Article by Boris Czerny

Russia’s unbearable aggression against Ukraine is combined with the fact that the country under attack has a problematic relationship with its past, to say the least. The history of its national construction and its memory of the Shoah sometimes violate Jewish memory. Boris Czerny examines the place accorded to the Shoah in Ukraine, and asks what it means in the debate surrounding the country’s eventual integration into the European Union.

The history of relations between Jews and Ukrainians came back with insistence from the beginning of the war initiated by Putin. It is an essentially tragic history, which Boris Czerny revisits, but reminding us that it is not limited to acts of violence. Through the evocation of Dovbush, a popular hero of the Carpathians, and of Rabbi Israel Ben Eliezer, known as the “Baal Shem Tov”, he focuses on the web of linguistic and cultural exchanges that demonstrate the richness of the links between Ukrainians and Jews and that constitute the complex material of a common past.

Nicknamed the ‘Je Sais Tout’ brothers, Joseph, Salomon and Théodore Reinach represent both the academic excellence and the extreme assimilation of French Jews at the turn of the 20th century….

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