The conflict in Ukraine has led to a Golden Age for Jews
Though some Jews are still leaving for Israel due to Putin's war and occupation, the conflict has resulted in a kind of renaissance for Ukrainian Jews.
I'm kind of shocked that the reality on the ground is the exact opposite of the Kremlin propaganda, pushed by RT and some useful fools on DU, about some kind of nightmare in Kiev.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-03-18/its-golden-age-jews-ukraine-so-why-are-they-still-leaving-droves
Fishman thinks this shift has at least something to do with the rise of Ihor Kolomoyski, a Jewish billionaire who was appointed the governor of Dnipropetrovsk, a city in central Ukraine, last year. Kolomoyski built a multimillion-dollar complex called the Menorah Center in his town. It's actually shaped like a menorah, and it includes a Holocaust museum, a kosher restaurant and a sort of reverse ATM that can only be used for donating to Jewish causes.
But Kolomoyski is also an outspoken Ukrainian patriot who’s kept Russian separatists out of Dnipropetrovsk.
“That has affected the image that Jews have in the eyes of Ukrainians,” Fishman says. “It also has to be said that the new government that’s come in has gone out of its way to make the right signals of being pro-Jewish.”
Those signals include Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, attending a commemoration ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Jews have also been appointed to some of the country’s highest positions; Vladimir Grossman, the new speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, is Jewish.
All this unprecedented solidarity seems to be a by-product of the conflict in Ukraine.
“What’s really emerging is a civic nationality. In other words, being Ukrainian isn’t about your ethnicity anymore, it’s about being a citizen of a country,” Fishman says. “Just like we feel comfortable saying, ‘I’m American. I’m Jewish, but I’m American,’ now there are people who can easily say, ‘I’m Jewish, but I’m Ukrainian.’ ”
But what do Jews actually living in Ukraine say about all this? I called up Igor Shchupak, head of the Dnepropetrovsk Museum of Jewish Memory and the Holocaust, and asked him if he sees it as some kind of golden age for Jews in Ukraine.
“Yes, absolutely,” he told me.
The Jewish Menorah Center in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, in October 2012, just after it opened. It's the world's biggest Jewish center.
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The big problem with the Nazis wasn't that they were anti-Jewish or anti-gay. It's that they were anti-Russian (or at least attacked Russia) and anti-Communist.
If it hurt Russia, the Nazis were down with it. That allowed the "Ukrainian nationalists", at least some, to fight with the Nazis. Before the Nazis went into Ukraine, these nationalists were fighting Russians (the USSR and Stalin). When the Nazis showed up, some continued to fight Russia as the Great Satan so to speak, others fought the Nazis. Some fought both. When the Red Army went through and regained the territory, the Ukrainian nationalists continued to fight the Russians.
With the nationalism went anti-Polish and anti-Jewish animosity. Many of the worst deeds were conducted, as far as anybody can prove, by German SS. In some cases there were groups of Ukrainians attached to them; what's hard to show is that the Ukrainians went out on raids with the Germans.
Another Ukrainian nationalist group went on their own anti-Polish raids. Note that the former imperial power, before the Russians, had been the Poles. Ukrainian itself still bears a Polish layer of vocabulary from the centuries of being part of the Polish empire. Jews were exported to Ukraine by Russia, which put them in the "Pale".
This is all very complex. In the Russian narrative, it boiled down to one thing and one thing only: Damn the Jews, damn the Poles, damn liberation, what mattered was that Ukrainians fought with Hitler against the mighty Red Army and Stalin. Since 1991 the "Red Army" and the "USSR" have been conflated with "Russian Army" and "Russia." There's little space between the two in the popular and media viewpoint these days.
Fascists are those who oppose Russia and Russians. Secondarily, they oppose the Communist Party. Which is why the Donbas folk have two big groups sending them money, arms, and fighters: The nationalists (Putin being one of them) and the Communists (who otherwise are a kind of opposition force in Russian politics).
There are a lot of "Nazis" fighting on the side of the pro-Russian group. For a simple reason. Putin considers Le Pen (in France) and many neo-Nazi groups to be allies. They're fighting for local nationalist movements. The result would be a disintegrated EU and dismembered NATO. Whatever the Russian nationalists think of the local nationalist movements in European countries, they'd be less of a problem than the EU and NATO. Some of the Russian fight in E. Ukraine is clearly anti-EU and, as many fighters have said, anti-NATO. And the European neo-Nazis (whether Scandinavian or German) fighting with the Russians find common cause against the EU. Which is strange, because a fair number of self-styled Communists are also fighting there (remember--nationalists and Communists support the fight against the "fascists", which word means, pretty much, anti-Russian and anti-Communist). The Communists also tend to hate the EU. And NATO.
It was a no-brainer for the Ukrainians to coin the word "russhist" or "rasshist", given that the Russian nationalists tend to chant "Rah-see-yah" (Rossiya, "Russia"
fairly often. Of course, this only makes sense of the Ukrainians using the words are Russian-speaking Ukrainian "fascists." Giving the lie to the idea that this is a language split. There's a bit of that, but not to the extent usually cited. There's no shortage of pro-Ukrainian news written by Russian-speakers in Russian for Russian-speakers. The difference is elsewhere.
