It all starts with the exceptions of the rule

The Jews of Ukraine or Ukrainian Jews? Former dissident and co-president of the Vaad of Ukraine, member of the Supervisory Board of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union Iosif Zisels – a civilizational choice and formation of a political nation.

– Joseph, a lot of talk lately about a new phenomenon – the birth of Ukrainian Jewry as a special form of identity of unknown a few years ago …

– All the Jewish communities of Europe passed a similar transformation. Including our closest neighbors, enough to read the article of the Polish-Jewish intellectual Konstanty Gebert, stresses that, despite all the vicissitudes of the general history of Polish Jews say about themselves: “We – the Poles.” According to him, democracy as a basic value, appreciate and Jews. “I’m not surprised that the Ukrainian Jews are mostly supported Ukrainian independence – says Gebert This phenomenon is repeated in Europe regularly Every time when some nations are independent, the Jews, as a rule, are on their way…”

In western Europe, the reform of Jewish identity began in the era of the Haskalah, when the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre in the Constituent Assembly proposed to equalize the rights of the Jews, because they are part of the French nation. He spoke of a nation in the European sense of the term – a political nation. It was then born the concept of the French law of Moses, the Germans of the Mosaic law, that is, Jewish identity takes on a new form – civil. Most European countries one way or another have come to such an understanding of the identity of the middle of the XIX century, the Russian Empire, that did not happen – it was moving along a path. I’m not talking about the lag phase, it’s just another path – within the framework of the Eurasian identity could not appear Russian and Ukrainian law of Moses.

– However, in Ukraine for centuries his name in the Eurasian paradigm, the process began …

– Yes, and it’s painfully long process – the formation of a political nation in the Western European sense. We all – originally from the Soviet Union, we all Soviet Jews, the main feature of which was the identification state anti-Semitism. We could not know Jewish history, tradition, language – to know nothing other than a couple of Jewish jokes, and, nevertheless, remain different. Precisely because of the state of anti-Semitism. How many of the nearly half million Ukrainian Jews were parishioners of one of the 14 active synagogues under the Soviets? Several hundred elderly. Therefore, Soviet Jews, and even “anti-Soviet Jews” like me, for example, come from the same “cradle”.

Then Ukraine became a sovereign state, and we started to get the Jews of Ukraine, while maintaining all the Soviet, but rather, Eurasian features – related to basic values, the role of government, religion, private property, etc. This civilizational values ​​that are absorbed with their mother’s milk, and do not change overnight, as the overnight Jews of Ukraine can not become Ukrainian Jews.

– Ukrainian National Democrats have long criticized the fact that in terms of cultural identity of Jews in Ukraine pro-Russian. While half of the country, including ethnic Ukrainians, belong to the same – the Russian-speaking – camp.

– It’s true, in another’s eye speck see, we do not notice the log in your … Jews living in Ukraine and are guided by the surrounding society.

– The more that the majority of the country’s Jews live exactly in the south-eastern regions.

– I would not connect to the civilizational choice place to stay – we are all Europeans and all the little little Eurasians – Ukrainians, Russian, and Jews. Just Russian Jews, who stood on the Maidan, made its civilizational choice in favor of Europe, but today many of these choices are at war. We go through the same path as that of the whole country – become Ukrainians in the political sense of the word – regardless of language, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. I stress that we are Ukrainian Jews, not because they are beginning to speak Ukrainian. I was in 1978 named in the party press “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist.” Apparently, even then I was a Ukrainian Jew, though he spoke in Ukrainian is much worse than it is now. Not in the language, and not in the religion business, and in civilizational choice. feature

And those of us who supported the Ukrainian choice not because of fashion or pragmatic reasons, but because (and this says Gebert) that prefer democracy – they are the Ukrainian Jews. Of course, the well known authoritarian leaders who sympathized with the Jews, such as Pilsudski. But when he died, Pilsudski, the Jews remembered how well they lived under Marshal – say, your grandfather died.

Yes, Jews have traditionally focused on power, we treat it loyally, sometimes entering into conflict with the aspirations of the people among whom we live. What to do – it is our history, our mentality. However, other Jews at all times defended democratic values ​​and participated in the national liberation movements, becoming part of one or another political nations.

– In our case, this process has become possible only after the Ukrainians themselves have changed their model for understanding the nation, rejecting ethnic nationalism, tailored on the patterns of the 1930s …

– It did not begin on the Maidan. I joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1978, become acquainted with a new generation of Ukrainian Nationalists, did not cave, otherwise I would not have joined them. Moses Fishbein poet in the 1980s worked in the Ukrainian service of Radio Liberty, as a Ukrainian nationalist …

– You’re talking about exceptions …

– It all starts with exceptions, and I was not the first. In the Polish uprising in 1794 involved not many Jews in the November Uprising 1830 there were more, and in 1863 – even more. When you can talk about the birth of Polish Jewry? Not in 1863, and at the end of the XVIII century. With Ukrainian Jews the same story. It’s a question of quality, not quantity. There are such people, and they are becoming more – Jews of Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa – this is not the Soviet Jews. Some of them are fighting in the Donbass, and they will go to the guerrilla groups, if will be in occupation.

It all starts with the exceptions in the 1970 Ukrainian Jews had very little, how little and Ukrainian national democrats, but the phenomenon has existed. Another thing is that the heroes of Ukraine, that is, the people who died for the independence of his people today, really, other. After Heavenly hundreds of pieces of Bandera and Shukhevych began to leave in the past.

Hundreds of children are dying today at the front – they are the new heroes of Ukraine and the new symbols of Ukrainian nationalism, although many of them do not even think that it is – Ukrainian nationalism.

– There are other forms of nationalism …

– And then there was all black, and now – not all white. And now there is an anti-Semite Levko Lukyanenko and 13 deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, which we identify as the right-wing radicals, among them two men with neo-Nazi backgrounds – Aleksandr Mosiychuk and Dmitry Linko. I am convinced that the coalition does not include these characters, and I will fight for it as well as fighting for something that the leader of the Social-National Assembly Andrey Biletsky did not go to the deputies of the People’s Front list.

– Do not you think that this new identity is largely built on the denial, on confrontation with Russia. But aggression, sooner or later will end, and what remains?

– How to start identity? No one knows. But we know, for example, what happened in the 2012 elections, and why 10% voted for the radicals of the VO “Svoboda”. Not because they are right-wing radicals, it was a protest vote against Yanukovych. In any identity combined various factors – both “for” and “against.” I became the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist” (with all the conventions of this definition) in 1978, because it was sympathetic to the National Democrats and the Communists did not like – it brought me to the dissident movement. Religious Zionists in Israel – against the creation of a Palestinian state and the expansion of the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria – the series goes on.

Of course, in the absence of an external threat could start natural fragmentation of society, but it has never been united. In the meantime, the process of formation of the Ukrainian political nation and Ukrainian Jewry, as one of its components. The process itself testifies to the fact that Ukraine still Europeanized, Eurasian identity is arranged differently. The activity of the country is in Europe, the greater the Ukrainian Jews. And it’s not in the formal membership in the EU, it is important that the feeling of the people, their mentality, their identities were European – this is a very long process, but it has already started …

Interviewed by Maxim Sukhanov

Sourse, 18/05/2015