Honoring the Murderers of Jews in Ukraine

In the chaos following the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, a group of Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas calling themselves the Poliska Sich seized control of a small area surrounding the town of Olevsk. Their goal was to resist the Soviets, a goal often pursued by carrying out brutal pogroms against Jews. Later, the guerrillas helped the Nazis in implementing the final solution. Now their leader, Taras Bulba-Borovets, is being honored by both local authorities and the national government, eager for a past of patriotic Ukrainian resistance against Russian rule. Jared McBride writes:

Bulba-Borovets ruled [the town of] Olevsk and its environs during the early months of the German-Soviet war, while Germans were thin on the ground in this remote location. It was only after the pogrom violence and further abuse of Jews at the hands of the Poliska Sich that the Germans took over Olevsk in September 1941 and established a ghetto. The Sich then patrolled the ghetto and later provided the Germans with manpower to liquidate the Jewish population. . . .

The memory of Bulba-Borovets and his Sich has figured prominently in Olevsk and regional politics over the past five years. In the [nearby] city of Rivne there are plans to build a new monument for Bulba-Borovets—not to mention this summer’s bike race named after the Sich. Olevsk itself has more plans, including: naming a park after the [short-lived self-styled] “Olevsk Republic” or Bulba-Borovets [himself], naming a square after Bulba-Borovets, and creating an exposition about the Sich in a local museum (with plans to build a separate museum in the future). . . . Moreover, the Sich force has caught the interest of the Ukrainian parliament. . . . This past April it passed a resolution to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Poliska Sich.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Politics & Current Affairs, Ukraine, Ukrainian Jews

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society