For Jews, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is Especially Traumatic

Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of the free, sovereign state of Ukraine is causing untold suffering within Ukraine itself and provoking pangs of fear and dread amongst worried watchers around the world. Democratic nations in Eastern Europe—especially those bordering Russia—have been compelled to escalate their military preparedness as they watch the Russian strongman’s rampage extend from Georgia in 2008 to Crimea in 2014 and now to Ukraine in 2022. The invasion has already caused the deaths of nearly 900 civilians and the displacements of over three million Ukrainians. Those who are concerned with the rights of journalists and with the importance of maintaining a free, independent press; those concerned with the importance of ensuring private citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly (over 13,000 anti-war protestors have thus far been arrested in Russia); those concerned with the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals (Putin’s Russia does not exactly have the strongest record of support for gay rights); those concerned with freedom of religion (Putin has persecuted Jehovah’s Witnesses, among other groups, according to Amnesty International); and those concerned with human lives (there is evidence of Russian war crimes in Syria, and the International Criminal Court is already set to open investigation into Russian war crimes in Ukraine) all have great cause to worry about what Russia’s invasion—and potential conquest and occupation of—Ukraine could bode for these causes and for these groups of vulnerable individuals.

Also amongst those with much reason to worry about Russia’s campaign in Ukraine are Jews. An estimated 200,000 Jews currently live in Ukraine—it is one of the largest and oldest Jewish communities in Europe, with a history stretching back to the Kievan Rus era one thousand years ago. It is also one of the most targeted and tormented Jewish communities in European history. During the Cossack peasant uprisings of 1648-49, an estimated 100,000 Jews were slaughtered and many more uprooted from their homes and turned into refugees. Cossack pogroms in the early twentieth century killed thousands of Jews. (One such pogrom, surrounding a 1905 blood libel in Kiev when Ukraine was still under the rule of the Russian Empire, inspired Bernard Malamud’s 1966 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Fixer.) An estimated 31,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War which followed it. The nadir of the Jewish experience in Ukraine was reached during the Second World War, when the German invasion of Ukraine led to the deaths of over one million Ukrainian Jews, most of them murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, a special command unit of the S.S. that accompanied the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa and which was charged specifically with the task of implementing the final solution upon Eastern Europe’s Jews.

While there is little indication that Vladimir Putin is overtly anti-Semitic in either his personal or political life, several current Russian governmental officials—including senior members of his United Russia party—have made anti-Semitic statements, and Ukrainian Jews are bracing for anti-Semitic provocations during (or as a result of) the war with Russia. One such fear that Jews have, both within and without Ukraine, is that of being blamed for the very war itself. One of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in history is that Jews, regardless of how much influence they may actually have in a state’s affairs, are somehow responsible for leading their countries into war. Anti-Semites blamed Jewish financiers for leading the United States into a war in Europe in 1917; Charles Lindbergh and the America First party accused Jews of trying to persuade the Roosevelt administration to take the United States into war in 1941; and in the early 2000s the Jewish Bush administration officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith were accused of taking the United States to war with Iraq. (Never mind that Wolfowitz and Feith were the deputy and undersecretaries of defense, respectively—both subordinate to the true architects of the Iraq war, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, neither of whom were Jewish.) Most recently a Chilean-American economic analyst living in Ukraine suggested on his 300,000-subscriber YouTube channel that one of the primary forces behind the United States’ opposition to Russian aggression are the Jews. The best-case scenario is that such old-fashioned anti-Semitic rhetoric remains just that; the worst-case scenario is that the revivification of these tropes provokes outright violence against Ukraine’s Jews.

Whenever war breaks out in Ukraine, history says that Jews will suffer particularly grievously during the conflict. Vladimir Putin may be no Adolf Hitler, but the last time Ukraine was invaded by a European dictator with ambitions of reconstituting his nation’s former glory by means of brute military force, Ukraine went from being home to nearly 3 million Jews to a giant Jewish graveyard almost overnight. This invasion of Ukraine, taking place within living memory of the last one, is resuscitating many of these old (yet still quite modern) traumas and reawakening the memories of these historical and even more recent terrors. (Just google “Babi Yar”; even if you’re not Jewish, you will have nightmares for weeks.) Because of the numerous, unimaginable horrors that Ukrainian Jews have experienced in the past thousand years, it would not be farfetched to hear them this week paraphrasing a line from Fiddler on the Roof (the iconic Broadway play based on the stories of Ukrainian Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem): “May God bless and keep Putin…far away from us.”

Real prayers—in addition to humanitarian relief and monetary aid—are in order from people of all backgrounds this week for the people of Ukraine. A particularly appropriate prayer to recite this week is a prayer for peace composed by Rabbi Natan of Ukraine (1780-1844), a disciple of the great Ukrainian Hasidic spiritual master Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “May it be Your will, our God and the God of our forefathers, that you wipe out war and bloodshed from the world, and extend peace—mighty and wondrous—throughout the world, so that no nation shall take up arms against another nation and neither shall they learn war anymore. May all inhabitants of earth learn and understand the greatest of truths: that we have not come into this world to sow strife and make war; neither have we come into this world to spread hatred, jealously, discord, or violence; we have come into this world only to sow goodwill and make peace. May we live to see the day when the words of Scripture shall be fulfilled: ‘And I shall establish peace in the world, and you shall lie down without fear; I will eradicate all violence from upon the face of the earth, and the sword shall never more pass through your lands.’ And let us say ‘Amen’.”

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