Photo: Stephen Bandera speaks at the April 11 press conference ( Myroslava Oleksiuk, ePOSHTA www.eposhta.com)
(By Marco Levytsky and Alexandra Chyczij)
A project to memorialize the site of mass killings of Jews by the Nazi occupiers of World War Two Ukraine is being cited as a stepping stone to improving Ukrainian-Jewish relations in Canada.
“If we can show success in a place like Sambir, then my goodness, our communities can come together and can work together on projects. And what a tremendous success that would be, not just the community, but for the new Ukrainian state that can finally exit from its post-Soviet era into a free independent state in the full meaning of which we understand such countries in the West,” said Etobicoke Centre MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, who is spearheading this project along with Mark Freiman, President of the Canadian Jewish Congress, at an April 11 press conference held at the Ukrainian National Federation building in Toronto, to which Ukrainian News was hooked up to by speakerphone.
“This stands as an example to both of our communities about the possibilities of positive relationships of finding projects that mobilize the best in our cultures, that promote understanding. We never forget the past, but we need to look to the future as well,” echoed Freiman.
Nevertheless, he noted that rebuilding relations may be a long process.
“Our respective communities have everything to gain by improving understanding, by finding areas in which we can cooperate. I think it is the case that communities and nations that are horribly damaged by history need time to heal and sometimes the scars remain a long time. So the steps sometimes have to be small steps and they have to be measured steps. Confidence has to be built on both sides,” he said.
Left to Right: Mark Freiman, Merlakh Sheykhet, Borys Wrzesnewskyj at the community meeting at the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation, April 8. ( Myroslava Oleksiuk, ePOSHTA www.eposhta.com)
Joining Wrzesnewskyj and Freiman were Merlakh Sheykhet, Director for Ukraine, American Union of Councils of Jews in the Former Soviet Union, and Stephen Bandera, grandson of World War II Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who was hired by Wrzesnewskyj to work as an archivist on the project.
In a statement to the Ukrainian community of Canada, released at the press conference, Sheykhet noted that “the history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations includes many positive pages” including Jewish support for Ukrainian independence starting from the 19 century, during the 1918-1919 period, Jewish participation in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as part of the underground struggle against Soviet occupation during and after WW2 and “the total solidarity and full support In the Jewish community for today’s Ukrainian statehood beginning from the 1991 referendum and continuing down to the present day.”
He noted there were darker parts of Jewish history in Ukraine, but added that “those parts occurred at a time those parts occurred at a time when Ukraine was not independent and that Ukrainian yearnings for independence were brutally exploited in the interests of Nazi ideology and later by communism, monstrous totalitarian ideologies that competed in brutality and in the self interest of their dictatorships.”
“We cannot grant forgiveness for the lost lives of innocent Jewish victims but we MUST understand that some among the Ukrainian people were enlisted to serve ideologies that at bottom were completely at odds with the historical reality of Ukrainian sympathy to the Jews and the fact that our communities lived side by side for hundreds of years. Horrible influences encouraged some Ukrainians to participate in implementing Nazi and Communistic ideology. We know that the majority of the Ukrainian people never glorified such people, just as the Jewish community never glorified Jews who became communists.
“Jewish philosophy assigns primary guilt to the initiators of the brutality,” Sheykhet added.
Bandera noted that the Sambir project was based on “age-old Chris tian principles” and added that “relations between our communities need a lot more success stories a lot more examples of positive cooperation.”
He also related how, during the Deschenes Commission hearings on War Criminals in Canada, his family was represented by a Canadian Jewish lawyer and was, at one stage, approached by lawyers for Ernst Zundel who were told flatly that they would have no dealings with Holocaust deniers because Ukrainian nationalists were also imprisoned in concentration camps and documented the fate of Jewish prisoners.
Two-and-a-half years ago, Wrzesneswkyj was approached by Freiman, to help him in his effort to commemorate the burial ground of his forefathers in Sambir, Lviv Oblast, and took up the cause without hesitation. Freiman’s parents, survivors of the Holocaust, lived to tell their son about the vibrant 10,000 strong Jewish community in pre-war Sambir, and the horrors which befell them at the hands of the Nazis. Freiman has made it his personal mission to ensure that the Jews who died in Sambir are properly remembered.
After his first meeting with Freiman, Wrzesneswkyj resolved to find out what had happened to the Jewish community in Sambir. He retained historian Professor Orest Subtelny, whose research revealed that prior to WWII, Sambir was a multicultural town of 26,000 residents: 12,000 Poles, 10,000 Jews and 4,000 Ukrainians. During WWII there had been three massacres in Sambir. In the first, 1,200 Ukrainians were executed by the Soviets. In the subsequent two massacres, which took place in Sambir’s Jewish cemetery and in nearby Rawniki Forest, the Nazis exterminated most of Sambir’s Jewish population. In the end, only 100 of Sambir’s 10,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.
In the 1970’s, the Soviets completed the work of the Nazis by ploughing under the ancient Jewish cemetery in Sambir and ensured that only an overgrown mound of earth remained in Rawniki Forest to bear testament to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis.
Wrzesneswkyj also solicited the assistance of Bandera to travel with him and Freiman to Sambir to see what could be done. There they learned that a local candidate, seeking to gain questionable advantage in a mayoralty race, removed the Star of David which marked the site of the Jewish cemetery, and replaced it with three large crosses, ostensibly because there were also Christians buried in the cemetery.
While in Ukraine, the Canadians met Sheykhet, a soft-spoken man who has devoted his life to preserving Ukraine’s Jewish cultural heritage and Wrzesneswkyj flew him to Toronto to meet with the Ukrainian and Jewish diasporas.
April 8, Sheykhet addressed an audience of several hundred Ukrainian Canadians at the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation in Toronto in flawless Ukrainian, a language he insisted on lecturing in at the Odesa Institute of Telecommunications, even during Soviet times. He spoke of the many centuries of peaceful co-existence of Ukrainians and Jews, as well as the dark pages, which he believes were instigated by third forces, which continue to sow discord between the two communities.
Iryna Korpan, host of OMNI’s Svitohliad program, spoke about the great sacrifices many Ukrainians made during WWII to shelter their Jewish neighbours and friends. Iryna’s grandmother, who was widowed during the war and left with three young children, was named a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, for sheltering three Jewish neighbours in her home during the Nazi occupation. Tragically, she and her Jewish neighbours were betrayed, and she was executed by the Gestapo. Iryna called upon the Jewish community to ensure that Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsy be recognized in Yad Vashem as a Righteous Gentile.
Alti Rodal, Executive Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative, funded by Ukrainian Canadian businessman James Temerty, asked to address the audience. She stressed that the evening could not go by without speaking of the Ukrainian enablers of the Nazis and called upon the people of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government to make amends for the past.
At the conclusion of the evening, Freiman observed that the spirit of cooperation shared with Wrzesneswkyj and Bandera was emblematic of the respect that all Canadians have for the Rule of Law, human rights and equality.
When asked at the April 11 press conference about holding a similar meeting with the Jewish community, Freiman replied: “I am very focussed on beginning to find ways to bring people together to see the commonalities, but I have to be honest. I’m focussed on success rather than failure and putting people into positions where they will do the right thing because they understand it’s the right thing to do rather than prematurely putting them into situations where they feel cornered, trapped, accused of one thing or another, and the result of that sort of meeting would put us back rather than forward. When we have our meetings they’ll be meetings that are premised on ideas not on confrontation.
“I apologize for the slowness of the process, but we have a lot of misunderstanding to un do and we have to find the right conditions and the right confidence building moves that allows us to see our common interests,” he added.
Wrzesnewskyj later told Ukrainian News that Freiman had nevertheless committed to holding such a meeting within three months.
Marco Levytsky is the editor and publisher of Ukrainian News, a bi-weekly newspaper distributed across Canada.
