Praying for Ukraine

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine wears on, the outcome becomes increasingly less simple to predict. Time is the friend of the Russians, the ones with the limitless resources of personnel and firepower. But the fierce resistance of the Ukrainians, which surprised even their closest allies and supporters, might in the long run prove more important than the Russians’ wealth or numbers: wars are generally won by the brave (and the lucky), not necessarily by the many. Like all decent people, I am praying for the Ukrainians and find myself repulsed by the barbarism of the Russians. I read Bret Stephens’ appreciation of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Times’ the other day (click here if you didn’t see it) and found myself agreeing, and vigorously, with every single point he made.

For most Americans, the sense that the Ukrainians are the good guys comes naturally. That is my sense as well—that the angels  in this conflict are on the side of the Ukrainians—but I can’t say it comes to me naturally. In fact, just the opposite is the case.

All of this came to a head for me the other week when, just a few days before Pesach, the Rabbinical Assembly asked me to join a few other colleagues in proposing some prayerful supplements that could be offered to families that want to introduce the story of the Ukrainians resistance to tyranny into their seder. I was flattered to be asked and was eager to rise to the occasion. I did compose such a prayer and submitted it (after trying it out once or twice at Shelter Rock to see how it would be received). But the reading that I forced myself to undertake to prepare myself to compose a prayer that would be reflective of Jewish history in the Ukraine accurately and reasonably was beyond sobering. And it was in the wake of that self-assigned review of how things were that I found it, finally, in myself to compose a prayer suggesting of how I hope that things might yet turn out to be.

There have been Jews living in Ukraine forever…or at least since the days of Kievan Rus in the eleventh century. Indeed, in the days of Yaroslav the Wise (978–1054), one of the gates of Kyiv was called “The Jewish Gate,” presumably because it opened onto the Jewish quarter. There were good times in the ensuing centuries when the Jewish community flourished and created profound works of mystic theology and sharp halakhic acumen. But there were also bad times—the popular uprising of the mid-seventeenth century undertaken by Bohdan Khmelnytsky led to the massacre of scores of thousands of Jewish citizens and the upper annihilation of upwards of three hundred separate Jewish communities. (Nor is it irrelevant to note that Khmelnytsky, regarded by Jews as the Hitler of his day, is a revered figure in today’s Ukraine whose face adorns Ukrainian banknotes and whose statue dominates one of Kyiv’s central squares.)

In our own day, the amazing thing is not what happened to the Jews of Ukraine before the Shoah, but how almost universally the various pogroms that took Jewish lives in the course of those terrible years have been totally forgotten…including by Jewish people.

I can’t recall the last time I heard someone mention the Kyiv Pogrom of 1881, a widespread riot that resulted in the destruction of thousands of Jewish homes in Kyiv and the surrounding region, let alone the Odessa Riots of 1821, in which fourteen Jews were murdered. But it was the twentieth century that saw the worse of the pre-Shoah disturbances. It is widely and reasonably estimated that at least 100,000 Jewish people were murdered in the streets of Ukraine from 1918 to 1921, yet I have not noticed any reference to that almost unbelievable number in the last two months that I’ve been reading daily about Ukraine and the heroism of its Jewish president. Well worth reading in this regard is Jeffrey Veidlinger’s book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, published just last October by Metropolitan Books. A blurb for the book reads as follows: “Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.”

You see where we’re going. And then came the Shoah itself, which featured an unholy alliance of Ukrainian collaborators working hand-in-hand with the German invaders to murder Jews: in July 1941, it is estimated that as many as 5,000 Jews were murdered in Lviv alone. In an essay by Veidlinger published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (click here), he notes that during the first months of German occupation as many as 35,000 Jews were murdered and that “many of these massacres were perpetrated by locals, some without even a German presence.”

There’s way more to say. But the question is not how many horrific details I can stack up, but to decide what to do about this part of Ukrainian history. Do we take some sort of perverse pleasure in the Russian effort to inflict maximum punishment on the Ukrainian people for daring to wish to live in an independent state? Or do we remind ourselves that the murderers of Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are not the citizens of today’s Ukraine, that those people are long since gone from the world (or, speaking of the Shoah period, almost gone—but how many could have survived, let alone still be among the living?), that the citizens of today’s Ukraine are so far removed from the previous generations’ anti-Semitism that they’ve actually elected a Jew as their president? Or do we step outside of history entirely and focus on what we see before our eyes: a weaker nation being invaded by a larger, more powerful nation unafraid to kill civilians if that’s what it must take to bring the smaller nation to its knees? And what of President Zelensky’s Jewishness? Should that be the decisive detail here, the specific point that makes it impossible to turn away from the plight of Ukraine as the Russians murder children with impunity? And what if the president weren’t Jewish? Would that make it easier to turn away? And what would it say of us, we American Jews, if it did?

These were the thoughts I brought to bear as I sat down to attempt to write my prayer. I had no obligation to submit anything—I was flattered, as noted, by the Assembly’s request of me, but under no specific obligation to respond. I could easily have said no. My grandfather, my mother’s father, traveled—as far as I know—from his home in Belarus through Ukraine to board a ship for America in Odessa. This would have been around 1900. What if he had decided not to get on the boat at all and, instead, to settle down in Odessa, then as now a truly cosmopolitan city and a great cultural center. (I was there in 1990 and saw for myself just how attractive and interesting a place it was.) But what if he had stayed on and not come here? Would he have survived the pogroms and the Shoah-era massacres and deportations? Would one of his descendants (not myself—he and my American-born grandmother met here) be holed up in Odessa (or Lviv or Kharkiv or Kyiv) right now hoping not to be killed by an incoming Russian missile aimed directly at a civilian target?

And so I decided to accept the challenge and to create a prayer, something I could get behind emotionally and intellectually…and that would express my feelings about the past and the present, and my hopes for the future. Did I succeed? Only others can say, but I reproduce my work here for your consideration:

Avinu She-ba-shamayim, dear God in Heaven, as we watch on as a huge nation headed by a despot attempts to swallow up a neighboring state merely because it can, we are brought back to a different era not that long ago when a different nation headed by a different despot sought to swallow up neighboring nations large and small merely because it could. And that memory, for all it terrifies, also energizes. Ukraine has a long, complicated, and not at all happy, history with its Jewish citizens. We refuse to forget the past, as the Torah commands, and always to remember. But we also understand that the right to self-determination is the basic right of all peoples and that freedom cannot be a prize offered to some but not to all. And in that spirit we pray that You hear the groaning of Ukraine as it endures ruthless and merciless attacks against its citizenry, just as You once heard the Israelites in Egypt when they cried out to You in their misery. And also that You prompt the aggressor to open his heart to peace and to understand that, in geopolitics as in life itself, restraint is power and peace is the great end towards which humankind must strive if it is to endure.