The Holocaust by bullets, shootings in Ukraine - M Holocaust Memorial

Jews in Ukraine

On the eve of the 20th century, the vast majority of the 5,400,000 Jews in the Russian Empire were confined to a region known as the “Residence Zone” (essentially Ukraine but also Belarus, Lithuania and part of Poland). This is where, according to the expression of the writer Vasily Grossman, was the body of the Jewish people...

These populations spoke Russian, German, Polish and especially Yiddish. They were united by the same culture, even though many of their members had turned away from religion to engage in political and social struggle.

Despite the changes in sovereignty, Jews felt more like they belonged to a region, city or shtetel than to a country.

The consequences of World War I (non-Soviet Ukraine).

At the end of the First World War, the disappearance of the central powers (German Reich, Austria-Hungary) and the upheavals resulting from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia led to the dislocation of Ukraine, bursting

its territory and its populations, particularly Jewish, between the different countries resulting from the peace treaties. Jews experienced different situations (depending on the political circumstances and territories in which they were implanted).

If the brief People’s Republic of Ukraine (January 1918-November 1920) gave the right to the Jewish community to manage its religious, cultural and educational institutions, pogroms were nevertheless perpetrated, in which all national and political forces participated. The situation was not better in the Ukrainian regions attached to Poland, where the situation of the Jews began

to deteriorate from 1926 (year of the coup d'état of S. Pilsudski): boycotts of companies and shops, unofficial quota system in schools...

In Romania, the rise of anti-Semitism and the growing influence of racist and totalitarian theories resulted in the formation of far-right nationalist movements in Romania and the fascisation of Ukrainian independence parties.

In contrast, the Jewish population of Transcarpathian Ukraine attached to Czechoslovakia lived a peaceful existence between the two wars. Following the Munich crisis in 1938, the region was finally annexed by Hungary. The Jews then began to be the object of a policy of discrimination and persecution.

Soviet Ukraine before the Holocaust

During the first years of the establishment of the Soviet regime, the main decisions suggested that the Jews had finally found a homeland in the USSR and especially in Soviet Ukraine. However, the years 1920-1930 were marked, in the economic and public life fields, by a terrible disillusion and by a succession of measures which announced the disintegration of the Jewish world. It is only in the field of culture that the years 1920-1930 corresponded to a golden age. Raised to the status of official language, Yiddish developed on a large scale: use in some regions by administrations, teaching in Yiddish in state schools, proliferation of newspapers, magazines, theatres and concert halls.

The year 1939

In 1939, the Jewish population in Ukraine was estimated at 2,500,000 (5 million in the USSR). That same year, the USSR annexed eastern Poland in application of the German-Soviet pact, then, in June 1940, northern Bukovina. Nearly 300,000 Jews, fleeing the western territories of Poland annexed by Germany tried to find refuge in the USSR. Considered as "activists", the refugees were sent by thousands to prisons or labor camps. Nevertheless, they were able to escape the fate of 3 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis on Soviet territory...

Buczacz-Buchach-Bukach (Galicia): birthplace of Simon Wiesenthal. The market square.
© CDJC/Shoah Memorial Coll.

Stanislawow, Stanislau, Stanislav (Galicia). On the sign is written in Hebrew and Polish: Jewish farm. Sale of vegetables every day. © USHMM, courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archives

Kolomyja-Kolomyya-Kolomea in Galicia (1935). The inscriptions on the signs of the shops are in German, Ukrainian, and in Polish in Yiddish. © Coll. USHMM, courtesy of Sueddeutscher verlag Bilderdienst

Jews from the region of Mukachevo (Mukatch), Carpathian Ruthenia. The legend in Czech indicates: father leading his son to the synagogue. © Coll. CDJC/Shoah Memorial