Abstract: This open access book explores the resilience of Jewish civil society organizing in Ukraine during the tumultuous early months of the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion. Developed in collaboration with Paideia - the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, the research chronicles a project that involved Ukrainian Jewish communities during wartime through Paideia’s alumni network. Drawing on rich empirical data, the authors examine the multifaceted work of Jewish organizations and organizing efforts, from sustaining rituals to engaging in humanitarian work. The book examines single case studies and broader cross-organizational analyses, shedding light on the capacity of Jewish groups to repurpose activities, pivot from serving specific communities to addressing broader societal needs, and mobilize resources under extreme conditions. This resilience, the authors argue, is shaped by a complex interplay of factors: pre-existing organizational structures, transnational networks, and the fusion of symbolic and material institutional elements rooted in the Ukrainian-Jewish experience. By situating these efforts within a wider context, the book uses different streams of organization studies to provide an in-depth analysis of resilient civil society organizing during wartime. Aimed at organization scholars, civil society researchers, activists, and those interested in Jewish culture and Ukrainian history, this book offers critical insights into the possibility of civil society resilience in the face of war.
Abstract: This paper examines the adaptation and proliferation of antisemitic narratives on Telegram during the Russian-Ukrainian war, tracing their evolution from historical myths to digital propaganda. Through a qualitative analysis of Telegram channels in Russian and Ukrainian, we explore how classical antisemitic tropes such as conspiracy theories about Jewish global control, Holocaust denial, and accusations of dual loyalty are repurposed to shift blame for the war onto Jews. Our findings reveal a multilayered process of blame-shifting operating across historical, social, national, and global levels, positioning Jews as instigators of conflict to deflect civic and political responsibility from Russians and Ukrainians. We argue that this antisemitic rhetoric serves as a tool of social manipulation and political deflection, embedded in diverse nationalist and conspiratorial digital environments. By embedding these narratives within Telegram’s unregulated and virally oriented ecosystem, content creators amplify prejudice, erode social cohesion, and perpetuate cycles of mistrust and scapegoating. This study highlights the enduring power of antisemitic myths in contemporary digital conflict narratives and calls for further research into the structural mechanisms enabling their spread.
Abstract: The terrain of the past remains a battleground in Ukraine, where policymakers, interest groups, and individuals continue to use and abuse history for contemporary gains. The recent escalation of Russian violence has only exacerbated these processes. Apart from discussions of Ukraine and Russia’s historical relations and the Holodomor, nothing looms larger than the Holocaust in Ukraine’s ongoing memory wars, whether in discussions and denials of local collaboration and complicity in anti-Jewish violence or exercises in comparative and/or competitive suffering. This article examines the Holocaust as it played out in Ukraine and the evolving memoryscapes that emerged in its wake, homing in on two major massacres, Babyn Yar and Bohdanivka, and their memorial afterlives in Soviet Ukraine (ca. 1945–91) and independent Ukraine (1991–today). While this project briefly engages the well-trod topics of local collaboration and competitive suffering, as evidenced in competing monuments on the site of Babyn Yar itself and the larger commemorative landscape of Kyiv, it draws attention to understudied sites like Bohdanivka, which fell within the Romanian occupation zone during the war.
Abstract: This study explores the religious practices of the general Ukrainian population and the Jewish community, focussing on their role in fostering social identity and psychological resilience in contemporary Ukraine. It examines how religious rituals, as key sociocultural mechanisms, contribute to a collective sense of belonging and help individuals adapt to social and cultural disruptions, especially during national crises like the war in Ukraine. The article compared religious trends and the level of secularisation among European and Ukrainian Jews. Particular emphasis was placed on religious rituals in the context of social upheavals and national conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, where religion and rituals became a support for individual and collective psychological resilience. The sociocultural, psychological and spiritual aspects of rituals, as well as the impact on the formation of positive emotional and cognitive coping strategies, were studied. The application of Tajfel’s theories of social identity, Durkheim’s concept of rituals, and Bolby’s approaches to psychological resilience provided a deeper theoretical justification for the role of rituals in strengthening both individual and group resilience. Based on an interdisciplinary analysis, it was determined that religious rituals not only supported cultural continuity but also formed new models of social interaction and adaptation to modern challenges. The study has contributed to a broader understanding of the relationship between religious activity, social structure and psychological mechanisms of resilience, which was especially important in the context of current crisis events.
Abstract: Cet article aborde la restauration de la mémoire de la Shoah en Ukraine, ainsi que le rôle, dans ce processus, de différents acteurs de la mémoire et de leurs actions. Cette question sera étudiée à la lumière des changements intervenus dans la politique historique ukrainienne au cours des années 1990-2010, à travers le prisme de l’interaction entre un récit national ethnocentré et la mémoire de la Shoah. Les choix mémoriels de l’Ukraine s’inscrivent dans ce qu’on pourrait qualifier de « modèle est-européen » au sein duquel domine un récit focalisé sur le groupe ethnique majoritaire qui y tient le rôle principal. L’histoire de l’Ukraine est celle des Ukrainiens ethniques et est racontée comme le long cheminement d’un peuple vers la création d’un État national (ou vers le rétablissement de celui-ci). On y observe enfin surtout des discours post-traumatiques et postcoloniaux, ainsi qu’une lecture des relations avec les pays voisins fondée sur des rivalités. Dans ce contexte, l’appropriation de la mémoire sociale (culturelle) de la Shoah et son inclusion dans le récit mémoriel officiel font inévitablement face à des difficultés.
En Ukraine, cette intégration rencontre les mêmes obstacles qu’ailleurs en Europe centrale et orientale et dans les pays baltes :
Premièrement, nous l’avons dit, on ne peut brosser le tableau complet de la Shoah sans se heurter au récit national canonique dans lequel la mémoire de la Shoah, que ce soit sous sa forme nationale ou transnationale, n’est pas présentée comme faisant partie de la mémoire collective…
Abstract: Проаналізовано значення поняття «культура історичної пам’яті», розглянуто історію її формування у Західній Європі, особливості ландшафту пам’яті у Східній Європі та Україні, визначено ключові питання історичної політики України, які мають потенціал перешкодити європейській інтеграції України. Внаслідок проведеного дослідження встановлено, що Україна належить до східноєвропейського регіону історичної пам’яті, якому притаманні етатизм, єдність та героїчність, віктимність, сек’юритизація. На шляху до європейської інтеграції перед Україною поставатимуть проблеми піднесення ролі Голокосту в історичній пам’яті та визнання часткової відповідальності за злочини колаборантів, обмеження регулювання з боку держави історичної сфери, українсько-польських історичних конфліктів. Водночас може відбуватися дифузія західноєвропейської та східноєвропейської моделей пам’яті.
Abstract: This volume considers the uses and misuses of the memory of assistance given to Jews during the Holocaust, deliberated in local, national, and transnational contexts. History of this aid has drawn the attention of scholars and the general public alike. Stories of heroic citizens who hid and rescued Jewish men, women, and children have been adapted into books, films, plays, public commemorations, and museum exhibitions. Yet, emphasis on the uplifting narratives often obscures the history of violence and complicity with Nazi policies of persecution and mass murder. Each of the ten essays in this interdisciplinary collection is dedicated to a different country: Belarus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, North Macedonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The case studies provide new insights into what has emerged as one of the most prominent and visible trends in recent Holocaust memory and memory politics. While many of the essays focus on recent developments, they also shed light on the evolution of this phenomenon since 1945.
Abstract: Since the end of the USSR, post-Soviet Jewry has evolved into an ethnically and culturally diverse Russian speaking community. This process is taking place against the gradual inflation of a collective identity among Russian-speaking Jews that survived the first post-Soviet decade. The infrastructure for this new entity is provided by new local (or ethno-civic) groups of East European Ashkenazi Jewry with specific communal, subcultural, and ethno-political identities (“Ukrainian,” “Moldavian,” or “Russian” Jews, e.g.). These communities demonstrate a changing balance of identification between their countries of residence and the “transnational Russian-Jewish community”, and they absorb a significant number of persons of non-Jewish and ethnically heterogeneous origins as well.
This book discusses identity, community modes, migration dynamics, socioeconomic status, attitudes toward Israel, social and political environments, and other parameters framing these trends using the results of a comprehensive sociological study of the extended Jewish population conducted in 2019–2020 by this author in the five former-Soviet Union countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan).
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the city of Odesa and its altered reality after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It discusses the different levels of fragmentation that run through the everyday life of a city and its residents and create fissures in identity and kinship, upheavals and reversals of historical memory, and challenges for conducting research during the war. Ukraine has an unusually complex ethno-linguistic and religious composition, with inherited historical divides. As a borderland, it constituted a pronounced case of political and national fragmentation even before the war. Odesa has its own forms of fragmentation, populated as it is by a rich amalgam of people and cut through with the afterlives of empires. The war has intensified all of these forms of fragmentation, bringing different histories into the present. The chapter addresses fragmentation on three different scales: the vignettes of Jewish Odesans reflecting on the war in the contexts of self, family, community, city, and nation; the historical narratives and historical truths revealed by the term “denazification,” which has served as Putin’s justification for the invasion of Ukraine.; and the reflections of a fragmented anthropologist, highlighting ethical dilemmas and practical difficulties of researching a constantly changing and deeply painful reality during the war.
Abstract: French students in the third and final year from the Humanities and Social Sciences license degree course traveled to Ukraine and Belorussia between 2017 and 2020, in order to carry out surveys of eyewitnesses to the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The subject-matter stands out in the French scholarly scene, as the Holocaust usually attracts little attention at this level of studies. Students registered in the course hail from license degrees in History, Social Sciences or Geography, and have chosen to attend the course labeled “European Historical Heritage and Citizens’ Thoughts” as a complement to a more classical curriculum, and as a way of enhancing their own university curriculum. The research professors involved have also volunteered to participate as authors of the aforementioned multidisciplinary program, with the aim to raise awareness to research practices on the Holocaust. University professors and teams from the Yahad-in-Unum NGO take turns leading the two-hour weekly sessions. The professors help establish theoretical focus and provide methodological tools, develop lines of investigation on various areas of interest (e.g., mode of operation used in the shootings, collaboration and rescue operations, and neighbors of the crime scene), as well as the context (anti-Semitism, racism, local geopolitics, regional history, culture and society, etc.), while Yahad-in-Unum participants describe actual cases based on records, maps and filmed testimonies. They had the task to provide documents from Soviet and Nazi archives translated from Russian, or from German, and act as translators during fieldwork. Students are encouraged to participate as often as possible and have to prepare analytical reports and presentations following each session, while adopting the position of a researcher.
Abstract: Of about a million Jews that arrived to Israel from the (former) USSR after 1989 some 12% left the country by the end of 2017. It is estimated that about a half of them left "back" for the FSU, and the rest for the USA, Canada and the Western Europe. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of this specific Jewish Israeli Diaspora group through cutting-edge approaches in the social sciences, and examines the settlement patterns of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrants, their identity, social demographic profile, reasons of emigration, their economic achievements, identification, and status vis-à-vis host Jewish and non-Jewish environment, vision of Israel, migration interests and behavior, as well as their social and community networks, elites and institutions. Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin makes a significant contribution to migration theory, academic understanding of transnational Diasporas, and sheds a new light on the identity and structure of contemporary Israeli society. The book is based on the unique statistics from Israeli and other Government sources and sociological information obtained from the author’s first of this kind on-going study of Israeli Russian-speaking emigrant communities in different regions of the world.
Abstract: У статті розглядається вплив масової прощі представників закордонних хасидських громад на динаміку розвитку українсько-єврейських взаємин зокрема та на етнополітичні процеси сучасної України загалом. Актуальність дослідження визначається, по-перше, недостатньою вивченістю вказаного явища у вітчизняній науці; по-друге, тією обставиною, що кількість паломників, які щороку відвідують нашу країну, суттєво перевищує чисельність парафіян місцевих юдейських громад. Специфіка хасидського віровчення вимагає, щоби віруючі регулярно відвідували місця поховання своїх провідних лідерів. Тому, оскільки згаданий релігійний рух зародився саме в Україні, зв’язок з нею багатьох закордонних юдейських релігійних громад тримається на високому рівні, незважаючи на жодні обставини. Ні пандемія, ні війна суттєво не зменшили кількість відвідувачів місць поховання вчителів хасидизму. Наведені автором факти дозволяють виявити дві суперечливі тенденції в реакції місцевих мешканців на прибуття численних послідовників юдейського релігійно-містичного руху: 1. Поширення ворожих настроїв та акцій, скерованих проти прибульців; 2. Зростання зацікавленості в розвитку прощі і збільшення толерантності.
Перша тенденція зумовлена суттєвими розбіжностями у світогляді, культурі та побутових звичках. Вона також є наслідком корупційних проблем, оскільки муніципальна влада вводить до місцевих бюджетів лише малу частину здобутих від паломників коштів. Друга тенденція визначається зацікавленістю місцевих мешканців у заробітках, пов’язаних з обслуговуванням прочан, і толерантністю, яка дедалі більше поширюється в суспільстві. У висновках відзначається, що розвиток дружніх стосунків між місцевим населенням і хасидами-паломниками сприяє позитивній динаміці іміджу українського суспільства не лише в єврейському середовищі, але також і в численних спільнотах сучасного західного світу, які безпосередньо не причетні до юдаїзму. Це, в свою чергу, допоможе Україні під час повоєнної розбудови. Задля вирішення пов’язаних з прощею проблем автор рекомендує низку просвітянських заходів для місцевого населення, регіонального чиновництва та самих паломників.
