OPINION: Jewish community stands with Ukraine
Recently the holiday of Purim was celebrated by Jewish people all over the world.
The origin of Purim, from the book of Esther in our Hebrew Bible, is a particular Jewish story celebrating the victory over the diabolical plot to exterminate the Jewish people during the days of the Persian Empire.
While neither Purim nor Hanukkah appear in the first Five Books of Moses – the Torah – both of these festivals are significant because they compel us to celebrate two major antisemitic assaults against the Jewish people throughout the ages:
• The attempt to persecute the practice of Judaism.
• The attempt to annihilate – and remove the physical existence of – the Jewish people.
We Jews have experienced both types of hatred, and throughout our long history we have survived to see the fall of mighty empires and tyrants who attempted to crush our religion and remove us from the map.
In 1920, my family left their village of Skvira, Ukraine, before ultimately making their way to America. My mother was born in a Romanian barn on the way to the ship that would take my family across the pond to freedom in our blessed country. My great-great-grandparents were killed in the pogroms that broke out against the Jews of Ukraine between 1918 to 1921.
There is a long history of Jews in Ukraine, starting in the 16th century when the first Jews settled in the Polish-Lithuanian state that embraced much of today’s Ukraine. Jews flourished there for a while, but they were slaughtered during the Ukrainian national uprisings of the mid-17th century. In the process, one-third of the Jewish population in Ukraine was murdered.
In 1941, after Germany invaded Ukraine, a huge segment of the Jews who remained in the country were murdered by the Nazis, who were abetted by Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers. This horrific genocide led to the largest single massacre of the Holocaust: During a two-day period in September 1941 at Babi Yar, a ravine outside of today’s Kyiv, more than 33,000 Jews – including members of my family – were murdered before and during our holiest day, Yom Kippur.
There are, miraculously, between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews who still live in Ukraine, a nation I visited on a few occasions to restore synagogues and carry out other efforts on behalf of its hearty Jewish population
However, even after this long, arduous historical past, it is still possible to hear a figure like Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president, refer to Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, as someone who is “from a certain ethnic group” – a comment that only stirs up age-old antisemitic canards.
Most people are not aware of the Jewish stake in what is now happening in Ukraine. And that's why I, as a member of the Jewish community, want to tell the Ukrainian community that we are with you in your struggle for freedom – and in your fight to destroy Russian President Vladimir Putin's murderous plans.
The Ukrainian people will win because the story of Purim tells us that all despots eventually fall. And one day Ukrainians will be able to tell their children the story of how the nation's Jewish president led the valiant fight to preserve Ukraine's national dignity and freedom.
We the Jewish people remember our past, and we stand firmly behind the Ukrainian people's fight to live in peace in their cherished homeland. Keep fighting – we are with you.
Rabbi Stuart Altshuler is the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Sarasota.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Jewish community stands as one with Ukraine in its fight for freedom
