As Russian troops gather at the Ukrainian border, Jewish immigrants who fled Soviet Ukraine are speaking out against Vladimir Putin. Even the Russian-speaking Jews who oppose Russian aggression, however, do not necessarily feel solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Raina Weinstein notes that the present moment has served as a reckoning for some, who recall the reasons they fled.
As emigres from the Ukrainian SSR, these refugees never lived in an independent Ukrainian state. Under Soviet rule, their passports identified their nationality as “Jewish”—rather than Ukrainian—unlike their non-Jewish neighbors, who were not subject to the anti-Semitic discrimination of the Soviet regime.
The distinction between Jewish and Ukrainian still plays a role in the self-conception of Ukrainian-born Jews. Many members of this community do not identify as Ukrainian but express political support for Ukraine against Russia and President Putin.
Irina Rakhlis, a Manhattan Beach resident, was born in Kyiv but does not identify as Ukrainian. She describes herself as a “Russian-speaking Jew,” whose upbringing in Kyiv was more culturally Soviet than Ukrainian. In Kyiv, Ms. Rakhlis studied Ukrainian as a second language in school. She recalls that her Ukrainian teacher discriminated against Jewish students.
Her grandparents told her stories of pogroms in their childhood shtetls—often carried out by popular Ukrainian figures. “I remember my parents saying, ‘it’s a Ukrainian hero, but it’s really a person who slaughtered Jews,’” she says.
Read more on New York Sun: https://www.nysun.com/foreign/united-against-putin-ex-soviet-jews-in-brooklyn/