Behind the Headlines: for Ukraine’s Multitude of Jews, a Singular Question: to Stay or Go?

For the Jewish community of Ukraine, one of the world’s largest, the future looms like an ominous question mark. The dreams, desires, anxieties and uncertainties can be reduced to a single query: To stay or to go?

Emigration to Israel is accelerating so rapidly that Ukraine now has the fastest-growing emigration rates in the former Soviet Union, according to officials with the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Yet at the same time, Jewish life is beginning to flourish, with schools, camps, Yiddish clubs, newspapers, cultural groups and religious organizations expanding by leaps and bounds.

Not surprisingly, planning ahead is difficult, especially in an unclear political situation.

“I have no sense of what’s going to happen,” said Rabbi Ya’akov Bleich, the chief rabbi of Ukraine’s approximately 500,000 Jews. “I don’t think everyone is going to move out in the next three or five years, but then again, I wouldn’t advise building a new synagogue.”

“The more people go, the more people come. This is our paradox,” said Kira Verkhovskaya, a Jewish leader from Odessa, referring to the simultaneous trends of emigration and new affiliation with the Jewish community.

For those boarding planes to Tel Aviv, financial problems appear to be a primary motivation. While average wages are stuck at about $20 a month, consumer items like clothing and appliances cost about the same as they do in the West. Industrial production is plummeting, market reform is only hiccuping along and hyperinflation means that Ukraine’s currency, the coupon, now runs at more than 45,000 to the dollar.

“For the most part, Jews are leaving for economic reasons,” according to Zvi Rom, who oversees the Jewish Agency office in Kiev.

NOT ALIVAH, BUT REPATRIATION

“It’s not really aliyah, it’s repatriation, because it’s not for ideological reasons,” he said. “As an Israeli, I would like to see Jews leave Ukraine because they have come to the conclusion that Jews should live in Israel, but that is not what is happening.”

Still, a growing proportion of Ukrainian Jews have decided to move to Israel after attending the new Sunday schools for adults and sending their children to Jewish day schools.

Others are leaving to be with loved ones. Nearly every member of the Jewish community here has close friends or relatives living in Israel who are urging them to make the move.

Another push is anti-Semitism. While the new president, Leonid Kuchma, is following the friendly policies toward Jews that have become the norm since independence, the country’s sputtering economy is straining his staying power.

But Jew-hating has not disappeared. Interviewed at a Jewish summer camp in Odessa, Igor Bloch, 16, recalled a recent performance of the Jewish theater group he belongs to in the eastern Ukrainian city of Makeyevka.

“Some people cried out, “Avram, go away to Israel’ and other things I don’t want to say,” Bloch said. “Our leader said, ‘Don’t worry, we will go!'”

The number of Ukrainian Jews choosing Israel is constantly increasing. While emigration statistics are dropping slightly in Russia, where the economic and political mayhem has stabilized somewhat, Ukrainian emigration has nearly doubled in the past year, from 1,300 to 2,300 each month, according to Chaim Chesler, who oversees the Jewish Agency in the former Soviet Union.

Despite the many departures, Jewish life continues its vigorous revival in the land that produced Chasidic Judaism, populist Zionism and dozens of gifted Yiddish writers before the dark years of Soviet repression.

Today Ukraine has not one, but two umbrella Jewish organizations.

Kiev, the capital city, is home to three religious congregations and a welfare society serving 6,000 poor and elderly Jews. Active communities also exist in Odessa, Kharkov and dozens of smaller cities and towns.

“Ukraine has a very lively Jewish community,” Rabbi Bleich said. “The Jews here are more connected to their Judaism than those in Russia because it wasn’t long ago they lived in shtetls. They have an emotional connection, while in Russia, people’s relationship with Judaism is more philosophical.”

‘THERE IS A FUTURE HERE’

Arkady Monastirski, 33, the vice president of the Jewish Council of Ukraine, calls himself an optimist when it comes to a Jewish future here.

“People are working with us, helping us,” he said. “Some people say Jews are history, their problems are old problems.” he said. “These people don’t understand.”

One of the organizations providing assistance to Jews here is the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which has offices in Kiev and Odessa.

“There is a future here, if only because there will be hundreds and thousands of Jews here for the next five or 10 years, barring any unforeseen catastrophe,” according to Charles Hoffman, a former journalist who oversees the JDC office in Kiev.

“There is no reason why they should be deprived of the basic means and facilities to redevelop a Jewish life for themselves,” he said.

Those who remain and redevelop this Jewish life must grapple with the country’s troubled past, which includes the Chmielnitsky massacres of Jews in 1648, the Petlyura pogroms of 1919 and 1920 and Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were shot and buried in September 1941.

“In Ukraine, anti-Semitism is a tradition; negative views of the Jewish people have been passed down from generation to generation,” said Monastirski of the Jewish Council.

“But now many Ukrainians have married Jews and their children are now half-Jews,” he said, adding that such intermarriage can serve as a basis for reconciliation.

Zinaida Fourmanova, a screenwriter in Kiev who recently completed a film examining the myths about the relationship between Ukrainians and Jews, believes that while Jewish history in Ukraine “has been very difficult, very tragic,” the Jewish connection here is “still very deep.”