occupied by the Nazis. Therefore, a survival
rate of 40 percent, even approximate, is especially high. This figure is also
surprising given the much more brutal nature of the occupation in Eastern
Europe, and the fact that Ukraine was classified as either part of the
Generalgouvernement (in the formerly Polish regions) or as a
Reichskommissariat. Hence, both regions were under complete martial law,
and lacked the sort of meaningful organs of self-government that were
permitted in some Western countries. Furthermore, many Ukrainians,
particularly in the western regions, viewed cooperation with the Nazis as
justified retribution for perceived Jewish collaboration with the Communists.
Some Ukrainians also sheltered Jews from the Nazis, including the Uniate
Metropolitan Andryi Sheptytskyi, responsible for rescuing some 250 children
in his network of convents and monasteries.
19441991. At the wars end, returning Jews were met with a surge of
antisemitic violence as they attempted to secure their homes and property
after the dislocations of the war. The official reaction of the Soviet Union was
to dismiss such violence as the lingering effect of pro-Fascist elements, and in
fact the postwar years were characterized by silence on the unique suffering
of Jews during the Holocaust. The most egregious example of this failure to
memorialize the Holocaust properly was at Babi Yar, which did not receive a
memorial until 1976. Official antisemitism, sometimes covered with a thin
veneer of anti-Zionism, was especially prominent in Ukraine: in 1963, the
Academy of Sciences of Ukraine published Trofim Kichkos crude and
cartoonish Iudaizm bez prykras (Judaism without Embellishment), a
blatantly antisemitic work under the guise of scholarship.
Beginning in the 1960s, however, Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents
were intensifying their activities, the former demanding internal change and
the latter demanding release to immigrate to Israel. Although their
immediate demands were not entirely congruent, the broader need for change

was something both groups shared, and informal contacts between the
movements flourished. With the era of glasnost, the predominant Ukrainian
movement for change, known as Rukh, adopted a decidedly friendly posture
toward Jews in both Ukraine and the State of Israel. When the extremist
Russian nationalist organization Pamiat called for anti-Jewish violence in
May 1990, Rukh successfully campaigned against any attacks, convincing
many Ukrainian Jews that this more liberal, national-democratic movement
deserved their support.
After 1991. Ukraine officially achieved independence in 1991 with the
collapse of the Soviet Union. In the late Soviet period, Jews had already
begun emigrating at a rapid rate, especially to Israel and the United States.
According to the 2001 census, roughly 380,000 Jews had chosen to leave
Ukraine, some three-quarters of the Jewish population. Nevertheless, a
strong community of Jews remained in Kiev, organized initially under the
leadership of Yaakov Dov Bleich, an American Hasid who became chief rabbi
of Ukraine during the late Soviet period. A rich network of Jewish schools
and synagogues appeared in the major centers, especially Kiev, Lviv, and
Dnipropetrovsk, where the Lubavitch Hasidic movement was especially
active, and tens of buildings confiscated by the Soviet regime were returned
to Jewish communal organizations. Jewish newspapers, typically in the
Russian language, circulated, and even advanced scholarship was reviving,
including at the Tkuma Holocaust Museum and Research Center in
Dnipropetrovsk. Although the population markedly declined, Ukrainian
Jewry displayed remarkable vitality after the fall of the Soviet Union.
[See also Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Jewish Confederation
of Ukraine; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; and entries on the cities and
principal individuals mentioned.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in

Revolutionary Times, 19171920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Howard Aster
and Peter J. Potichnyj, eds., Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical
Perspective, 2nd ed. (Edmonton, 1990); Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the
Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924
1941 (New Haven, 2005); Shmuel Ettinger, The Legal and Social Status of
the Jews of Ukraine from the Fifteenth Century to the Cossack Uprising of
1648, Journal of Ukrainian Studies 17.12 (1992): 107140; Philip
Friedman, The First Millenium of Jewish Settlement in the Ukraine and
Adjacent Areas, Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in
the United States 7.11 (1959): 14831516; Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality
and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 19171930 (Princeton,
1972); Zvi Gitelman, Native Land, Promised Land, Golden Land: Jewish
Emigration from Russia and Ukraine, in Cultures and Nations of Central
and Eastern Europe, pp. 137163 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Vladimir

Khanin, ed., Documents on Ukrainian-Jewish Identity and Emigration, 1944

1990 (London, 2003); John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms:
Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, Mass., and
New York, 1992); Joel Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial: The Fate of
the Jews in the Wars of the Polish Commonwealth during the MidSeventeenth Century as Shown in Contemporary Writings and Historical
Research (Boulder, Colo., 1995); Shaul Stampfer, What Actually Happened
to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648? Jewish History 17.2 (2003): 207227.
HENRY ABRAMSON

The article presented above is a sample entry from The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, to
be published by the Yale University Press. Copyright 2005 YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Inc.
Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Inc. All
rights reserved.