Faina Vaynerman was born in a large Ukrainian shtetl Piytegory, about 50 miles from Kyiv, where, historically, Jews and Ukrainians lived side by side. She was only two years old when World War II broke out. Fortunately, she and her parents were able to flee from the Ukraine in her uncle’s truck. Otherwise, she said, they would have shared the fate of the other Jews in their shtetl, who perished from the many massacres that were carried out in Europe.
Faina shares her
family history going back another generation: “In 1919, when my father was seven
years old, dozens of Jews from our shtetl
were forced to gather in a local synagogue. Among them were my grandma, Chana
Shlima, her older daughter Rivka, and three-year-old son. The Ukrainians set it
on fire and whoever tried to escape the fire was shot. My two grandmothers were
murdered by the Ukrainian nationalist anti-Semites. My other grandma, Hinda
Khmelinsky had found her death in 1941. They were murdered only because they
were Jewish.”
Faina, who grew up
in the Soviet years and whose native tongue is Russian, was a journalist. “I
was among a group of journalists approved by the KGB who got to ask a question
to the Russian president Boris Yeltsin in January of 1992,” recalls Faina. “He
came to our city Ulyanovsk after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he was
completely drunk – he was a drunkard – and I had an insight that this country
is damaged, that my son’s future was weak and unsettled. I didn’t have any more
relatives in the Ukraine or in Russia, except for one cousin, now in her 70s. I
was the last from a big extended family who was still present in the former
Soviet Union.”
After the breakup
of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many thousands of Jews fled the
Ukraine, emigrating mostly to the U.S.A. and Israel, although others sought
refuge in Canada, Germany, and Australia, among other countries. It was not
until 1993 that Faina, together with her husband and son, arrived in Baltimore,
following her sister and brother and dozens of cousins.
Faina who
considers herself Jewish, rather than Ukrainian or Russian, opines on the
current Russian-Ukrainian situation. “I can tell you that never in the human
beings’ history did war ever solve any problems. War is always destructive. War
doesn’t bring peace; war brings hate and blood.”
She notes that
after World War II anti-Semitism only increased in the Ukraine. “I started
first grade in 1946, exactly a year after the war ended. I will never forget
how our town, Uman, was so poor that everyone had to bring their own stool to
sit on in school! There was a sweet little non-Jewish boy in my class who was
always hungry. One day, he got angry with me because he wanted to ring the bell
that the teacher had asked me to ring at the end of the lesson. He called me an
offensive word for Jew. I remember that it didn’t matter how I was so nice to
him or how much pity I felt for him by sharing my lunch with him regularly. I
was immediately reminded who I am. At that young age, I already knew what it
meant to be humiliated for being a Jew. My reaction was to take revenge
immediately. I smashed the school bell over his head. Thank G-d, I didn’t break
his skull; he got only a bruise on his forehead. My teacher punished me by
sending me home to bring Mama to school. I didn’t rush to go home.”
Faina continued to
experience anti-Semitism even as a teen when she aspired to go to medical
school in Odessa. Because she was Jewish, she was not awarded a “golden medal,”
despite receiving straight As. Her uncle told her that only if her father had
15,000 rubles to bribe the medical school would she be accepted.
“There was always
a reminder – you are not equal to others,” says Faina. “I attempted to get into
medical school twice. I got excellent grades and high grades nationally, and still
I wasn’t accepted. Girls from the Ukrainian villages with lower grades did get
in, however, although their knowledge was nothing compared to mine.”
Faina says she had
no inkling that Putin would start a war against Ukraine. “I couldn’t believe
it. I was in shock. In Russia, you cannot say that Russia entered a war with
Ukraine; you have to say ‘a special operation for de-militarization and
de-Nazification’ of the Ukraine. This is how Putin insists on referring to the
war. I condemn Putin’s actions against Ukraine in this war; he is a dictator
with enormous power in his country. But in my opinion, Zelensky made a lot of
mistakes, and America also had some part in this. Biden didn’t have the guts to
talk to Putin before he started this.”
Faina continues,
“President Zelensky is not a hero. He was a successful, gifted showman, who
didn’t even consider himself Jewish before the war when he befriended Bandera [Ukrainian
nationalist] people. He came into power without any governing skills; he didn’t
know what to do with his power. As president, he participated in erecting many
monuments to Bandera – his followers in the Ukraine are typical Nazis of our
day. Many monuments of the heroes of WW II were destroyed; in their place are
the monuments to Bandera and other war criminals.”
Although no one
can predict what the end will bring, Faina says, “Some of my colleagues and
other people I know in Russia – Jews and gentiles – are suppressed and afraid
to speak. Meanwhile, many Russians are not afraid to speak. They are protesting
the war in big crowds. I believe that nothing good can happen from the war. I
don’t have any idea of what Putin wants to achieve, what he can achieve with
this action.”
* * *
Aleksandr* was
also born and raised in the Ukraine; he and his parents left their homeland in
1990, when he was 16, along with most other Jews leaving the Ukraine. Those
Jews who did stay behind were mostly concentrated in the bigger cities – they
were mixed marriages and those who had started businesses. None of his
relatives stayed behind.
Like all Jews who
lived in Russia and the Ukraine, Russian is Aleksandr’s native tongue. Yet he
considers himself neither Russian nor Ukrainian but, rather, Jewish?.? “I don’t
take sides in this war; I just try to be an impartial observer,” he says. “It
is not like there are two sides in the Russian-speaking ?Jewish community, one
supporting the Russian side and one supporting the Ukrainian side. Because we are
frum people, we also must consider
the Torah view of what is going on. The majority of people may support the
Ukraine against its oppressor. You won’t find too many Russian-speaking people here
in America who will support Putin and Russia – especially frum Jews. We have to realize that Hashem is not sending all this
trouble to these people arbitrarily. It is for a reason. The Ukraine had a
long, long bloody history with Jews.”
Aleksandr mentions
how at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, before the collapse of
the Soviet Union, he, as child, experienced very strong anti-Semitism in the
Ukraine, whether it was on a government level or a local level.
“We always felt
like we are foreigners there, as Jews, and we don’t belong there. I remember being
picked on as a kid in school; there was fighting, name-calling, and kicking all
the time. Bullying and abuse happened on a daily basis for everyone in our
family.” In Aleksandr’s opinion, the most anti-Semitic people in the USSR were
Ukrainians. “I asked my friends from Russia, Azerbaidjan and Uzbekistan, and
they told me totally different stories. Although they experienced
anti-Semitism, it was incomparable to what we went through in the Ukraine; it
was so fierce. As a kid, you are afraid to say you are a Jew. If they called
you a Jew, it was as if you had some sort of leprosy; you were an outcast.”
Fast forwarding to
the present situation, Alexsandr remarks, “No one could have expected what
happened; the Ukrainians couldn’t believe it. They thought that Putin would
never start a full-fledged war. I blame Russia for the war, for sure, but
indirectly I blame weak presidents in the Ukraine and the United States. The
post-USSR Ukraine was a corrupted country; Russia is very corrupted, too. From
the bottom up, it is one big corruption system, and on top of it is Putin.
Although there is
a democratic-elected Jewish president, who has the love and support of 73% of
the Ukrainian people, the society is still corrupt. Their army did not prepare
for a war although they are managing to push Russia back – which is a surprise
for everyone.
“As an outsider, I
can say that Zelensky is a relatively inexperienced person, who didn’t prepare
his country for war – because the Ukrainian army and society is corrupted – and
now he is begging everybody for help, trying to drag Europe and the U.S. into
the war, and they don’t want to give it,” continues Aleksandr. “He wants NATO
to impose a no-fly zone over ?the Ukraine, which means a declaration of war
between NATO, the U.S. and Russia. That could lead to World War III. They are
defending themselves against? a? corrupt army – the Russian army – which is
also not prepared. So why is the Ukraine winning? Because they have very, very
strong motivation. I see the spirit of the Ukrainians is very high. Russian
army soldiers have zero motivation and strategy, despite all their tanks and
aircraft. That’s why in over two weeks, they didn’t manage to conquer any major
city.”
Aleksandr, like
everyone else, has no idea how this is going to end, but he does feel that
Putin cannot back out after putting so much effort into it. It wouldn’t look
good for him. “Putin ha?s never understood Ukraine and? ?the Ukrainian
mentality,” says Aleksandr. “He looks at the Russian and Ukrainian people as
one Slavic people. He feels that NATO is threatening to Russia, and the Ukraine
openly wanted to join NATO. He saw that as his red line, thinking that he
cannot have NATO missiles at Russia’s front door.”
Aleksandr shares
that the vast majority of the Russians support this so-called “special
operation” and believe the brainwashing propaganda they watch on state
television about it – they have been convinced that the Ukraine has a
Bandera-like gang that are Nazi-like and that the Russian military effort will?
?purify it from Nazification. Russia even invented a new official term, the
reason for the invasion, called “Denazification and Demilitarization of
Ukraine.” They believe that the whole of Ukraine, including Zelensky who is a
Jew, are all Nazis.
“I have sympathy
for the Ukraine, but I don’t take sides because I am not thinking like a
secular person,” explains Aleksandr. “If I were a secular person, I would take
the side of the Ukrainians, of course, but I think – as a Torah person – that
Hashem is paying back Ukraine, where Jews were murdered in the bloodiest
pogroms ever experienced. The statue of the Ukrainian national hero, Bogdan
Khmelnitsky, the Hitler of the?1?7th century, who slaughtered
hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Ukraine, proudly stands in the center of
Kiev.
I remember my
grandmother told me about her childhood experience during the civil war pogroms
in the Ukraine in 1920. She told me there were horse-drawn wagons carrying
corpses of decapitated Jews. Her mother was taken somewhere by the Cossacks;
her father begged to free her and managed to get her back. They were among the few
who managed to survive the pogrom in their shtetl.”
Aleksandr concludes,
“Someone said to me, ‘It’s a new generation, and the president is a Jew.’ No,
sorry! In the Holocaust, who do you think murdered over a million Ukrainian
Jews? The Ukrainians were the most brutal people, who tortured the Jews and
carried out the execution of millions of Ukrainian Jews under the guidance and
supervision of Germans. There are thousands of mass graves in Ukraine.
Ukrainian soil is soaked with Jewish blood more than any other country. My
great-grandmother, who survived the Ukrainian pogroms 20 years earlier, was
shot together with her whole family by Ukrainians in 1941. It looks like Hashem
does to them what they did to us – that is what you are seeing now. No, I am
not on the Ukrainian side. Let them experience a little bit of nekama
(revenge) from Hashem, for all the brutality over the centuries they did to us. Everything happens for a reason; nothing is
accidental. That’s a Torah's perspective. Hashem sends to every nation what
they deserve.?"?
* a pseudonym
