[MUSIC PLAYING]

[DESCRIPTION] Touro Talks intro displaying photos of students and faculty across the university, fading into the Touro University logo.

[TEXT] Touro Talks, You Were Strangers: Refugees in Jewish History, April 6, 2022. Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg.

[DESCRIPTION] Henry Abramson speaks to the camera, with a Touro University logo background.

[HENRY ABRAMSON] I have to say that I put a lot of energy into this presentation, primarily because my main area of specialization is history. I'm much more comfortable dealing with things that have already happened, that are firmly located in the past. But over the past six weeks, it has been impossible for me to concentrate on the past because I keep being drawn into the future and into, unfortunately, the present, which is so terrible in Ukraine.

So my goal for today is to speak about Passover and speak specifically about the refugee experience connected specifically to Ukraine. This talk may be a little bit more personal than most of my talks, for reasons which I hope to make clear shortly. But it's one that I feel very strongly about.

[DESCRIPTION] Henry Abramson is sharing his screen while speaking. He reads the text on the screen while presenting.

[HENRY ABRAMSON] So let me begin by looking at something from the tradition. I was asked to say something relevant to the holiday of Passover. And of course, this holiday commemorates the Exodus, the departure of the Jews from Egyptian servitude.

And one of the concepts that is repeated so many times in Jewish thought-- it is noted no less than 36 times in the Bible, according to some counts, far more than 36 times-- but basically a demand that the Jews recognize the suffering of the stranger.

Here's just one example of the many verses that underline that particular concept. Let me read it in Hebrew, and then we'll look at it in English.

[SPEAKING HEBREW]

"You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt."

Now, the term for stranger that's used here has multiple meanings. It is related to the word [HEBREW], which means "to dwell or reside." And sometimes this term is used to refer to, as it implies here, a stranger, a foreigner. It sometimes is used to refer to someone who has become Jewish, who has converted to Judaism. Sometimes it's referring to a resident alien. And depending on the context, that's a different translation that will be used by the commentators.

But if we look at this one very important commentator, very popular-- Pele Yoetz, who was Rabbi Eliezer Papo, who wrote in the 19th century-- and he clarifies that for him, this commandment says, "we are not speaking about a convert to Judaism. The verse refers to a person in a foreign land without friend, sibling or acquaintance, whose spirit is low and whose heart is broken and crushed. One must have mercy and draw this person close, be a friend and a neighbor, and provide as much support as you can. In this way one fulfills the commandment."

So obviously, in the context of the Passover Seder, as Jews around the world will gather with their families and contemplate the meaning of freedom and the meaning of displacement and hopefully identify with the displacement of others, that is, according to Rabbi Papo of the Pele Yoetz, how they will fulfill this commandment.

Now, when we look at it in our specific moment, we're not talking just about Jewish refugees, of which there are many from Ukraine. There are a lot of different counts of how many Jews live there. A conservative count says there are about 40,000 Jews who self-identify as such.

There are about 90,000 Jews in Ukraine who are not necessarily connected to that core population but nevertheless are, if you were to ask them, they would then see that they would say that they are, in fact, Jewish. And maybe as many as 200,000 people who are on the fringes of the Jewish community, perhaps with partial Jewish lineage or married to Jews. But we're talking about a very large number of Jews.

But the main issue, of course, is not the Jewish refugees but a far larger group of Ukrainian refugees. This is actually one of the most colossal refugee crises in history. You have a look, for example, at this report that just came out recently from the United Nations Report on Migration. There are about, as of April 1, 7 million who are internally displaced within Ukraine, meaning they have not left their country. They have left their homes for other regions of Ukraine, particularly towards the west, where there is less shelling and less danger.

And there are 11 million who are total displaced, which means they've actually left the country. That means there are about 4.1 million Ukrainians. Roughly one quarter of the entire population of the country is now out of its boundaries because of the fear of the war. It's an absolutely mind-boggling number.

If we try to put that number into some context, we should really think about what William Faulkner said in 1951 when he said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Meaning people like to say that history repeats itself. Some people work with another quotation that it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. But we are still living in an extended 20th century of egregious refugee crises.

For example, let's just think about what this means in the context. The estimated number of international refugees after six years of World War II was 40 million. That's a conservative estimate. Liberal estimates go all the way up to 60 million.

Ukrainian refugees have reached 4 million after only six weeks, an absolutely stunning number of people displaced. Tremendous human suffering as a result. This is the eighth largest refugee crisis in recorded history, and, unfortunately, the third largest in the 21st century.

And if we look at these numbers in one other way, look at the scope and speed of it, if you were to calculate the number of refugees per the month of conflict, we're just six weeks into this war. And you can see that Ukrainian refugees are off the charts. Far more refugees displaced in a far shorter period of time than even in World War II or the partition of India, which was also a tremendous crisis in 1947. So we are dealing with a colossal crisis that boggles the mind and demands a response.

Now, what I would like to do over the next 40 minutes is to talk a little bit about the specifically Jewish aspect of the experience of Ukraine and to understand a little bit about what that might mean for Jewish responsibility to fulfill that commandment or how Jews might fulfill that commandment of considering the stranger.

But I want to get personal for a few minutes and just tell you a little bit about my own connection to Ukraine because I think it's relevant for giving you a sense of how strongly I feel about this. This is a photograph of my father's parents, my grandparents, Polly and Alex Abramson. It's dated circa 1932. They lived in Northern Ontario, Canada.

This quirky individual at the bottom here is my father. And one of the things that my father always used to tell me about his childhood is that he grew up with an adopted brother. Right after World War II, there was a tremendous refugee crisis of Jewish orphans. And they were displaced among about 300,000 other Jews to these camps that dotted East Central Europe and Italy.

And my grandparents-- a blessed memory-- took in an orphan child as a refugee to live with them in northern Ontario, Canada. And so he was the same age as my father, and they grew up together. He was his adopted brother.

And so the experience of being directly connected with a refugee population and a refugee experience is something that I contemplated deeply when I was a young child and my father told me about his own childhood. It meant a lot to me to think about what he and especially his parents, had sacrificed in order to help out an orphan from the war.

And I have a more specific connection with Ukraine. This is a photograph of a typical five-story walk up in Ukraine. It's called the Khrushchev because they had two different kinds of major buildings. They had the Brezhnevs, which are much higher, more modern buildings. And they had these Khrushchevs, which were smaller and somewhat more decrepit. And I spent several months living in this Khrushchev. Let me tell you the story.

I first visited Ukraine as part of my graduate education. My first degree was actually not in history. It was in philosophy. But I realized I wasn't going to be able to make much of a living as a philosopher. So when I was thinking about what else to study, I knew that my father-in-law was very enamored of Ukrainian history in particular. My wife's family is from Ukraine.

And so I thought I would try and knock off two birds with one stone. I would impress my father-in-law, and I would find a way to make a living as a historian if I studied Ukrainian history. It turns out that I really liked it, and so I studied more and more.

When I first went to Ukraine in 1989, it was still under the Soviet Union, but it was beginning to liberalize significantly. And the Canadian Jewish Congress asked me to take a large supply of insulin to a diabetic Ukrainian Jew who lived in this building here.

So I took it. It was a big deal in 1989. You had to put it in the freezer and things like that in the plane, and we got it to Ukraine. And then I managed to get a taxi and find my way over to left bank Kyiv and to this address. And I delivered the insulin, and I spent about an hour there with him, and then I went home.

And then-- this was still under the Soviet Empire, so I could not get into the archives that I really wanted to, but I did do some useful research there. However, I was denied access to the more serious secret archives like the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Then, when the Soviet Union fell and Ukraine declared independence, I was invited back, this time by a much more open and Western-oriented government-- free from Moscow's influence or free from much of Moscow's influence-- to come back and look at those archives. So I said, absolutely. Fantastic. They said, we'll give you an apartment, and you'll be all taken care of. And it was sounded like it was going to be fantastic.

When I landed at Boryspil Airport outside Kyiv, everything had fallen through. Nobody knew who I was. The people who were in charge had fled for various reasons. And I was completely alone in a strange city with a pocket full of Canadian cash and no idea where I was going to spend the night.

I didn't have a hotel reservation. I was supposed to be a guest of the Akademiya Nauk. And I really didn't know what to do. And the sun was setting, and there was a lot of rogue criminality going on. The mafia was very strong in those early months after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So I got in a taxi. I knew that this building-- this was the only person I really knew in Kyiv at the time. I knew this building was somewhere in the left bank of the Dnipro River. I said, take me to that region. We drove around for about half an hour. I thought I recognized this.

And sure enough, I went in. I went up to the right floor. I thought it was. I went to the right door. I thought it was. And in fact, when I knocked on it, Yevgeny Antonovsky answered the door. He was home. It was, thank God, the same place that I had visited originally.

And I ended up staying there for several months. Even after we were able to work out where I was supposed to be and what my living conditions were supposed to be, I simply asked that all the funds that the Canadian government had allocated for my trip be directed to the Antonovskys. And so they were able to get a windfall, but I lived in their tiny two-room apartment for several months as I did my research.

Here's a picture of me with Yevgeny. Believe it or not, I'm the guy in the back there with the dark hair and dark beard. And you'll see that we're looking at some beautiful 19th century Talmuds. Yevgeny's grandfather was the shamas of a shul in Kyiv. He was sort of like the sexton of a synagogue.

And when the Communists came in 1917, 1918, he hid all of the holy books. And he preserved them until his father and until Yevgeny could take care of them. So their house was filled with a remarkable collection of 19th century imprints, which was absolutely gorgeous. And we would spend time studying there together. So I got to see from the perspective of regular Soviet Jews what it was like to live under those conditions.

Here's another photograph with Yenna, his wife. And also on the right, those of you who are students of Ukrainian Jewish history, or those of you who are fans of art, you might rec-- or even if you're fans of Cuban literature, you may recognize the young man on the right, who is my good friend that I met in Kyiv at that time, none other than Professor Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern of Northwestern. Here's a picture of what he looks like now. He's kind of mastered the smoldering look since I knew him then, but our first associations were in the Vernadsky Library.

So I had an experience of what it was like, however attenuated, to be a stranger in a strange land, to not know where I was going to sleep that night. Nothing compared to the actual suffering of the current Ukrainian refugees. But nevertheless, I had a little taste of it. And thank God, by dint of the kindness of strangers and the grace of God, I was able to find a very safe place to live.

So, by the way, my research resulted-- this is a book that I wrote about that, the topic that I was studying, which was the revolutionary period. It's no longer available in print, but a Ukrainian translation is now available. And there's a second edition that's out, too, that will go into some of the things that I'm going to talk about a little more detail right now.

So what I'd like to do now that I've given you some kind of personal background or personal introduction to this story, let me talk to you a little bit about Jews and Ukrainians specifically and how that relates to the refugee crisis. So we should certainly bear in mind that Jewish history goes back a very long way in Ukraine. It goes back at least a millennium of recorded history. And there's even further back evidence of Jewish settlement at the fringes of Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory.

If you have a look at this map, which is part of an atlas written by my teacher, Professor Paul Robert Magocsi, you see the blue line outlines the contemporary boundaries of Ukraine, obviously not referring to the contested areas and Crimea being annexed by Russia in the 21st century. And you can see the extent of the Jewish population by the heavy green shading, in which Jews were more than 15% of the region to the west. That is, the right bank of the Dnieper River, or the Dnipro River.

But even on the left bank, you can see in Poltava and Guberniya, you have 3.9%. Katerynoslav, 4.7%. Still a very significant percentage of Jews, way higher than Jews are in almost all parts of the United States, New York City, of course, being a major exception. So Jews have a very rich and long population history in Ukraine, particularly.

If you have a look at this map, you'll see the origins of Ukraine in a kind of a medieval state called Kievan Rus', which existed from about the 10th century to about the 13th century. This sort of group of principalities, which were headed up from the city of Kyiv, formed the kind of ur-culture, the original political, social, and religious culture of three contemporary countries, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, in particular.

Now, it happens that the center of this was in Kyiv. And so Ukrainians claim that essentially they are the geographic inheritors of Kievan Rus', as well as political and religious and cultural inheritors. Belarus and Russia also have their roots in this region.

Now, Jews lived in this region easily from the 10th century on. There are plenty of references to Jews in the several historical chronicles that we have of the era, including the Povest Vremennykh Let, which is one of the most important documents that describes this early period, the so-called Chronicle of Bygone Years.

But we also have some archaeological evidence that suggests that they even lived on the Black Sea Coast as far back as antiquity, that Jews were involved in a lot of trade in the region. And so you'll have Jewish ports in Crimea, for example, at this time.

We have in the 13th century and a little bit earlier even members of the Baalei Tosafot-- that is, the important commentators on the Talmud. There's one Moses of Kiev and an Isaac of Chernigov that show up in various writings of the time. So Jews are there right at the very beginning of Ukrainian self-determined statehood in one form or another.

They begin, however, to emerge in much larger numbers in the late 11th century and onward. That's the era when the Crusades begin. As you can see from this map, which outlines the various routes of several Crusades moving from western Europe into the land of Israel and the predominant number of the stars of David, which represents Jewish communities in the 12th century and onward, they're much more to the west.

The central heartland of what would be called Ashkenazi Jewry is located primarily in the Rhineland, which would be in northern Germany, parts of France. And what's going to end up happening over the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries is that there's a significant number of reasons why Jews are being forced eastward by increasing anti-Semitic pressures.

For example, the noxious development of the "blood libel" myth, that Jews somehow need to consume the blood of Christian children. Absolutely ridiculous concept that has no basis in reality whatsoever. But once the idea began to take hold in the 12th century, it spread rapidly. People liked to believe it in a kind of a QAnon way, which, actually, we may reflect on that a little later in this lecture when we think about contemporary propaganda.

This is actually a document. It's actually German currency from the 20th century that commemorates a host desecration case in Sternberg, in which Jews were accused not of murdering a Christian child but by doing something that was a related charge of capturing the communion wafers, the so-called host, and torturing them instead. And although that's also a figment of some kind of fever dream imagination, nevertheless, Jews were frequently charged with this heinous activity. And they were frequently judged to be guilty and burned at the stake, as we see in this rather grotesque image.

So from western Europe, starting with the Crusades of 1096 and onward, there is an increasing pressure on Jews to leave for anti-Semitic reasons. And then from the East, there's actually an economic vacuum that's drawing Jews in.

At this time, Ukraine was under the control of the Poles as part of the very large Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And there was a tremendous need for people to act as middlemen, as leaseholders to help manage these large landed estates in which there tended to be an ethnic division between the landlords, who were Polish Catholics for the most part, and the farmers, the peasants, who were Ukrainian Orthodox-- Orthodox, of course, not in the Jewish use of that term but in terms of the Christian denomination, as opposed to Catholic.

And the Jews were an excellent choice to bring in to manage these estates, both because of their developed skills in literacy and in numeracy but also because they were not especially-- they didn't show allegiances to the local population. They could be depended on to be loyal to their employers because they were a distinct entity.

There were a whole bunch of activities that were associated with the Jews at this point because the nobility could literally give them monopolies in things like the production of alcohol, something called propinatsiia. And so that's why so many Jews were active in, for example, maintaining inns and the distillation and distribution of alcohol. This was, however, a rather exploitative economic system, as I've discussed in other videos, of course-- if you're curious, you can have a look on my channel, and you'll see some of them where I discuss in more detail-- and would be the cause of some conflict.

But nevertheless, what ends up happening is if you combine the pressures pushing Jews out of the Rhineland, the growth of anti-Semitic ideas-- I haven't even mentioned the Black Death-- and you combine that with the economic opportunities that are drawing Jews to the East, you begin to see from the 12th through the 17th century very large movement of Jews into the region of Ukraine in particular, where they're acting as "arendators," as middlemen, for the most part.

Now, how are they getting along at this time? We should understand that-- and I will talk about this in the next set of slides-- there certainly were punctuations of great violence. There certainly were moments where Ukrainians in particular would attack Jewish communities. And we'll talk about them momentarily.

But the overwhelming experience of Jews in Ukraine was one of peace and prosperity, that Jews in Ukraine managed to find a way to eke out a living, to study, to develop some remarkable religious innovations like the Hasidic movement. And for the most part, for 1,000 years, Jews and Ukrainians lived together in peace.

Does not mean that they joined together and everything, but there was a level of cross-cultural pollination, of cross-fertilization, where Ukrainian ways of looking at the world influenced Jewish ways, and vice versa.

Just to give you a little introduction, jumping ahead to the 20th century, this image we're looking at right now is Ukrainian currency from the very brief lived period of Ukrainian independence between the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the imposition of Soviet rule under the Communists shortly thereafter.

During that time, remarkably, Jews and Ukrainians strove to officially work together to create a new state. And it ended in great failure for various reasons, including popular pogrom violence that was one of the most important reasons. But nevertheless, for that brief period of time, it hinted at what could be possible for Jews and Ukrainians.

And as you can see, it's got it's a 100 karbovanets bill. It has on the top the denomination listed in several languages. But on the bottom, right under the number 100, you can see in Yiddish the words [YIDDISH] because Yiddish was actually an official language of this very brief lived and ephemeral republic.

So we're basically talking about 1,000 years of tremendous cultural cross-fertilization. We see it in terms of linguistics. Some of the most intimate terms that enter the Yiddish language are essentially Ukrainian or Proto-Slavic language terms, like, for example, the word for father. In Hebrew, the word for father is av, and a very common Aramaic term is abba. This is an ancient term that Jews have used for a very long time.

Then when they were in Germany, they picked up Yiddish, which is essentially a kind of medieval German. And they used "vater." But when they came to Ukraine, they switched over to "tatti." "Tatti" is clearly derived from the Ukrainian "tatto." And we can say this about hundreds of words in the Yiddish language.

There are culinary things where Jews and Ukrainians are almost identical in their choice of diet. In fact, in some regions, like in western Ukraine, gefilte fish is considered a delicacy, and it's called [UKRAINIAN], "Jewish fish," because there is so much overlap there. Holubtsi-- some people would say with the Russian pronunciation "golabki," which is cabbage rolls. These are all Ukrainian foods that make their way into the Jewish tradition as well.

And in folklore we see so many areas in which they are similar. Let me just show you one example. In the Chabad Hasidic movement, there's a very popular song that is "Ne zhurits'ya khloptsi," which is literally in Ukrainian. And this is much easier, of course, when Hasidim lived in Eastern Europe. But even in America today, they're memorizing these lyrics in Ukrainian. It's a rather amusing song that the text of the lyrics is basically, "Don't worry, boys, we're going to get to our destination. And there will be vodka there."

Here is-- I'll play for you a very short piece, recording, of that.

["NE ZHURITS'YA KHLOPTSI" PLAYING]

So you get a sense of what that might mean in terms of the cultural overlap that would happen over the 1,000 years that Jews lived there. Many other folkloric elements-- I happened to choose this one because I liked the photograph. This is current president Joe Biden in happier times visiting Ukraine. And he is being greeted with bread and salt, which is also a very common Jewish welcoming gift for guests. Not so much here in America, but throughout Eastern Europe, very common kind of cultural appropriation. I don't even know if it comes from the Ukrainians to the Jews or the other way around.

Now, I'm going to show you one last little bit of audio-visual. And it's idealized because it is Hollywood. It's Hollywood, though, based on the writings of this man, Sholem Aleichem. This is one of the greatest writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He wrote, of course, in Yiddish, but a heavily Ukrainianized Yiddish.

If you've looked at Sholem Aleichem in the original, you can see that he is liberally sprinkling his works with Ukrainianisms. The peasants speak in Ukrainian. And the Yiddish readers will understand it because they are so close to the peasants and understanding what that culture meant.

And the scene that I'm going to show you is from Fiddler on the Roof, which is, of course, a film in Hollywood based on a play, which was based on a cycle of stories from Shalom Aleichem. And so it has been idealized several times over.

But nevertheless, I think in this five-minute clip-- I'd like to show you all of it-- you get a sense of what Ukrainian and Jewish life, or Ukrainian-Jewish coexistence, was when it was best. We will have plenty of time to talk in a few moments about when it was not best. But when they got along, over 1,000 years, it might have looked something like this.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Tevye's eldest-- Tzeitel!

[CHEERING]

["TO LIFE" PLAYING]

- To Lazar Wolf!

- To Tevye!

- To Tzeitel, your daughter!

- My wife!

- May all your futures be pleasant ones

Not like our present ones

Drink l'chaim to life

To life

L'chaim

- L'chaim

- L'chaim, l'chaim, to life

It takes a wedding to make us say

Let's live another day

- Drink l'chaim to life

- We raise a glass and sip a drop of schnapps

In honor of the great good luck that favored you

We know that when good fortune favors two such men

It stands to reason we deserve it, too

To us and our good fortune

Be happy

Be healthy

Long life

And if our good fortune never comes

Here's to whatever comes

Drink l'chaim to life!

[CHANTING]

[MAN HOLDING NOTE]

- [RUSSIAN]

Heaven bless you both

Nazdrovia

To your health

And may we live together in peace.

- Thank you.

- [RUSSIAN]

Heaven bless you both

Nazdrovia

To your health

And may we live together in peace

- Hey!

- May you both be favored with the future of your choice

May you live to see 1,000 reasons to rejoice.

[RUSSIAN]

- Hey!

[MUSIC STOPS]

[ACCORDION NOTE]

[ACCORDION NOTE]

[LAUGHTER]

[RHYTHMIC MUSIC BEGINS]

- Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

- I like it!

[CHANTING]

Hey! Hey!

[CLAPPING FASTER]

- Hey! Hey! Hey!

- Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

[CHANTING]

- Drinks for everybody! Mazel tov!

[CHEERING]

To life!

[END PLAYBACK]

[HENRY ABRAMSON] That was certainly an idealized portrait of a drinking setting that brought together Jews and Ukrainians. Not beyond the realm of imagination, but what I especially like about that clip is showing how they're existing separately. They're drinking separately from each other. And they're rather suspicious of each other. In particular, the Jews are concerned about the potential for violence, and they're a little afraid of the Ukrainians.

But they both share a moment where they recognize that the trajectories of their lives are parallel in many ways, that while the Jews are celebrating the engagement of Lazar Wolf to Tzeitel, of course, that would not work out because Tzeitel wanted to marry the tailor, Motel Kamzoil.

Nevertheless, at that moment, the Jews are saying "l'chaim." The Ukrainians are saying "nazdrovia," which means "to your health," essentially a kind of l'chaim. And their lives are running along parallel courses. And I think that's a fair way to understand how the majority of the time that Jews lived in Ukraine got along with their neighbors. Not necessarily as exuberant as portrait in that film, but nevertheless very similar.

Now, we have to understand, of course, that there were some really awful, horrific points of conflict. This image of an idealized Cossack. You can see in the background there is a Jew being tortured, hung upside down. And towards the bottom right, there's another Jew being manhandled. And the captions have various derogatory things to say about the Jews.

There were several moments in Ukrainian Jewish history that represent periods of great conflict when Jews suffered tremendously, specifically, the Khmel'nyts'kyi rebellion of the middle of the 17th century. Also, if you're curious about this, please view my videos on this topic where I speak at greater length. But it's basically an economic cause to that that has to do with the "arenda" system that I described a few moments ago.

Similarly, the Haidamak Movement of 1768, which resulted in a massacre in the city of Uman. And that was why, by the way, Rebbe Nachman chose to be buried there. And so there are pilgrimages today. Tens of thousands of Jews go to Uman because Rebbe Nachman is buried there. But Rebbe Nachman chose to be buried there because he wanted to be near the victims of the Haidamak Movement.

And in many ways, this horrible institution called the pogrom, which is kind of like an uprising, a popular upswell of violence, begins to accelerate in the 20th century. And you have some terrible pogroms that had a very strong impact on the Jewish community at the end of the 19th century, and some even more awful pogroms in the early 20th century.

These are all dwarfed, however, by the so-called "Holocaust by Bullets" or "Holocaust of Bullets," which refers to the Einsatzgruppen murders of 1941 onward. The Nazis, when they invaded Ukraine, double-crossing Stalin with their previously secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, they sent four armored units behind the Wehrmacht, behind the regular army, to round up Jews, to bring them out to ravines, and to shoot them dead.

These were staffed by German military police, but they made frequent use of local populations, including Ukrainians. And also, as you move up in the so-called "bloodlands," as Timothy Snyder has called them in Poland and Lithuania and Latvia, they found willing accomplices to assist them with this. There's a very large backstory to this that deserves more attention, but about 1.5 to an estimated 2.5 million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in all of East Central Europe, with a very large number of them in Ukraine.

This is also in terms of my personal story, the background of my father's parents, my grandfather's parents. I showed you them at the beginning of this lecture. They're buried somewhere in this mass grave in Lithuania. And the only thing that we have to mark them is this rather arresting sculpture that captures some of the mood of what it must be like to contemplate these horrific deaths.

So, all told, we have 1,000 years of relatively peaceful coexistence, lots of cultural interaction, which, by the way, probably involved a lot of women because many of the kinds of things that we see showing up in Ukrainian Jewish culture are things that would be transferred by women sharing recipes and market day and things like that. But they are punctuated by an accelerating amount of violence for reasons which deserve a lot more explication but are beyond the scope of this talk today.

And they are cruelly mirrored by what we're seeing today. I can't help but reflect on the mass graves that I've been seeing in the news lately in places like Bucha or in places like Mariupol. Just horrific. They look exactly to me like the ravines in which my ancestors were killed. And it's hard not to feel a deep level of sympathy and empathy for what the Ukrainians are currently enduring.

So let us move now to the third point of this lecture. And I'd like to place this Ukrainian Jewish reality within the Russian and Soviet reality because for most of the period that we're discussing today, Ukrainians were not in control of their own destiny.

Besides the Kievan Rus' period, in which there were very few Jews living there, and we generally don't know a lot about how they managed their affairs as a whole, Ukrainians did not have control of their lands as Ukraine, with the exception of a very brief period after the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolt in the 17th century.

They lived under Polish rule, under Tatar-Mongol rule, under Russian rule for the duration of this time up until the 20th century, where they could finally articulate their own self-determined nationhood. So looking at the contemporary period, they're living under Vladimir Putin, who is shown here in his KGB days, which I think in many ways speaks to the core of his personality. And I believe that in his thinking on Ukraine and on the Ukrainians, he's channeling three Russian leaders and two other leaders, and they are really guiding his thoughts on how he is punishing this population.

The first is Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, who is actually the first tsarina to conquer right-bank Ukraine and bring it into the Russian state, the Russian Empire at the time. She was instrumental in forcing her will upon the Ukrainians and reducing their nobility to essentially peasantry once again so that under the Russian heel they would be forced to work essentially like they did for the Poles. They would end up working for the Russians.

He's also channeling Nicholas I, who was a tsar in the first half of the 19th century. Tsar Nicholas I operated with three basic principles in mind. After his father was killed in an abortive revolution, the Decembrist revolution, he decided that there are basically three things that he has to enforce on all of the people within the Russian Empire.

The first is the notion of orthodoxy, that everyone must conform to the Orthodox Church. The Jews were a very difficult, indigestible mass in that regard. The second was autocracy, the idea that all Russian Empire citizens, or subjects, I should say, should recognize the primary rule of the tsar as a führer-like principal leader.

And then finally, a term that's difficult to translate into English with all of its connotations. He believes in the value of the narod, of the people. But it's "people" in a much deeper, spiritual sense. He believed that Russian people, kind of an ethnocentric value, an ethnochauvinism, really, was to be primary. And anyone who kind of like did not fit into the Russian narod really did not belong in the entire state.

This is why, from the Jewish perspective, he imposed so many horrific decrees, such as the infamous Cantonist Decree that required Jewish children legally as young as 12, and often much younger, to be taken from their homes and spend 36 years in military service, an incomprehensible punishment that wreaked tremendous havoc on Jewish communities.

He destroyed the kehilla structure that was essentially allowing the Jews to self-govern. And he did everything he could to try to bring the Jews as much as possible into these three areas of orthodoxy, autocracy, and the narod. He wanted to assimilate them to Russianness as much as possible.

For the Ukrainians, the orthodoxy part was basically taken care of. There were Ukrainian Catholics in the far west of the territory, but the vast majority of Ukrainians were Orthodox. In terms of autocracy, he had difficulty getting these Ukrainian peasants to submit to the far-off tsar in Moscow.

But he had the most difficulty with the idea of the narod. And he eventually had to settle for the notion that the Ukrainians were kind of like sort of cousins to the Russians. There are many things to say for that. Like, for example, the fact that they speak a Slavic language, which is related. Distinct, different alphabet, different pronunciation, different vocabulary in a lot of places, but nevertheless a related language, sort of like, if you will, Spanish and French are both Romance languages. Maybe a little closer than the two of those, but not that much.

And so he tried to push this idea that they were "little Russians--" that's the actual Russian term-- "little Russians," as opposed to the "great Russians." The people who lived in the North were the "great Russians," and they had these younger brothers, these cousins who were the "little Russians." And they were somehow part of the overall family, even though they did not necessarily agree to be part of that family.

Unfortunately, you see this even in propaganda today. I was just watching today some of the news. They were interviewing average Russians on the street, saying oh, it's a made-up nation. It was just invented in 1918 when Lenin decided to give away a piece of territory. Well, that in itself is a ridiculous way of looking at history.

But even if you want to say that they really are Russians, which I would not agree to, you got 44 million people who say that they are a distinct people. And they can call themselves alligators if they want. There are 44 million of them who say they are distinct. You've got to listen to that. But essentially, Putin is channeling Nicholas I, trying to assimilate the Ukrainians into a larger Russian mentality.

And then, of course, he's also channeling Joseph Stalin, the most notorious dictator of the Soviet Union, who chose to impose his will on the Ukrainians in a disastrous genocidal manner-- I don't use that term lightly-- with the artificial "terror famine" of 1932-33, which was directed at Ukrainians and killed millions of them. By conservative estimates, 3 million, most likely 5 million, or possibly even more Ukrainians were killed in that disastrous season because of the policies followed by Stalin in his rush to industrialize the country.

In other words, Putin is thinking of Stalin as kind of like-- as Stalin put it at the time, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. And the Ukrainians are, unfortunately, the eggs. Now, these three, I think, are fairly well identifiable to anyone who's studied Russian history. They'll see them in Putin's mindset.

But Putin is also thinking very carefully about this individual, Joseph Goebbels. And this is something I want to focus on a little bit more. Goebbels is, of course, the minister of propaganda in the Nazi state, and he was an evil genius. He was brilliant in his ways of thinking of how to convince people to do the wrong thing.

And his basic theory was tell the big lie. Tell it as loudly and as often as you can. And it's shameless the way Russian propaganda is spouting the most ridiculous things about the nature of this conflict and the intimidation of people who want to object and say the truth. I'm going to get back to that in just one moment.

But I want to bring us back to our starting point by saying there's one other individual that reverberates throughout Jewish history. And unfortunately, Ukrainians are also experiencing that. He's also channeling pharaoh. He's also channeling that absolutist leader who wishes and will stop at nothing, even the power of God, as we see so powerfully represented in Cecil B. DeMille's representation of The Ten Commandments, with, here, Yul Brynner playing pharaoh. Nothing can stop him. He will defy even the heavens in order to achieve his will.

So, as I see it, we have two basic challenges as we go into the Passover Seder. This is a page from the famous Barcelona Haggadah, which I believe is 14th century Spain. And this is from the opening of the Haggadah, which reads [ARAMAIC]. In Aramaic, "this is the bread of affliction," in which the person who is leading the Passover ritual, the Seder, will proclaim to all the guests as he holds up a piece of matzo, simple unleavened bread, "anyone who is hungry, let him come and eat."

So there is an impetus built right into the Seder ritual to recognize the needs of others, the needs of strangers, and to include them in our own meal and try to alleviate their suffering. I see this in two principal ways. There is a challenge of memory in our current moment, and there is a challenge of redemption.

In terms of the challenge of memory-- and this is something that is very pragmatic that we can all do-- we have to understand that this war is being fought in two very significant manners. The first is, of course, on the ground, that Mariupol is being pummeled night after night with artillery in civilian areas. And the fighting is raging, and horrible, horrible war crimes are being committed that make some of the pogroms of earlier centuries seem minor by comparison.

And Russia is lying about this to their own people. It's phenomenal how people are swallowing it. Here you see the famous protest by a person in the media who managed to get a sign onto live TV to specifically tell Russians they are lying to you. This is propaganda.

And nevertheless, current opinion polls in Russia indicate that the vast majority, in the 80 percentage points of Russians, support the war and believe that Ukraine is somehow populated by Nazis and that they have to extirpate them.

We see the people who try to tell the truth are horribly intimidated, like this Jewish journalist in Russia who had this pig's head left at his door with an anti-Semitic statement, meaning anyone who tries to challenge this intellectual status quo, tries to-- it is actually, I'm sure you're aware, it's a crime currently to even use the word "war" to refer to what they prefer to call the "special military operation" in Ukraine. And the crime is punishable by 15 years imprisonment.

So besides the refugees that I've already mentioned, the some 11 million people who are displaced, there's an estimated quarter million of so-called Russian refugees of conscience, Russians who feel that it's too dangerous for them to speak their minds in Russia, and they're fleeing to wherever they can get a visa to land-- in Georgia, in Turkey and elsewhere.

But I firmly believe that truth will out. And in fact, the battle for information, the battle for memory and how we will remember this, is coming out in the most amazing ways. This is dated just yesterday. That satellite-- one of the things that happened in Bucha, as I'm sure you're aware, is that when the Russians left the city, there were bodies scattered all over the streets.

And the Ukrainian forces, when they entered this suburb of Kyiv, they found these bodies, and they protested war crimes, things like that. The Russian Foreign Minister pronounced that, no, no, these are plants. The Ukrainians planted them there in order to make Russia look bad, which is such a bald-faced, incredible lie. But satellite data, surprisingly, can come out and can actually prove that, no, in fact, those bodies represent people who were killed by the Russians and left there for three weeks before the Ukrainians even approached.

So truth will out. But I see I'm running out of time. I'm just going to conclude in two minutes. What we can do, what our challenge of memory is, is that we have to make sure that we speak the truth, that we engage in this discussion, and that we insist on what we are all about. And that is the Touro model, which is where values-- where knowledge and values meet-- excuse me.

And I think that really means something. As we go into this Passover season, I think it's worthy of all of us who are connected to Touro University to reflect on how we can best use our intelligence and our moral sensibility to help the refugees from Ukraine.

And with that, since I'm out of time, I want to wish you all a [HEBREW], a happy and redemptive Passover. Let us hope that next year we will all celebrate together in Jerusalem and that it will be a year where we will know no more--[INAUDIBLE].

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[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, touro.edu/tourotalks

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