“Convinced that in the free Ukraine… rights are respected”: Ministry for Jewish Affairs and Constructing Homeland, 1917-1920

• In Event: Eastern European Jewish Politics and Spaces Between the World Wars

Abstract

The February Revolution of 1917 brought hopes of new beginnings in the destinies of Jews and Ukrainians. Within the framework of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the independence of which was proclaimed in early 1918, Ukrainian Jews got an opportunity to experiment with their national demands and access to political representation in the Diaspora through national-personal autonomy. Yiddish became one of the state languages, and the Ministry for Jewish Affairs was established. With these transformations, however, the Jewish political parties were concerned with the fragmentation of the former Russian Empire’s Jewry as Jews residing within the Ukrainian government-controlled territory had to position themselves vis-à-vis this new version of their homeland that replaced the Russian Empire. My paper argues that though this did not imply unanimous Jewish support for the new republic, encounters reflected in the documentation and letters of the Ministry for Jewish Affairs indicate that Ukraine’s Jews attempted to embrace, whether sincerely or tactically, the concept of a free and sovereign Ukraine, as put forward by the Ukrainian national movement, and deployed it for various purposes, such as articulating financial (requesting funds/compensation) or legal (voting rights) demands.
The paper is based on the archival collection of the Ministry for Jewish Affairs at the National Library of Israel and the published Yiddish-language accounts of the Jewish ministers in the Ukrainian government (Moses Zilberfarb’s THE JEWISH MINISTRY AND JEWISH NATIONAL AUTONOMY IN UKRAINE (1919) and Abraham Revu(t)sky’s WRENCHING TIMES IN UKRAINE: MEMOIR OF A JEWISH MINISTER (1924)) as well as the Ministry’s Director of the Department of Community Administration Elijah Gumener’s A UKRAINIAN CHAPTER: TWO YEARS IN PODOLIA (1921). Scholarship on Ukrainian-Jewish relations in 1917-1920 has largely focused on anti-Jewish violence (as in Jeffrey Veidlinger’s as well as Elissa Bemporad’s recent work). However, in asking how in the midst of pogroms Jews interacted with political authority and participated in a state-building project, my paper builds on Henry Abramson’s work but examines closely the Ministry’s activities, to shed light on the ways Jews participated in constructing homeland.

Author

• Olga Petrova, Central European University, Department of History