In November 2019 I returned to Ukraine, this time concentrating on the Kiev region, formerly part of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement, a region that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. This region had for centuries, despite numerous pogroms, been a haven for Judaism and the centre for European Jewish settlement. Ukraine’s cities, towns and villages once held sizeable Jewish populations active in trade, commerce and politics. Ukraine is still culturally and religiously significant to Jews: it is the ancestral home to many diaspora Jews; Jewish people have lived on these lands for nine millennia and it is a major pilgrimage site for Hasidic Jews. This layering of history is crucial to the understanding of Ukraine, and of Eastern Europe in general, and is the contextual soil in which this project sits. Ukraine may have been a borderland, with Kyiv and the Dnieper River at its centre, but for the Jews it was the spiritual heartland and place of religious reform and enlightenment. There is talk of a Jewish revival within Ukraine, with new communities growing in the large urban areas, such as Kyiv, however in the rural areas there is a declining Jewish population.
Elderly Jewish Man, Holocaust survivor from a village near to Zvenyhorodka
Bellinda (Barooka), Bershad
Yacob Tamarkin, Head of the Jewish Community, outside former Synagogue, Vasyl’Kiv
Elena Alekseevna Miroshnichenko, Zvenyhorodka
Pyotr wearing Tefillin, Korsun
Leonid Brasavskiy, Head of the Jewish Community, Zvenyhorodka
Roman’s Grandfather, Avraam Simhovich Mamut with his wife Rivka, both of whom died from typhoid in the evacuation – Korsun Jewish Museum
Dmitri (Shoemaker), Uman
Puppets from Yiddish Theatre Exhibition (part of the Judaica Institute collection), Museum of Theatre, Music and Cinema Of Ukraine, Kyiv
Leonid Finberg, Director of The Center for the Studies of History & Culture of East European Jewry, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Tania Borodina, Researcher in Holocaust history, Judaica Institute, Kyiv
Oksana, ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, Kyiv branch (with drone aerial view of Jewish cemetery)
Kateryna Malakhova, Historical Researcher, ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, Kyiv branch
Jewish School, Bila Tserkva
Jewish School, Bila Tserkva
Holodomor Monument, Kyiv
Sweeper, Babyn Yar (massacre site), Kyiv
Goats, Zvenyhorodka Jewish Cemetery
Yakob, Jewish Cemetery, Vasyl’Kiv
Former Jewish home, Bershad
Locals, former Jewish shtetl, Bershad
Bohslav, former Shtetl
Jewish Cemetery, Zvenyhorodka
Yefim Mihailovich Vigodner, Head of the Jewish Community, Bershad
Synagogue, Bershad
