KIEV (Kiov), capital of Ukraine.
The Jewish Community before 1667
Kiev's central position on the River Dnieper at the commercial crossroads of Western Europe and the Orient attracted Jewish settlers (*Rabbanites and *Karaites) from the foundation
Like the rest of the Jews in the principality of Lithuania, the Kiev community was expelled in 1495. When the decree was revoked (1503), the community was reestablished. However, in 1619 the Christian merchants obtained from King Sigismund III a prohibition on permanent settlement of Jews or their acquisition of real estate in the town. They were allowed to come into Kiev for trading purposes alone and might remain one day only in an inn assigned to them. In spite of this, many Jews continued to live in the town under the protection of the Vojevoda (district governor) and noblemen in their properties in town (who saw them as a source of income). Russian sources relate that Jews were killed in Kiev during the *Chmielnicki massacres (1648). On the demand of the citizens, John II Casimir of Poland and Czar Alexis renewed the prohibition on Jewish settlement (1654). This became final with the annexation of Kiev to Russia (1667). The Russian Orthodox academy there fomented hatred of the Jews and its students attacked any Jew they found trading in the town.
After a break of about 150 years the community of Kiev was reestablished in 1793, after the second partition of Poland. In 1798 the community acquired land for a cemetery. The earlier conflict between the Christian citizens and the Jews began once more. While the Jews struggled for settlement in Kiev, the economic and commercial center of the southwestern region of Russia, the citizens persistently endeavored to expel them, basing their claim on the status quo since Sigismund III and adding that "holy" Kiev was "profaned" by the presence of the Jews.
In spite of this in 1809 there were 452 Jews in Kiev (of about 20,000 total population), and their numbers rose by 1815 to about 1,500 (not including transients), with two synagogues and other communal institutions. The citizens proceeded with the demand to expel the Jews but owing to the negative stand of the governor, Czar Alexander I ordered them to leave the city. Eventually Cẓar *Nicholas I acceded to the demands of the citizens and at the end of 1827 residence in Kiev was forbidden to Jews. In part due to representations by state officials, who pointed out that the expulsion would worsen economic conditions in the town, the execution of the decree was twice deferred. In 1835, however, on the expiry of the last postponement, the Jews left the town, and the Jewish community facilities ceased to function. Despite this, they still played an important part in its economic life, for Jewish merchants came in their hundreds to the large annual fairs held from 1797 in Kiev in January. With their assistants and servants, they made up 50–60% of the fairs' participants. In 1843 Jewish temporary visitors were officially permitted, provided that they resided and bought food in two specially appointed inns. These were leased by the municipality to Christian agents, who were empowered to deliver to the police any Jew who did not stay in them. At the beginning of the reign of Alexander II these inns were abolished (1858), and instead a special payment to the municipality was levied upon the Jews as compensation for the losses caused by the abolishment of the inns. In 1861 two suburbs, Lyebed and Podol, were assigned to those Jews entitled to reside in Kiev (wealthy merchants and industrialists and their employees, members of the free professions, and craftsmen). The number of Jews in Kiev increased to 3,013 (3% of the total population) in 1863 and to 13,803 (11.8%) in 1872.
In May 1881 a pogrom raged in the streets of the city, supported and encouraged by the governor-general, General Drenteln. Jewish houses and shops were looted, and many people were injured; 762 families were completely ruined. The damage caused was evaluated at 1,750,000 roubles. From that date the authorities began sporadically to investigate the residence rights of the Jews in Kiev. Until 1917 the city became notorious for the police " oblavy " ("hunt attacks") for Jews without residence rights. For example, expelled in 1883
In the wake of Jewish revolutionary activity, a large-scale pogrom occurred on Oct. 18, 1905. Neither army nor police controlled the rioters, who ran amok unhindered for three days. Indeed, soldiers protected the hooligans from the Jewish *self-defense organization. The rioters attacked the houses of the wealthy, but their attacks were mainly directed against the poor suburbs. However, the pogrom did not interrupt the development of the community, which became one of the wealthiest in Russia as well as one of the most diversified socially. In 1910 there were 4,896 Jewish merchants in the town, 42% of all the merchants there, but nevertheless 25% of the community had to apply for Passover alms during that same year. The community was officially recognized in 1906 as the "Jewish Representation for Charity Affairs at the Municipal Council." Its income from the meat tax (see *korobka) and other sources amounted to 300,000 rubles annually. A Jewish hospital for the poor which served the whole of Ukraine was opened in 1862, followed by a hospital specializing in surgery, a clinic for eye diseases (under the direction of M. *Mandelstamm), and other welfare institutions. In 1898 a magnificent central synagogue was built by means of a donation from L. *Brodsky. From 1906 to 1921 S. *Aronson was rabbi of Kiev; notable as *kazyonny ravvin ("government-appointed rabbi") were Joshua Zuckerman, the first to be appointed to this office, and S.Z. Luria. Between 1911 and 1913 Kiev was the site of the notorious *Beilis blood libel trial and the town was then racked by the agitation of the members of the *Union of Russian People ("Black Hundreds"). In 1911, after the assassination of prime minister Stolypin by a Jew in Kiev, severe pogroms were on the point of breaking out there, but the authorities decided to restrain the rioters.
During World War I, residence restrictions in the town were lifted for Jewish refugees from the battle areas. The years 1917–20 were years of upheaval for the Jews of Kiev. With the February 1917 Revolution, all the residence restrictions were abolished and Jews at once began to stream into the town. In the census at the end of 1917, 87,246 Jews (19% of the total population) were registered. A democratic community was established, led by the Zionist Moses Nahum *Syrkin. Meetings and congresses of Russian and Ukrainian Jews were held in Kiev, the central institutions of Ukrainian Jewry were set up there, and Jewish writers and communal workers of every shade of opinion and party became active in the town. Books and newspapers were published and cultural institutions, led by the Hebrew *Tarbut and the Yiddish Kultur Lige, engaged in a variety of activities. In the spring of 1919, the number of Jews had grown to 114,524 (21%).
With the first conquest of the town by the Red Army, which lasted from February to August 1919, Kiev became a haven for refugees from the pogroms sweeping the provincial towns of Ukraine. The running of the Jewish community was handed over to the *Yevsektsiya, and the systematic destruction of communal institutions, traditional Jewish culture, and national parties began. With the retreat of the Red Army, an attempt was made to form a Jewish self-defense unit. When *Petlyura's forces entered the city they arrested the members of the self-defense unit and 36 of them were executed. A month after Kiev was occupied by *Denikin's "Volunteer Army," thugs initiated a period of pillage, rape, and murder of the Jews which lasted until the "Volunteers" were driven out by the Red Army (December 1919). The Jews in Kiev suffered heavily during the famine and typhus outbreak of 1920. In the August 1920 census they constituted one third of the town's population. In 1923 Kiev had 128,041 Jews (32%), 140,256 (27.3%) in 1926, and in 1939, 224,236 (of a total population of 845,726).
In the years 1920–22 the famine and typhus epidemic ravaged Kiev and took a heavy toll on the Jewish population. OZE, the JDC, and other relief organizations from abroad organized food and medical help. The Jews went through a process of proletarianization, engaging in physical labor or crafts; later
During the first 20 years of the Soviet regime, Kiev became a major center of the officially fostered Yiddish culture, with a school system catering to many thousands of pupils and students, culminating in institutes of higher education and learning, such as the department for Jewish culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1926) which in 1930 became the "Institute of Proletarian Jewish Culture" under the direction of Joseph Liberberg. This state-sponsored activity attracted even Jewish writers and scholars from the west, such as Meir *Wiener and others. Some valuable research works on Yiddish language and literature were published there. Many Yiddish poets and writers, among them David *Hofstein and Itzik *Feffer, lived and wrote in Kiev. There were also the All-Ukrainian Jewish State Theater, a Yiddish children's theater, Yiddish newspapers, journals, and publishing houses. In the early 1930s Liberberg and some of his associates headed a group of Yiddish intellectuals who went to the newly established Jewish autonomous region in *Birobidzhan to organize Jewish educational and cultural work there in conjunction with the Jewish academic institute in Kiev. Several years later, with the forcible liquidation of all Jewish institutions, including libraries and archives in Kiev, one of the most important centers of Soviet Yiddish culture ceased to exist.
The fall of the city to the Germans on Sept. 19, 1941 marked the end of Kiev Jewry. A considerable part of the Jews living in Kiev in 1939 were among the 335,000 evacuees; some managed to flee eastward to central Russia, just before the Nazi occupation. Between September 20–24 buildings in the Khreshchatik area where headquarters of German military units were housed blew up, and many German soldiers and officers were killed. Thousands of hostages, among them many Jews, were taken and executed. On September 26 the city commander convened a meeting in which participated Friedrich Jaeckeln, commander of police and SS on the Southern Front; Dr. Otto Rash, head of Einsatzgruppe C; and SS Colonel Paul Blobel, commander of Einsatzkommando 4a. It was decided to annihilate all the Jews of Kiev. Blobel was in charge of the execution, with the help of units of the German Police and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. On September 28 (Tishri 7) 2,000 notices in German, Ukrainian, and Russian were posted in Kiev, announcing that "All the Zhids (Jews) of Kiev and the suburbs are to appear on Monday, September 29, 1941, at 8:00 A.M. on the corner of Melnikovskaya and Decktiarovska streets [near the cemeteries]. They are to bring their documents, money, other valuables and warm clothes, linen, etc. Any Zhid found disobeying these orders will be shot. Citizens breaking into flats left by the Jews and taking possession of their belongings will be shot." (For Jew the derogatory word " zhid " was used and not the usual evrei.) Since the location was near the Petrovski goods railway station, and owing to the rumors about evacuation of the Jews to other towns or camps, nobody suspected what was coming. On the morning of September 29, tens of thousands of Jews concentrated there were led through Melnik Street to the Jewish cemetery in the Babi Yar ravine, stripped naked, and led in groups to the edge of the ravine, where they were machine-gunned, their bodies falling into the ravine. At the end of the day heaps of earth were thrown over the bodies, burying both dead and wounded. According to the official report of the S.S. unit in charge of the mass extermination, 33,771 Jews were murdered in Babi Yar on Sept. 29–30, 1941. A later report said that about 36,000 Jews were killed then.
Babi Yar continued to be a mass execution ground throughout the German occupation. On October 1–3 Einsatzkommando 5 murdered in Babi Yar 2,500–3,000 Jews, including 308 mentally ill. All the time Jewish prisoners of war, mostly from Darnitsa camp, were executed. Hiding in the city were many Jews, some in mixed marriages. Many of them were denounced by local Ukrainians, caught, and shot. From spring 1942, Jews who were caught were sent to labor camps in the city, such as that on Kerosinnaya Street (5,000 prisoners of war and 3,000 Jews), Pecherskaya Street, and Institutskaya Street. The number of inmates diminished due to selections, starvation, and daily killings. In May 1942 the Syretsk camp (near Babi Yar) was opened, and in December it housed 2,000 inmates, more than a third of them Jews. The regime was very cruel – prisoners were shot for the smallest infraction or for not being able to work. On August 18, 1943, 100 prisoners from Syretsk were taken to Babi Yar, and soon the group was enlarged to 321 inmates. Their task was to eradicate any sign of the mass graves in the ravine. A bonfire was made from railway ties, and excavators opened the graves. The prisoners, whose legs were in chains, took the bodies, searched them for valuables and gold teeth and fillings, and threw them into the bonfire; any bones remaining were ground, and the ashes spread around and leveled. A garden was planted on the site. The prisoners lived in two bunkers dug into the wall of the ravine, kept closed by an iron grate that was shut for the night; opposite them was a machine gun position. The Russian Fedor Yershov, a senior KGB officer, organized an escape group. They managed to find a key to the grates, a wire cutter to cut the chains, and a few knives. On September 28, 1943, they learned through the interpreter (a Jewish prisoner) Yakov Steyuk (Stein) that their work was finished and that the following day they were to be shot and cremated. At about 3 A.M. on September 29, they cut the chains, opened the grates, and escaped under the cover of fog. Many were machine-gunned, among them the leader Yershov, and only 15 succeeded in remaining alive until the liberation of Kiev on November 6, 1943 – among them nine Jews. The State Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes in Kiev could not locate graves to exhume in Babi Yar, so they set the approximate
In the struggle against *antisemitism in the Soviet Union, Babi Yar became a symbol of pro-Jewish support, crystallized in the poem Babi Yar by Yevgenii *Yevtushenko. Despite recurring requests by Soviet intellectuals, including Yevtushenko and Viktor Nekrasov, the Soviet authorities refused to erect a monument to those massacred there. Jewish survivors made attempts to hold a memorial day each year, circumspectly choosing the eve of the Day of Atonement. When in early 1959 the ravine was filled with earth, and Babi Yar was turned into a new residential area, there were protests from Jews and non-Jews alike. In 1961 a flood swept away the earth and destroyed the houses; many people were drowned. At the end of the 1960s, the ravine of Babi Yar remained a desolate wasteland. "In Babi Yar there is neither monument nor memorial" (Yevtushenko). It was only in 1976 that a stone with an inscription was put there, but it mentioned Soviet citizens, not Jews.
[Benjamin West /
Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)]
After World War II
At the end of World War II, when thousands of Jews began to return to liberated Kiev, they often encountered a hostile attitude on the part of the Ukrainian population, many of whom had been given, or had taken, the dwellings and jobs of the absent Jews. There were even isolated physical clashes between Jews and Ukrainians. In the 1959 census, their number was 154,000 (13.9% of the total population). Nearly 15% of them declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue. Out of about 14,000 Jews living in the smaller towns of the Kiev district, around 33% declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue. In 1979 there were 132,000 Jews in the city.
The only synagogue in Kiev, with room for about 1,000 persons, was situated downtown in the Podol quarter. On holidays, particularly on the Day of Atonement, also the memorial day of the Babi Yar massacre, several thousands attended the service, overflowing into the courtyard and the street. A number of services (*minyanim) were held in private homes, but when their existence was discovered, they were closed and the owners severely punished. A mikveh, a place for the ritual slaughtering of poultry, and a maẓẓah bakery were attached to the synagogue. From 1960 until 1966 the baking of maẓẓah was prohibited and several Jews were punished for baking them illegally in their homes. The last rabbi to officiate in Kiev was Rabbi Panets, who retired in 1960 and died in 1968; a new rabbi was not appointed. Until 1960 the synagogue board's chairman was Bardakh; the atmosphere was relatively relaxed, and visitors from abroad, who arrived in increasing numbers from the late 1950s, were cordially received. The situation changed abruptly in 1961, when a new board, headed by Gendelman, was appointed. Gendelman, in an aggressive manner, implemented meticulously the instructions of the Soviet authorities, harassed members of the congregation, and prevented any contact between them and foreign visitors. He was eventually forced to resign in 1967 because of the growing tension between him and the congregation.
In 1959, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of *Shalom Aleichem, a plaque was affixed to the house where he lived before World War I, bearing the text: "Here lived the famous Jewish writer Shalom Aleichem (Rabinovich)." Shortly afterward the plaque was replaced by a new one on which the words "famous Jewish" and "Rabinovich" were omitted. In May 1966 a group of Kiev Jews went to Moscow and submitted a petition to Mikhailova of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, about the establishment of a Yiddish theater in Kiev. The petition stressed the fact that 82 Jewish actors were ready to participate. M. Goldblat, one of the survivors of the Yiddish theater in the U.S.S.R. and the last director of the Yiddish theater in Kiev, declared his readiness to organize the new Yiddish theater. The petition also included a list of plays by Jewish Soviet and classic writers for the repertoire. The petition was rejected.
In 1957 four elderly Jews were sentenced in Kiev to several years of imprisonment for "Zionist activity." One of them was Baruch Mordekhai Weissman, whose Hebrew written diary about the "black years" was smuggled out and published anonymously in Israel, under the title "To my Brother in the State of Israel" (1957). At the trial Weissman was not accused of smuggling out his manuscript, but of keeping Hebrew newspapers and participating in a "Zionist circle."
In 1959 the Kiev municipality opened a new Jewish cemetery and decided to close the old one at Lukyanovka, near Babi Yar, which had been desecrated and partly destroyed during the Nazi occupation. Local and foreign Jews were allowed to transfer the remains of their relatives to the new cemetery if they defrayed the expenses involved. American rabbis arranged for the transfer of the remains of the ḥasidic rabbis of the Twersky family, and the president of Israel, Iẓḥak Ben-Zvi, received permission from the Soviet head of state to transfer to Israel the remains and the tombstone of his friend Ber *Borochov (1963).
Kiev continued to be a center of Yiddish writers, many of whom had served terms of imprisonment under Stalin. Among them were Itzik Kipnis, Hirsh Polyanker, Nathan Zbara, Eli Schechtman, and Yehiel Falikman. Several books in Yiddish and translations in Russian and Ukrainian were published between 1960 and 1970. The Ukrainian authorities usually prevented Jewish cultural events from being held in the city.
During the campaigns against "economic crimes" two Jews, B. Mirski and Shtifzin, who worked in a Kiev publishing house for art books, were sentenced to death (1962). At
The refusal of the municipal authorities to erect a memorial in Babi Yar, after an exhibition of models for such a memorial was officially arranged in 1965, was ascribed to the popular antisemitic atmosphere prevailing in the city. Protests against this omission were voiced by Russian and Ukrainian writers (e.g., Y. Yevtushenko, V. Nekrasov, Ivan Dzyuba, and others).
When an international poultry exhibition took place in Kiev in 1966, and Israel was represented by a stand equipped with exhibits and explanatory literature, tens of thousands of Jews from Kiev and all over the Ukraine streamed there. After the Six-Day War (1967), Jewish national feeling reemerged publicly in Kiev. The anniversary of Babi Yar became a rallying day for Jews, most of them young, who came not only to recite Kaddish but also to express their Jewish identification. Wreaths bearing inscriptions in Yiddish and Hebrew were laid and there were occasional attempts to make speeches, but on every such occasion the police intervened to remove the wreaths and silence the speakers. After one such gathering a young Jewish engineer, Boris Kochubiyevski, was arrested in 1968 on the charge of "spreading slander against the Soviet regime," after he and his non-Jewish wife Larissa had applied for an exit permit to Israel. In May 1969 he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment with hard labor. At his trial Kochubiyevski made a passionate speech, declaring his Zionist credo. In summer 1970 an open letter was published abroad, addressed to the prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, to UN Secretary General U Thant, and to various international institutions, signed by ten Jews from Kiev who claimed the right to settle in Israel. In August 1970 the same ten persons wrote a second letter to President Shazar, making it known that, after having been refused exit permits, they had renounced their Soviet citizenship and asked to become citizens of Israel.
Though most of Kiev's Jews emigrated in the 1990s, Jewish life revived at the community level as the city became the seat of the Ukrainian chief rabbinate and a Jewish day school was opened.
A. Harkavy, Ḥadashim gam Yeshanim (1886–1912), no. 1, 6–12; no. 2, 13–17; I.N. Darevsky, Le-Korot ha-Yehudim be-Kiev (1902); Ettinger, in: Zion, 21 (1956), 107–42; idem, in: Roth, Dark Ages, index; Gurevich, in: Shriftn far Ekonomik un Statistik, 1 (1928), 104–5; J. Lestschinsky, in: Bleter far Yidishe Demografye, Statistik un Ekonomik, 5 (1925), 149–67; A. Druyanow, in: Reshummot, 3 (1923), 221–36; A.A. Friedman, Sefer ha-Zikhronot (1926), 195–227, 315–97; A. Golomb, A Halber Yorhundert Yidishe Dertsiung (1957), 95–114; B. Dinur, Bi-Ymei Milḥamah u-Mahpekhah (1960), 311–420; A. Pomeranz, Di sovietishe Harugei Malkhus (1962), 44–60, passim; Die Juden-pogrome in Russland, 2 (1909), 339–406; G. Reitlinger, Final Solution (1953), 233–5; M. Malishevski, Yevrei v yuzhoy Rossii i v Kiyeve v X–XII vekakh (1878); I. Zinberg, in: Yevreyskaya Starina, 11 (1924), 93–109; M. Kulisher, ibid., 6 (1913), 351–66; Y. Galant, ibid., 264–78; idem, in: Zbirnyk prats Zhydivskoyi istorychno-arkheografichnoyi komisii, 1 (1928), 149–97; Rybynsky, in: Yubileyny zbirnyk D.I. Bagalya (1927), 938–55; E. Turats, K istorii kiyevskogo pogroma (1906); P.T. Neyshtube, Kiyevskaya yevreyskaya bolnitsa 1862–1912 (1912); Badanes, in: Vestnik yevreyskoy obshchiny, 2 (1914), 49–54; 3 (1914), 33–37; Polyakov, in: Yevreyskaya Letopis, 2 (1923), 17–36; 3 (1924), 60–70.
Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.