03 - After World War II

During the last stages of World War II and in the period after it, when Nikita Khrushchev was the ruling party man of the Ukraine, Ukrainian Jews who, during the occupation, fled or were evacuated to Soviet Asia, began to stream back and claim their previous housing, possessions, and positions. They were met with outspoken hostility by most of the Ukrainians who had taken their place. The administration refused to interfere in favor of the Jews and generally showed "understanding" for the anti-Jewish reaction, even hushing up violent clashes (as, e.g., in Kiev). When Khrushchev became the ruling figure in the U.S.S.R. after Stalin's death, and particularly in the 1960s, the traditional hatred of Jews in the Ukraine was again allowed to find free expression in pseudo-scientific literature (e.g., the book by the professional anti-Semite Trofim Kichko, Judaism without Embellishment, which appeared in 1963 under the auspices of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences) and in various popular brochures and periodicals. This official anti-Jewish atmosphere prevailed in the Ukraine during the whole postwar period. The only synagogue in Kharkov was closed down in 1948 and its aged rabbi sent to a labor camp. In Kiev the only remaining synagogue was put under severe surveillance of the secret police, more than in other Soviet cities. Yiddish folklore concerts and shows were almost completely banned from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, though they were allowed to take place occasionally in Ukrainian provincial towns.

An interesting reaction to this trend "from above" became noticeable in the late 1960s among Ukrainian intellectuals who openly strove to achieve more freedom in civil and national rights. Though engaged in defending the Ukrainian character of their republic against "russification," some of them went out of their way to emphasize their solidarity with Jewish demands for the revival of Jewish culture and education. They also identified with the Jewish attempt to keep alive the remembrance of the Holocaust against the official policy of obliterating it. Young Ukrainian writers, most of them Communist Party members, expressed this new trend in Ukrainian national thought in various ways, and even in labor camps after their arrest for "bourgeois nationalism." A particular impression was made in 1966 by the speech of the writer Ivan Dzyuba in Babi Yar on the anniversary of the massacre (October 29). It was published only in the West, but it became widely known among Jews and educated non-Jews in the Ukraine.

From 1969 some Jewish families in Kharkov, Kiev, and Odessa were allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. for Israel.

[Editorial Staff Encyclopaedia Judaica]


Source:
www.heritagefilms.com

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* Historia: Ucrania