back to Kiev
Bill Mandel writes in his autobiography:
"After dinner that night, a campfire was built and a discussion conducted by the head of the Ukrainian Peace Committee. His purpose was to inform us about the Ukraine. I asked in what languages school was taught. He said Ukrainian, Russian, German, Hungarian for those minorities. I asked about Yiddish. He replied that Jews could learn Yiddish in their synagogues.
"Obviously his answer was a shot in the dark, because the language of the synagogue is Hebrew. It has less relationship to the folk language, Yiddish, than Latin has even to such Latin-derived languages of Catholic countries as Italian, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Synagogues, whether in the United States, Israel, or anywhere else, rarely teach Yiddish, except for congregations of the Hassidic sect. Hebrew is related to Arabic, while Yiddish grew out of medieval German.
"Moreover, the speaker was from Kyiv, with a large Jewish population active in all spheres of life. Therefore, he had to know that Soviet Jews were secular. American rabbis learned that to their surprise when they tried to get the hundred thousand recent immigrants from the former USSR to attend synagogue.
"I was furious at the man and announced that I would conduct a discussion group on the status of Jews in the Soviet Union. About forty people came, about evenly Soviet and American. Perhaps half a dozen were Jews. A Russian woman from Siberia said that in her area Russian and indigenous people had simply, on their own, organized classes to teach the local language, Altai. Why didn't the Jews do likewise? At least half a dozen other Soviet walkers endorsed that approach. A Ukrainian young man from Lviv, which my parents' generation knew as Lemberg, offered to help such an endeavor in his city. I gave him the addresses of three prominent Jewish intellectuals I knew in Lviv. A year later he sent me a news clipping announcing the establishment of a Jewish cultural society there.
"In Kyiv we visited Babi Yar, a ravine where the Nazis slaughtered a hundred thousand human beings, mostly Jews, and then filled it in. When we Jews among the walkers -- I had my arms around a Soviet woman three of whose immediate family lay somewhere beneath us -- broke into uncontrollable weeping, the Ukrainian walkers sobbed from the bottom of their guts. It was then that I distributed my article, 'Reopening Jewish Wounds'."
`"In 1989 I attended a Yiddish-language theater in Kyiv that had been founded during the intervening year, as had Jewish cultural societies in twenty-five cities in what was still the USSR. The founding convention that year of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, RUKH, passed a resolution attacking anti-Semitism. It spoke specifically of 'fascist genocide' against the Jews during World War II. It appealed to 'all socially-conscious citizens of the Ukraine, members of all nations and peoples living on its territory, to raise their voices against any forms of anti-Semitism whatever, to rise in defense of their own dignity and that of the Jewish people, its culture, learning, religion, right to representation in all elected bodies, and its inalienable right to speak, create, and teach its children in either the Yiddish or Hebrew languages.'
"I had reason to accept the sincerity of that statement that reached beyond the behavior of the Soviet walk participants at Babi Yar and at my spontaneous seminar. On the 1989 Walk, before reaching Kyiv, we passed through the typical county seat of Medzhibozh, burial site of Bal Shem Tov, the founder of the Jewish sect of Hasidism. Since the Holocaust forty-five years, almost no Jews lived there. Yet the Ukrainian country people living near the overgrown cemetery who came to watch us as we visited it showed very respectful attitudes towards Jews as a people who had long been part of their history."