CHANUKAH 5783 SECTION D PAGE 14
By Jacob Judah
LVIV, Ukraine — Three rabbis sat around a breakfast table in this city’s Tsori Gilod Synagogue, discussing Russia’s war in a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. They named their hometowns as Lugansk, Lvov and Dnepropetrovsk, the Russian names for Ukrainian cities that have vaulted into international headlines since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
A bookshelf at Medzhybizh with texts in both Hebrew and Russian. (Jacob Judah)
Although they were focused on Ukraine’s progress in the fighting, the rabbis uttered not one word in Ukrainian.
How could they? Like the vast majority of Jews in Ukraine, none of them speaks the country’s official language.
Russian has long been the first language for a wide swath of Ukrainians, including the majority of the country’s Jews.
But after the Russian invasion, many Ukrainians decided they wanted to speak less Russian and more Ukrainian.
Many Jews, similarly horrified by the sight of thousands of Russian soldiers pouring over Ukraine’s borders and wishing to demonstrate their Ukrainian bonafides, have made the same choice — even as it means disrupting a long linguistic tradition.
So when these rabbis’ successors meet for pancakes and sour cream, they will be far more likely to introduce themselves as the rabbis of Luhansk, Lviv and Dnipro, the Ukrainian names for their hometowns that have become the standard in English transliteration.
They will also likely be able to hand their students and congregants Ukrainian-language versions of central Jewish texts that do not exist now.
“Many of my friends say that they are embarrassed to use Russian as a language. They say that we are Ukrainian Jews, and that Russia is a terrorist country fighting us and that we shouldn’t use their language,” says Rabbi Meir Stambler, from Dnipro. “Others say that Putin doesn’t own the Russian language. It is an issue. This is something that people are discussing all the time.”
A decade ago, half of Ukrainians said they spoke Russian as their native language. That number has declined to 20%, fueled in part by resentment over Russia’s aggressions in Crimea, a contested region that it annexed by force in 2014.
But Jews remained predominantly Russian-speaking, even in parts of western Ukraine where Ukrainian has long been the dominant language. (Russian and Ukrainian are related linguistically, but their speakers cannot understand each other.)
Russia’s war on Ukraine has Ukrainian Jews playing catchup.
Stambler, who heads the Federation of Jewish Communities, affiliated with Chabad, opearting 36 synagogues around Ukraine, offers a stark prediction: “Within 10 years, every Jew in Ukraine will speak Ukrainian.”
The dominance of Russian among Ukraine’s Jews, who numbered in the tens of thousands before the war, has deep roots.
“The historical trajectory of Jews in what is now Ukraine led them in the 19th century to adopt Russian rather than Ukrainian,” says historian Natan Meir, a professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University.
“That was because Ukrainian was perceived as a peasant language that did not have any high culture associated with it, and because there were no economic advantages to adopting Ukrainian at the time.”
Now, the upside of switching to Ukrainian — demonstrating national allegiance in a time of war — couldn’t be clearer.
“Jews feel quite integrated into Ukrainian society, but a shift, even if it is a gradual shift, to Ukrainian is going to make that more tangible than ever,” Meir says.
“Ukrainian Jews will be perceived even more strongly than they have been as being wholly Ukrainian, part of the fabric of Ukrainian society.”
Most Ukrainian Jews, especially those educated since the collapse of the Soviet Union, can now speak some Ukrainian. Their ability often depends on where they grew up. Many Jews in traditionally Russophone cities such as Odessa, Dnipro or Kharkiv struggle with the language, while their grandparents often cannot speak it at all.
“Not more than 20% were Ukrainian-speaking at home,” says Stambler. “Take President Zelensky. He knew Ukrainian, but he didn’t speak it at home, and he had to polish it up when he became president.”
It will not be simple for the Jewish community to switch to Ukrainian without a standardized translation of the Torah.
Two years ago, a team of translators working in Israel, Austria and Hungary began to produce Ukrainian-language Jewish texts. But before the Russian invasion, the effort produced only a Ukrainian book of psalms, or Tehillim.
In May, two months into the war, a decision was made to accelerate work on a daily prayer book. A Torah or chumash could follow.
“The chumash is difficult,” says Stambler, who oversees the half-dozen-strong team of translators from his base in Dnipro. “We are working on it.”
While translating sacred texts can take years, other changes have come faster. The Russian leaflets, brochures and calendars that are a fixture at any Jewish center in Ukraine were quickly swapped out for Ukrainian, at least at the federation’s headquarters.
“This differentiation from Russian Jewry is going to be huge,” says Meir, the historian. “Up until this point they have essentially formed one linguistic and cultural space that all Jews, whether they were in Ukraine, Russia or Belarus could move freely between.”
Now, the ties between those communities are both logistically complicated — trade routes have been ruptured — and potentially a liability at a time when anyone in either Russia or Ukraine showing an affinity for the other country can face suspicion or penalties.
“This shift, if it actually happens, is going to be marking out a totally new cultural space for Ukrainian Jews and almost a declaration of independence,” Meir says “Or at least that is the aspiration, because there is so much of their heritage which is still based in the Russian language that it is going to be a long time before they can fully separate.”
That separation process, which began to take shape most clearly after 2014, has quickened.
“Says Stambler, “We used to do about 20% in Ukrainian for the Jews in western towns like Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod, but we are making a much stronger push now.”
He estimates that some 75% of material being distributed to Ukrainian Jewish communities by the Federation of Jewish Communities was in Ukrainian by September, up from 20% to 35% in January.
Young rabbis who come from the US or Israel to serve small Jewish communities across Ukraine now say that they have had to add Ukrainian alongside their Russian classes.
Says one Ukrainian, “I had to learn Ukrainian because I needed it on the street. I needed it to speak with the government and with the media.”
Some Ukrainian Jews are voting with their voices. “My whole life, I spoke only Russian,” said Olha Peresunko, who before the war lived in Mikolaiv in southern Ukraine. “But after the 24th of February I am speaking only Ukrainian.”
Peresunko was speaking outside a Lviv synagogue this fall, where she and other refugees were waiting for food parcels. She had fled Mikolaiv, which has sustained repeated assault by Russian troops, for Lviv with her mother and two children while her husband is on the frontlines.
Her children are finding it hard to adjust to the exclusive Ukrainian environment in Lviv, but she is confident that they will make the shift.
Exactly how much the shift to Ukrainian will change local Jewish communities is a matter of debate. Rabbi Shalom Gopin, who fled to Kiev in 2014 from his home community in Luhansk, a Russophone city seized by Russia-backed separatists at that time, said he, too, believes that Ukrainian will displace Russian as the lingua franca of Ukrainian Jewry.
“They are starting to slowly speak Ukrainian,” he says. “We live here, and we speak the languages of the places that we live. It is normal.”
But Gopin says the linguistic shift “means nothing” amid other issues facing Jews in Ukraine, where Russia’s war is threatening to undo 30 years of Jewish community building.
“The problem for the Jews of Ukraine is not language,” he says. “It is about how much they are going to synagogue, or how many children are going to Jewish schools, not about what they are speaking.”
Natalia Kozachuk, 45, a Jewish businesswoman in Lviv, sees only upside to shedding Russian, her native language. She has started to speak to her children only in Ukrainian.
“This is the only way that Jews can truly learn more about the Ukrainian people,” she says, “about their history and the positive qualities and strengths of Ukraine.”
“Only good can come of it,” she added. “We will understand each other better.”
