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: Against the background of mass emigration, religious revival and social and political transformations in the former Soviet Union, specifically Ukraine, this thesis describes and analyses change and continuity in the Jewish way of life in contemporary Odessa. Odessan Jews - continuous residents and return migrants - engage in many different processes of identity formation and community building, negotiating Jewish traditions, values, practices and orientations. Through ethnographic analysis of individual and communal affairs, this thesis examines the everyday life of a post-Soviet ethnoreligious minority group open to competing cultural models, lifestyles and social norms that derive from different contexts: individual, family, community, city, state and transnational connections. Part I "Jewish life in Odessa: Memory and Contested History" focuses on the city's history and its legacy and myth as an open, cosmopolitan and Jewish city perceived as a "distinct place" within Russia, the Soviet Union and present-day Ukraine. These historical chapters not only provide the necessary background for understanding Odessa today but also challenge the highly negative and monolithic picture of Soviet Jewish experiences that often ignores the influences of specific urban cultures on the development of varying Jewish orientations. Part II "Jewish Revival: The View from Within and from Outside" concentrates on contemporary Odessa and focuses on the phenomena of local Jewish revival, mainly driven by international Jewish organizations and shaped by their differing agendas in the region. These chapters explore the various ways in which Odessan Jews selectively appropriate, explore and contest these new visions and practices of Jewish life that in effect offer an arena of novel orientations. At the same time, vital questions are posed about the overall goals and achievements of Jewish philanthropy projects in the former Soviet Union. Part III "Home in the Diaspora" deals with the processes of Jewish migration and analyses the various ways that continuous residents, visiting and returning Jews orient themselves to Odessa as a locale in relation to other destinations, including Israel, that partially define their sense of themselves as Odessan Jews. Chapter 7, in particular, poses the 3 question whether it is still meaningful to refer to Odessa as a Jewish city in the light of the changing demographics of its Jewish population and the altered status and orientation of the city's remaining Jews. In response, the thesis argues that Jewishness is envisioned as a metonym of cosmopolitan Odessa and that the fight for its recognition as a Jewish place is, by extension, a battle for the city's historically constituted - albeit diminished - cosmopolitanism
Abstract: После крушения государственного социализма в Украине начинают происходить драматические трансформации религиозного ландшафта. В данной статье анализируется влияние религиозного возрождения на еврейское население Одессы. Рассматриваются различные стратегии поворота к вере, мотивация новообращенных, их попытки вжиться в иудаизм, те обсуждения традиции, в которые они в ходе этих процессов вовлекаются, а также влияние новой религиозности на внутри- и межсемейные взаимоотношения. Утверждается, что по большей части новособлюдающие иудеи восприняли иудаизм как новый способ быть евреем, а не как возвращение к своим семейным традициям. В целом она характеризует постсоветскую религиозность в Одессе как формирование режима «религиозной приверженности» в смысле особого состояния ума и пространства для выстраивания духовной жизни. Эта «религиозная приверженность» приводит к новым или несколько иным направлениям иудейской идентичности, уже не связанным с «полнотой» соблюдения набора правил. «Религиозная приверженность» может включать в себя полную, частичную, кратковременную или долговременную практику иудаизма, приобщение к нему в дополнение или в замещение прежних убеждений.
