Ukraine’s Patriotic War and the Legacy of Jewish Heroism

For the past two weeks, I’ve been going to bed with news of fighting in Ukraine and waking up with more news from Ukraine. The news is both devastating and inspiring—devastating because of the sheer brutality of Putin’s armies, inspiring because of the courage and resolve of Ukraine and her people. In the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, I reach out for my smartphone and scroll through seething dispatches from Kharkiv, Odessa or Lviv. I read about the direction of Russian troops and the looming threat for Dnipro, one of Ukraine’s largest cities and a model for a post-Soviet renaissance of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Then, exhausted yet wired, I think of walking the streets of Kyiv with my seven-year-old daughter Mira in October 2013—some five months prior to Crimea’s annexation by Russia. I think of the fighting getting closer to the ancestral homes of my grandfathers in Podolia. And then, in a manner of an insomniac’s incantation, I thank my parents and the state of Israel for getting me out of the former USSR when I was young enough to start a new immigrant life and old enough to remember my previous Soviet one in granular detail.

My heart bleeds for Ukraine and her people. As both a Russian Jew and a longtime student of the Shoah, I am particularly horrified by the rhetoric of “denazification” employed by Putin’s regime to justify the invasion. As I type these lines on the thirteenth day of the war in Ukraine, reports of a maternity hospital hit by Russia’s artillery are coming in from the besieged city of Mariupol. Like hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union now dispersed across the world, I have a personal connection to the war in Ukraine and to the biggest refugee crisis Europe has seen since World War 2 and the Shoah. I cannot but react viscerally to the slaughter of Ukraine by Russia’s troops and to the suffering of Ukraine’s people. I feel both a personal solidarity with the victims of bloodshed and an ideological unity with those who resist Putin’s megalomaniacal plot. How else could it be? My family tree is rooted in Ukraine. I grew up as a refusenik in Moscow. I was of draft age during the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan. And I’ve even tasted the rancid milk of refugees’ daily sustenance. But there is more to the gamut of my thoughts and feelings about the war in Ukraine and the valor of her defenders.

If the history of Jews in Eastern Europe is bound to repeat itself, yet again, this time it will be not only as tragedy, and not at all as farse, but as a dance macabre. I cringe at this untimely thought, and yet I cannot wave it off like a gadfly. Especially so in the middle of the night, when insomnia’s special forces land in the fields of my own imaginary Ukraine, and a deluge of historical associations drowns out the last hope of sleep.

Have you seen photos of men in Ukrainian military uniform praying in a synagogue, tefillin on their heads and left arms? Have you also seen news coverage of veterans of the Israeli special forces arriving to fight in Ukraine? I presume most of them are Israelis of Ukrainian origin who have volunteered to go to Ukraine. These striking images and reports have a way of stirring up a mixture of Jewish pride and Jewish anxiety. Coming alive before our own eyes is the legacy of Jewish soldiers who during the 20th century served in the armies of Europe, of Jewish servicemen who fought to bring peace and stop murder and genocide. This complicated story is largely a record of heroism and dedication, but it comes with a tangled legacy.

During World War 1, the “war to end all wars,” scores of Jewish soldiers served in the armed forces of the Russian Empire, the country that legally discriminated against them and locked them in the Pale of Settlement. As part of Russia’s troops, Jewish soldiers went to battle for “czar and fatherland” and fought against the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. Not only Jewish soldiers but also Jewish commissioned officers were present in significant numbers in the armies of the Triple Alliance. The case of unconverted Jews in the Russian army and navy was different. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a professor at Northwestern University and a historian of Jews in the former Russian Empire, commented: “There were no Jewish officers in the Russian army during World War 1. Russia’s public opinion considered those awarded with all three Crosses of St. George (plus a medal) as ad hoc officers, and there were dozens of those, but they were never formally promoted and allowed to take commission.” Specifically in Galicia, in the areas that are now part of the embattled Ukraine, Jews from the Austro-Hungarian troops and Jews from the Russian troops died for their respective countries with the cry “Shema, Israel” burning on their desiccated lips.

The creation of the Red Army led, for the first time in European history, to the rise of many senior Jewish field officers and top generals. Probably the most celebrated Jewish commander of the Red Army was the Bessarabian-born Iona Yakir, who distinguished himself while fighting White army troops at Odessa in 1919 and during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920. (Yakir and other top generals would be purged in 1937, when Stalin beheaded the Red Army of some of its most senior commanders.) Another legendary Jewish general was Solomon Slepak, hero of the Civil War in Russia’s Far East. (As Jewish refuseniks in Moscow, my parents and I got to know Vladimir Slepak, Prisoner of Zion and a leading refusenik activist, who had inherited from his father the fearlessness of a Jewish zealot.) Most of the Jewish Red Army commanders came from the former Pale and grew up in traditional Jewish families; they remade themselves in the name of the Revolution and were prepared to die for it.

Another perspective, also bearing light on the outpouring of international support and military aid to Ukraine as she fights Russia’s invading armies, could be found in the Spanish Civil War, which was in some ways an abandoned rehearsal of World War 2. Significant numbers of Jews from the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States fought with the Republican Army against General Franco. That was, perhaps, the last time in history that an international contingent of Jewish Communists and Socialists volunteered to fight against fascism. At the dawn of World War 2, tens of thousands of Jewish soldiers and field officers defended Poland against the Nazi invasion from the West as they also fought the Soviet invasion from the East. (Several thousand Jewish-Polish soldiers and officers would subsequently fight against the Nazis and their allies as part of General Anders’s army in 1943-1945.)

For as many as 350,000-500,000 Jews who served in the Red Army and Navy during World War 2, fighting the Nazis was, simultaneously, a Soviet patriotic war of liberation and a Jewish avenging war against the murderers of the Jewish people. In the words of Ilya Ehrenburg, spoken and published in August 1941, “Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Hitlerites have reminded me of something else: my mother’s name was Hannah, I am a Jew. I say this with pride. Hitler hates us more than anything. And this adorns us” (tr. Joshua Rubenstein).

It’s still inspiring to revisit these lines today, but it’s also painful to read them at the time when Putin’s armies are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. I also don’t like it when Jewish polemicists in the West refer to the land of my native language and culture as “Nazi Russia.” So many of the ex-Soviet Jews of my generation had grandparents who fought the Nazis first in the occupied Soviet territories—from the White Sea to the Volga plains, from the Neva to the Dnieper, from the forests of Belarus to the Caucasus mountains, and later in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. My paternal grandfather Peysakh (Pyotr) Shrayer volunteered first during the “winter” Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40 and then again in the summer of 1941, immediately following the Nazi invasion. The war took him from the Leningrad Front to Königsberg in East Prussia. He told stories about German women begging him, a young lieutenant commander, and other Soviet Jewish field officers, many of them native speakers of Yiddish, to protect them against the rage and sexual violence of Soviet soldiers in 1945. Jews from all over the vast Soviet Union—Ukraine, Belarus, European Russia, Siberia, Caucasus, Central Asia—battled the Nazis and their accomplices. But there were also some soldiers and officers with Jewish roots in the armies of the Third Reich; it would be dishonest to dismiss this opaque and uncomfortable page of history.

World War 2 may have been the last war in Europe, in which overwhelming numbers of Jews from many countries fought and died for a Jewish cause—on the Eastern Front, in Sicily, on the beaches of Normandy. I would also argue that all the subsequent wars after 1945, in which Jewish men and women fought for a Jewish cause, have been fought not in Europe but in the Near East—for the cause of Israel’s survival and security. Starting with the Israeli War of Independence, and subsequently during the Sinai War of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Jews in military uniform, among them veterans of World War 2 and their children, were fighting for a Jewish homeland rather than European countries that never fully made them feel at home.

Different sources put the number of Ukraine’s Jews between 50,000 and 100,000. How many of them can fight, and how many have taken up arms to defend their country and their homes?

All of this finally brings me back to the Jews who are fighting in Ukraine and for Ukraine today. Different sources put the number of Ukraine’s Jews between 50,000 and 100,000. How many of them can fight, and how many have taken up arms to defend their country and their homes? This kind of data is difficult to obtain, but there is no question that significant numbers of Ukraine’s Jewish citizens are fighting the Russian invasion as members of the regular military units and of the territorial defense forces. To complicate the picture even further, some sources suggest that there are already several hundred Israeli veterans and military advisers deployed in Ukraine, with more to join their ranks. (Given Israel’s official neutrality, this information is very difficult to obtain or corroborate.)

But what about Russia’s troops now massacring Ukraine? Are there Jewish soldiers and officers among their ranks? There is no data in my possession about Jews in the invading units of the Russian army. There is, however, plenty of data to suggest that Russia’s propaganda machine has insidiously tried to manipulate Jewish history in attempting to give Russia’s invasion a semblance of a noble cause that has its foundation in what in Soviet—and Russian—historiography is referred to as the Great Patriotic War. The much-debated Z painted on Russia’s tanks is not just Zapad (“West” in Russian) or za pobedu (“for victory”), nor is it only the first initial of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish and the stated target of Russia’s assassination squads. Z might also be interpreted as Zion, and in the language of the tireless conspiracy theorists of post-Soviet space, Russia’s war against Ukraine could also be envisioned as either fighting against a “Jewish takeover” or “liberating” Ukraine from Jew-murdering “Nazis.” Such rhetoric is an insult to Jewish memory.

Z might also be interpreted as Zion, and in the language of the tireless conspiracy theorists of post-Soviet space, Russia’s war against Ukraine could also be envisioned as either fighting against a “Jewish takeover” or “liberating” Ukraine from “Nazis.”

I hope and pray there are no Jews among the unlucky ones doomed by Putin and his henchmen to slaughter Ukrainian people and Ukrainian statehood. Russia is still home to some 150,000 Jews. There are, not surprisingly, Jewish chaplains in the Russian armed forces. However unlikely, a scenario of the Jewish defenders of Ukraine confronting Russia’s expeditionary forces that include Jewish conscripts or commissioned officers strikes me as particularly nightmarish. Jews dying for Ukraine and in Ukraine as she fights Russia’s invasion is the dance macabre to which I referred earlier, and this performance of death brings back the memories of Jewish soldiers rising with bayonets from the opposing trenches of World War 1. The war in Ukraine has thrown into the sharpest possible relief the historical predicament of Jews who have remained in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and the rapidly increased aliyah from the warring post-Soviet countries only makes this point more palpable.

Giving Ukraine’s patriotic war Jewish parameters or dragging Israel into this war strikes me as wrong and misguided. Ukraine and her people, Jewish Ukrainians among them, are fighting on their land for a just cause. But this is a Ukrainian cause, not a Jewish or Israeli cause. Those who fault Israel for its neutrality or pressure Israel into openly siding with Ukraine in this military conflict should be reminded of the fact that the founders of the Jewish state made a break with Europe and its history. I see not just pragmatism and diplomatic caution but also wisdom and strength in Naftali Bennett’s position on the war in Ukraine. Israel is saving lives for Israel and for the world, and it has already received thousands of refugees from Ukraine. I’m not just taking about Ukrainian Jews caught between the prospects of dying in Ukraine and surviving in Israel, but about Ukrainians who are not Jewish and are part of this horrendous refugee crisis.

Giving Ukraine’s patriotic war Jewish parameters or dragging Israel into this war therefore strikes me as wrong and misguided.

Let me conclude with a reflection on the heroism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has refused to bow down to Putin’s murderous generals. The Soviet-born American journalist Vladislav Davidzon recently called Zelenskyy “the bravest Jew on earth.” Such statements are impossible to prove or disprove. Yet Davidzon, who reports from Ukraine and is intimately familiar with the texture of its post-Soviet society, may well be correct in his praise and assessment. The American writer Gal Beckerman, known for his book about the Soviet Jewry movement, recently spoke of Zelenskyy’s giving “the world a Jewish hero.” Whether intentionally or not, calling Zelenskyy a Jewish hero forces Jewish questions onto conversations about Ukraine’s patriotic war.

Let me conclude with a reflection on the heroism of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has refused to bow down to Putin’s murderous generals. The Soviet-born American journalist Vladislav Davidzon recently called Zelenskyy “the bravest Jew on earth.” Such statements are impossible to prove or disprove. Yet Davidzon, who reports from Ukraine and is intimately familiar with the texture of the county’s post-Soviet society, may well be correct in his praise and assessment. The American writer Gal Beckerman, known for his book about the Soviet Jewry movement, recently spoke of Zelenskyy’s giving “the world a Jewish hero.” Whether intentionally or not, calling Zelenskyy a Jewish hero forces Jewish questions onto conversations about Ukraine’s patriotic war.

The situation in Ukraine is indeed remarkable. Has a European nation ever had a democratically elected president of Jewish origin? I’m deliberately discounting both Yakov Sverdlov, nominally the first president of Soviet Russia, and Mátyás Rákosi, Hungary’s Stalinist dictator, both of whom were born to Jewish families. When was the last time, since Leon Trotsky, that a European country at war had a Jew as a defense minister? Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jew born and raised in an educated Russian-speaking family in central Ukraine, is not only Ukraine’s president but also the country’s commander-in-chief. Add to the mix Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, who is also of Jewish origin (the Slavic reznik refers to shochet, the Jewish ritual slaughter of animals). Now you start to wonder if the river of postwar Jewish history hasn’t reversed its course. I so admire the great courage and strength of President Zelenskyy, who met his destiny when the enemy stood at Ukraine’s gates. What I’m less comfortable with is the symbolic ghettoization of Zelenskyy’s heroism.

Those who fault Israel for its neutrality or pressure Israel into openly entering this military conflict should be reminded of the fact that the founders of the Jewish state made a break with Europe and its history.

As I was finishing this piece, I decided to turn for guidance to a Ukrainian friend whom I have known for over a decade. Her name is Nika Naliota, and she has given me written permission to use her name and to quote her comments. Nika Naliota lives in Odessa. Her origins are Polish and Catholic. She is a writer, advanced practitioner of yoga, and an ardent Ukrainian patriot. When we first met, Nika used to write about books for mainstream Russian publications. I loved her book reviews because they were distinguished by Odessan wit and verbal vibrancy. Nika subsequently stopped writing for Russian publications. As I typed these lines, she was in Bulgaria, where she had taken her daughter to stay with a friend. As member of the territorial defense, Nika was about to make her way back home to Odessa in anticipation of fighting the Russian troops. She was bringing back a cargo of medical supplies and equipment.

The questions I asked Nika may strike some of the readers as naïve or simplistic. But I deliberately phrased them both simply and starkly so as to get to heart of the matter. I asked Nika as we communicated via Messenger: “I keep thinking of what would have happened if, G-d forbid, if I had still still been living in Moscow today … So how do they feel about Zelenskyy? As a hero of Ukraine? As a Jewish hero?” Nika fired back a long answer. Please read it carefully, for every word here carries multiple significance: “That he [Zelenskyy] is a Jew they no longer remember. And he has been forgiven much, even though there are things one could recall … but not now. Strange as it may seem, he has shown himself to be a much better commander-in-chief than Porokh [Ukraine’s previous president Petro Poroshenko], even though everybody was afraid that it would be the other way around. People think of [Zelenskyy] as a hero of Ukraine, exactly that. We’re a multinational country, a large Jewish diaspora, Bulgarians, Moldovans, Tatars, Russians of course, Poles like myself, Germans, Gagauzes, Magyars and so many others you can find here … So Zelenskyy is now first and foremost the president of this country.”

I agree with my brave and outspoken Odessan friend, she in whose literary veins flows the tradition of Isaac Babel, that great chronicler of Jewish heroism and Jewish death in Ukraine. In these days of war and carnage, Ukraine’s darker episodes of history have all but vanished into the background, while the country’s best aspirations of tolerance and diversity have finally been realized as Ukraine and her defenders stand in the path of Putin’s aggression. The fighters for Ukraine are of many origins, and they are united by a hope larger than themselves and their individual destinies.

Let us not claim Ukrainian heroes. Let Ukraine have her own new heroes, be they of Ukrainian, Russian, Polish or Jewish origin. Ukraine needs them, these soldiers and martyrs, now more than ever.

Maxim D. Shrayer is an author and a professor at Boston College. His recent books include “Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature” and “A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas.” Shrayer’s newest book is “Of Politics and Pandemics.”