“As a Jew and as a human being, I feel bad for children, women, anxiety,” said Zelikovic, an 83-year-old grandfather of four. And yet, although he was born and raised in Ukraine and speaks fluent Ukrainian, he has lived in Israel since 1974 and feels little solidarity with his homeland. “At the national level, I think it is their problem, not mine. “Believe me, it’s definitely not my problem,” Zelikovich said, citing widespread Ukrainian cooperation with the Nazis during World War II as the cause of his indifference. Zelikovich’s rivalry is characterized by the ambivalence of some Holocaust survivors and others, as both Ukraine and Russia consistently refer to the Holocaust to rally support for their respective sides during the current conflict. Get the Times of Israel Daily E-mail and never miss our top stories By registering, you agree to the terms Zelikovic, who lives in Karmiel, spoke to the Jewish Telegraph Agency on Thursday, Yom Hashoah – the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, when much of the ambiguity has surfaced. Although some Ukrainians helped save Jews during the Holocaust, “It is known that other Ukrainians helped the Germans,” Zelikovic said. “In some cases, by the time the Germans arrived, their job had been done for them: Ukrainians had killed Jews in one person and looted their homes.” Nazi Germans and Ukrainians execute a Jewish family in Miropol, Ukraine, on October 13, 1941. (USHMM) Ukraine’s checkered record during the Holocaust, the prevalence of Nazi cooperation there and the praise of collaborators today, create a complex and often conflicting attitude towards this country by Holocaust survivors from the country and their descendants. For Ida Rashkovich, an 86-year-old survivor from the Ukrainian city of Vynnitsa who now lives in Holon, Israel, this is not an abstract discussion of history and geopolitics. Several of her relatives were killed because of local Ukrainian collaborators, she told JTA. “Of course I had relatives who killed Ukrainians. But other Ukrainians also saved Jews. “It’s a very mixed picture,” he said, adding that he strongly opposed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “monstrous actions”. An emergency worker is assisted by locals transporting a man in an ambulance after a Russian bombing in Kharkov, Ukraine, on April 27, 2022. (AP Photo / Felipe Dana) Zelikovic recalls being taken as a child to a mass grave in the woods surrounded by Ukrainian police, who, under the auspices of the Nazi-occupied Romanian occupiers, rallied Jews from the town of Tomasbil. At one point, his grandmother, who was walking next to him, picked him up and took him to their place of execution. But the Romanians decided to restrict the adults to children, so his grandmother, Ida Dolbur, was allowed to return home. Having briefly escaped execution along with more than 200 victims who died that day outside Tomashpil, the Zelikovsky family hid and survived. Dolbur died in 1953. “It is particularly painful that the leaders of the collaborators are now being honored as heroes in Ukraine,” he said. Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggressors and the leadership of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zhelensky, who is Jewish, has inspired the West and undermined Putin’s propaganda, which describes his military intentions as “unrealistic.” Before the war, tens of thousands of Jews lived in Ukraine, enjoying a network of synagogues and schools and joining their non-Jewish neighbors to denounce and resist Russian forces. “We have been building an amazing community for over 30 years,” Avraham Wolff, a Chabad rabbi in Odessa, told the Washington Post in March. “And it’s a shame he got to that.” Over the past decade, however, Ukrainian society has seen attempts to glorify World War II collaborators such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych – Ukrainian nationalists who at least for a time collaborated with the Nazis against the formidable Soviet Union. Their troops are believed to have killed thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. A statue of Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera stands in Ternopil, Ukraine. (Mykola Vasylechko / Wikimedia Commons via JTA) State-sponsored awards to Nazi collaborators are a new development in Ukraine, where about 15% of the population is Russian. The phenomenon escalated as Ukrainian nationalism became politically entrenched and exploded after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and annexed Crimea by Russia. In 2017, the city of Lviv held a festival in honor of Shukhevych. The following year, the city sponsored a parade in which participants paraded in the uniform of a unit led by Nazi Ukrainian conscripts: the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, or the 1st Galicia. At the same time, historical figures are celebrated, such as Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the 17th-century Cossack leader whose army killed countless Jews. A golden statue of Khmelnytsky is on display on a central boulevard in Kiev that bears his name. The Ukrainian National Guard also includes a volunteer unit called the Azov Battalion, which its commanders say includes a significant portion of neo-Nazis and whose logo is a symbol of neo-Nazi hatred. Zelensky did not help things when he compared the Russian invasion to the Holocaust, at a time when the fighting was brutal but not genocidal by the accepted definitions of the term. In a speech to Israeli lawmakers last month, Zelensky defended the comparison. “I have a right to this parallel and to this comparison,” he said, provoking protests from some Israeli lawmakers. The final Nazi attack on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine on October 8, 1941. (AP Photo) References to the Holocaust on both sides make the fight against its distortion “a difficult battle,” said Mark Weitzman, chief operating officer of the World Jewish Rehabilitation Organization and one of the proponents of defining the Holocaust. International Holocaust Remembrance. Alliance – a forum of dozens of countries. There are some Israeli Holocaust survivors from Ukraine who felt patriotic solidarity with Ukraine during the war. “I grew up there, I went to school there, I went to university there. “It is impossible to remain indifferent,” said Avraham Sharnopolsky, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor from the town of Ilyintsy in western Ukraine and later Donetsk in the east. “I feel great solidarity with Ukraine as a country and with the Ukrainians as a people, even though the Ukrainians have killed countless Jews.” Pogroms and collaborations, he said, “do not erase centuries of coexistence. “It’s very complicated and tragic at times, but that does not mean I am not Ukrainian,” said Sharnopolsky, who immigrated to Israel in 1995 and lives in Jerusalem. Sharnopolsky also said that comparisons with the Holocaust were “inevitable” in light of the scale of the Russian catastrophe in some Ukrainian cities. However, in Israel and elsewhere, comparisons of the Holocaust, as well as bitter memories of anti-Semitic persecution by Ukrainians and Russians in the 20th century, have left some Holocaust survivors in Ukraine indifferent. “The suffering Ukrainian people have done nothing wrong and I feel sorry for them,” Boris Satanov, an Israeli Holocaust survivor from Donetsk, told JTA. “But the Ukrainian people as an entity have none of my favorites.” Shatanov, 91, who immigrated to Israel in 1990, said his cousin was raped and killed by a “gang of drunk Ukrainians even before the Germans reached her village” in 1941. “As for the Russians, I am not very favorable to them either,” said Shatanov, who said he was not admitted to the university under communist rule because he was Jewish and had to travel to Kazan, a city 500 miles east of Moscow. , to study engineering. “I’m a Jew, I’m an Israeli, I’m a Holocaust survivor and I’m done with their wars for a long time,” Shatanov said.
