When Vladimir Putin grabbed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, the Russian president claimed it was to protect minorities from anti-Semitic fascists whom Putin maintained were behind the revolution that year that ousted his ally in Kiev, former President Viktor Yanukovych.
But a physicist named Josef Zissels, who heads one of the groups representing Ukraine’s fractured Jewish community of 350,000, wasn’t buying it. He called the revolution “an expression of the Ukrainian people’s desire for independence, Western democracy and an end to the corruption by sellout leaders.”
That defense of the revolution, coming from a former political prisoner who spent nearly 10 years in a Soviet prison, severely undermined Putin’s narrative.
Now, two years on, Zissels finds himself at the center of another controversy.
Along with other Jews, he has expressed discomfort with the post-revolution government’s controversial veneration of local pro-Nazi collaborators — amid an explosion of nationalist and anti-Russian sentiment — who were responsible for the murder of countless Jews and Poles during World War II.
In Ukraine, that has meant the rehabilitation of “heroes” such as Stepan Bandera, who last month had a street named after him in Kiev; Symon Petliura, a 1920s anti-Semitic statesman who in May was commemorated on public television; and Roman Shukhevych, a militia leader who will also be honored with a street name in Kiev.
Such veneration has deepened divisions among Ukrainian Jews and heightened their concern over the government’s commitment to democratic values.
“These are not my heroes,” said Zissels, the head of the Vaad organization of Ukrainian Jews. Even though “they’re being honored not for anti-Semitic crimes, but for their fighting for Ukrainian independence against Russia,” Zissels said, “still, I don’t like the naming of streets after them.”
That being said, he added, speaking out against the trend “can and will serve Russian propaganda.”
Nearly all of Ukraine’s mainstream political Jewish groups share Zissels’ unease over the veneration of Bandera and Shukhevych. During the war, the two served as leaders, respectively, of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their men butchered thousands of Jews and Poles, including women and children, while fighting alongside Nazi Germany against the Red Army and communists.
Unlike Zissels, however, other Jews are willing to publicly denounce this trend.
Last month, more than 20 Ukrainian Jewish groups published a statement harshly condemning the honoring of OUN and UPA leaders. Such efforts, they said, are a form of “Holocaust denial” that erases “from our shared history the tragic pages connected with the anti-Semitic activities” of the militias.
What is happening in Ukraine is occurring across Central and Eastern Europe. Fear of Russian aggression, nostalgia and, at times, naked anti-Semitism are inspiring similarly nationalistic gestures in countries such as Hungary, which is rehabilitating figures like the Nazi collaborator Miklos Horthy, and Lithuania, where the pro-Nazi former ruler Juozas Ambrazevicius-Brazaitis is treated as a national hero.
But the issue is especially volatile and disconcerting to Jews in Ukraine, home to Europe’s second-largest Jewish population.
Venerating pro-Nazi and anti-Soviet leaders heightens tensions between the ethnic Ukrainian majority and ethnic Russian minority in a politically unstable country suffering an economic crisis. Ongoing fighting in the east between government troops and Russian-backed rebels only adds to the sense of unease.
Jews prefer not to be caught between a government that rewrites the past and a Russian antagonist that claims to act in the name of anti-fascism.
During and after the revolution, anti-Semitic incidents have remained rare in Ukraine, where, on average, only 20 have been reported in recent annual tallies — a fraction of the annual count in Western European countries with comparable Jewish communities such as France and the United Kingdom.
Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, sees “a clear connection between initiatives to honor Bandera and his kind, and other forms of disrespect of the Holocaust.”
Boruch Gorin, an Odessa-born Chabad rabbi who is chairman of Moscow’s main Jewish museum, said, “The concern here is that in post-revolution Ukraine, these murderers serve as the cornerstone for a new national narrative.”