Ukranian Jews Under Communism (1917-1991)
By the beginning of the 20th century, Jews lived in almost all the towns of Ukraine. They also constituted one-third of the total urban population. More than one-third of all Jews in western and central Ukraine lived in towns or shtetls where they formed an absolute majority. The largest population lived in the western and southwestern areas.
After the Bolshevik revolution, restrictions confining Jews to the Pale of Settlements, basically eastern boundaries of the Polish state in the 18th century, were lifted and many Jews moved to large eastern cities, while others migrated to Russia, especially Moscow and Petrograd (later Leningrad, and now St. Petersburg).
The Russian Revolution and the Civil War of 1918-21 brought the greatest violence since the 17th century against Jews in Ukraine and the greatest destruction of Jewish monuments. And although these horrors would be dwarfed by the terror of the Holocaust, and, thus, to some extent are forgotten, they ranked at the time among the worst catastrophes of Jewish history. Estimates put the Jewish death count at 35,000, with over 100,000 left homeless. The 1930s famine was confined largely to the villages, and losses fell mostly on Ukrainians who were then predominantly rural.
First Independent Communist Periods (1917-1939)
After 1917, Jews began to move in large numbers from small villages to big towns and cities, in part because of the numerous pogroms in small towns during the Civil War when Jews suffered from requisitions, robbery, and violence. From 1919 to 1921, violence against Jews occurred in more than 350 localities. A result was that the Jewish population of large cities such as Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Odesa increased significantly.
After a short period of Ukrainian independence, the western third of present-day Ukraine, including the city of Lviv, became part of the re-established Poland, while the eastern part fell under Soviet rule. The partition left more than 1.5 million Jews in what would become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. By the late 1920s, the Soviet regime began to end all autonomous Jewish communal activities. This was accompanied by a policy of confiscation of synagogues, converting them into sport halls, factories, and other facilities.
During the early Soviet period, Ukraine (together with Belarus) became a center of Yiddish culture, albeit devoid of any religious content. Yiddish schools, theaters, newspapers and publishing houses were established, as was the "Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in the Ukraine" attached to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. During this time Jewish ethnographic collections were expanded, and these collections - preserved from the destruction of the Holocaust - form the core of many state Judaica collectio ns today. Toward the end of the 1930s, during the Stalinist purges, nearly all of these institutions were eliminated. During this time, religious and Zionist activity was forced underground. By the late 1930s, after a thorough crackdown, most of those involved in propagating religious observance or Zionism had been arrested.
In the 1930s, as part of the economic and social politics of the Soviet Union, Soviet authorities established four Jewish autonomous districts in the southern part of Ukraine and in the Crimea. Large collective farms (called kolkhoz) were established, the members of which were mostly Jews. So, in such places, new Jewish cemeteries were established. These settlements lasted until the Second World War, when German forces occupied them and murdered their inhabitants.
Holocaust (1939-1945)
World War II inflicted huge losses on all, but some groups were singled out for special treatment. Soviet occupation of western Ukraine in 1939, which was under Poland between the wars, precipitated extensive arrests and deportation. All groups were affected, but Poles suffered the most. Former Polish officials and community leaders were arrested, killed, or deported with their families. The Soviet government also signed a population exchange agreement with Germany. Some Germans migrated to Germany under this agreement, and a small number of Ukrainians in the German zone went to Ukraine.
At the outbreak of Soviet-German hostilities in 1941, Germans from the Black Sea steppes were deported to the interior, especially Kazakhstan. During World War II, nearly all of Ukraine was occupied by invading German armies. Many Jews fled before the advancing German army; those who remained were almost completely exterminated. Of the approximately two million Jews who lived within the boundaries of modern Ukraine in 1939, it is estimated that 1.4 million were killed in the Holocaust. Hundreds of historic communities, especially in western Ukraine, were completely destroyed at the hands of the German invaders. Typical of the terrible loss is the fate of the Jewish community of Lviv, which numbered 109,500 in 1939. Of these, 97,000 were murdered in Lviv or sent to labor and death camps between March 1942 and January 1943. Of those deported, only about 150 individuals are believed to have survived. Synagogues perished along with the congregations. The gravestones of Lviv's Old Jewish Cemetery were uprooted and removed, never to be retrieved.
Reconquest of Ukraine brought another wave of deportations for disloyalty, real and imagined, to the Soviet regime. In the east, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, and Armenians were deported, and insurrection in western Ukraine resulted in massive deportation of Ukrainians after the war. The so-called voluntary exchange of population between Poland and Ukraine began the expulsion of Poles from Ukraine, and a small number of Jews, who had been Polish citizens before the war, chose to go to Poland as well.
Soviet Era, Post-Holocaust (1945-1990)
At the end of the Second World War, the boundaries of the Soviet Union and Ukraine were moved west to the line of Ukraine's present border. After the war, Jews returning to their homes were often met with hostility. The repression of Jewish cultural and spiritual life was severe. Kyiv became a center for anti-Semitic activity. The suppression of Jewish religious study and use of the Hebrew language continued, as well as a renewed wave of nationalization of Jewish communal property, the elimination through murder and deportation of the Jewish leadership, the closing of all schools using the Yiddish la nguage and, finally, a fervid anti-Zionist campaign. Many Jews, in the face of such organized repression, emigrated to Israel and the United States when able to do so.
As part of these policies, Jewish history in Ukraine was ignored and even denied. Jewish sites were neglected and even misidentified. Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was subsumed into the general outrages of the "Hitlerian War" or the "War Against Fascism" during which millions of Soviet citizens had died.
The first post-war census, in 1959, showed a far different ethnic composition than had been the case earlier in the century. Ukrainians now comprised 77 percent of the population of almost 42 million. Russians increased to 17 percent, Jews dropped to 2 percent, Poles to 1 percent, and other nationalities to 3 percent. Between 1959 and 1989, Ukraine's population grew annually at 0.6 percent, Ukrainians at 0.5 percent, and Russians at 9.1 percent, due to migration and assimilation. As the Soviet Union started disintegrating, additional changes occurred; Crimean Tatars were permitted to return, and Jews were allowed to emigrate. The two trends continued since independence.
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