The flyer, handed out by three masked men to Jews exiting synagogue, instructs its Jewish readers that an “ID and passport are required to register your Jewish religion,” and that they should bring “religious documents of family members, as well as documents establishing the rights to all real estate property that belongs to you, including vehicles.”

The leaflets were approved by Denis Pushilin, who is identified as a chairman of “Donetsk’s temporary government.” Secretary of State, John Kerry, labeled the incident as “grotesque.”

“It is beyond unacceptable,” Kerry said. “And any of the people who engage in these kinds of activities — from whatever party or whatever ideology or whatever place they crawl out of — there is no place for that.”

Beyond unacceptable is right. Though there is speculation that the leaflet is being proposed as a political tactic, it’s still pretty awful. And what is the consequence if you don’t comply with this daunting request? Deportation.

(Photo by Twitter)

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It’s warm now in Kiev for the first time since the waning days of September, and the population of my working-class neighborhood is shedding its winter coats. The crocuses are emerging, the stray cats are bolder than ever, and it is a perfect day to take a walk in the park: specifically, the one on the corner of Olena Talihi and Shusieva Streets—the one that also happens to contain the infamous ravine known as Babi Yar.



My neighborhood, colloquially known as “Dorohozhichi,” after the metro stop that bisects the Babi Yar memorial park, is not far from the center of Kiev. Take the subway two stops from Zoloti Vorota (the Golden Gate), on the city’s central hill, and you will arrive here, amid a cluster of food kiosks and beer tents. Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote that one can best get to know a city by studying its “coarse and sorrowing outskirts,” but life here is no more coarse or sorrowful than anywhere else in the city; the strains of Russian pop can be heard on the air, playing on teenagers’ cellphones, and on the corner you can buy wilting bouquets of green onions, strings of dried mushrooms, and 50-cent packs of Belomorye cigarettes.

A steady stream of people gets off at the Babi Yar bus stop, flocking to the kiosks, fumbling for their lighters. Mothers take their still-bundled children by the hand, and lead them over a rustling carpet of poplar leaves, just recently revealed by melting snow. And on the sunny concrete slope that forms the base of the Babi Yar monument, a middle-aged man is giving an impromptu drum lesson to a teenage student. This is the place where, 70 years ago, the largest single mass killing of the entire Nazi terror campaign took place, and the site of countless smaller massacres. And it’s where I live.



I never meant to live here. Although I came to Ukraine as a student of Jewish history, and ready to face the necessary hardships of life in the “Old Country,” I never imagined that I would be faced with the past so dramatically every day, on the way to the subway, the pub, and the grocery store. But, thanks to the vagaries of Kiev real estate—and the exhaustion that followed surveying weeks and weeks’ worth of grim, unfurnished apartments—my roommate and I moved in to a cozy two-bedroom flat with a little well in the courtyard, and an excellent stove … that just so happens to result in me giving “Babi Yar” as the primary navigational landmark for my house. 



Although an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people were murdered here over the course of the Nazi occupation, the most infamous incident at Babi Yar was the murder of 33,771 Jews over two days in September 1941. I had heard of the events at Babi Yar long before I arrived in Ukraine for my Fulbright scholarship: Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem about the slaughters, a courageous and poignant expression of solidarity with the Jewish people, is justly one of the most famous Russian poems of the 20th century. And no study of the Holocaust is complete without detailing the incident, which arguably instilled the Einsatzgruppen with enough confidence to engage in their campaign of devastation without fear of repercussions for the remainder of their occupation of Eastern Europe.

There are few eyewitness accounts of the massacre at Babi Yar. One of them is the story of Dina Prochineva, a Kiev actress, recounted leaping into the ravine before she could be shot, then staying perfectly still as the Nazis finished off the wounded. That night, she clawed her way up out of the piles of bodies, up through the earth covering the mass grave, later to relate her experiences to the novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov. 



The park at Babi Yar is filled with monuments. The largest, standing at the lip of the ravine itself, was erected in 1976, 35 years after the massacre. It is dedicated to “Soviet Citizens and POWs,” testimony to the widespread reluctance of Soviet authorities to specifically reference the race or religion of those who perished during World War II. (Other Soviet memorials at massacre sites, even those whose victims were exclusively Jewish, also reference “Soviet citizens” exclusively.) Others, smaller and more modest, are nestled between trees or in small clearings around the lip of the ravine, as if ready to be discovered by chance. These memorials, built since the fall of the Soviet Union, pay testament to the international character of the violence at Babi Yar. A memorial plaque in dark marble commemorates the Roma of five gypsy camps liquidated at the ravine; an oak cross, dedicated to the 621 Ukrainian nationalists executed there, stands beside a small Jewish memorial, testament to the equalizing nature of indiscriminate violence. (The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, whose members are interred at Babi Yar, engaged in virulent anti-Semitic propaganda, and participated in widespread pogroms.) A children’s memorial features a girl with outstretched hands; beside her, a doll in jester’s clothing slumps down towards the earth.



How do you live in a bloodland, a place shaped, stained, by history? I came to Ukraine to better understand that question; living where I do has literalized it, and made it part of my daily life. My roommate, Lena, who works for the Jewish Agency in Kiev, says she’s begun to make jokes about our address: “Come visit me if you want to see some living Jews at Babi Yar!” We’ve talked about arranging a literary evening at the park, reading poems and engaging in discussion with our Kiev friends and acquaintances. But mostly we go to work, and back, and to the corner store. The Soviet-era TV tower that looms over the park blinks at us all night. In winter, the snowy ravine is cut throughout by sled-tracks, and the poplar alleys in the park bear the marks of cross-country skis. These days, people take their lunches from nearby offices, and sit in the sun; teenagers flirt over Zhigulovsky beers, and weary parents settle back against the ravine’s edge, watching their children play along its bottom. 



When Yevtushenko wrote his poem to Babi Yar, no monument had yet been built – “a steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone,” stood there. Still, he felt the trees and grasses “screaming silently.” These days, perhaps the most common sound at Babi Yar is laughter, or footsteps, the various small sounds of people passing through on their way home from work, or lingering in the grassy clearings. For those who come to visit Babi Yar to pay their respects—people from all over the world–it’s hard not to shudder at that laughter, or feel, at the sight of the people who come here to barbeque outdoors in May or roller-skate on the lumpy pavement, a sense of pure outrage. But for the inhabitants of Dorohozhichi, a landscape shaped as much by memory as by wind, or rain, or pavement, living at Babi Yar is just that—living.



The post Babi Yar Is My Backyard: Life in the Shadow of Memory in Ukraine appeared first on Jewcy.

When I told people that I planned to spend the 2012-13 academic year in Ukraine, their most common response was: “Why?” (Followed closely by: “Is that safe?”) It seemed to me, at the time, that the most frequently asked questions are often also the hardest to answer. Although I came up with several canned responses—a craving for gritty post-Soviet adventures; a desire to get to know the country my grandparents came from better; to study Jewish history; because I lucked into a Fulbright scholarship to go there—I couldn’t help but feel that none of them sufficed, at least not alone. It could only be some combination of all of them that came together to make a kind of electric unease, a pull eastward that kept me sleepless before I boarded the plane to Kiev.

It’s been two months since I got here, and though I’m thrilled to see the Dnieper River through my window each morning, Ukraine is the kind of place that raises more questions than it answers. Though Ukraine’s contemporary Jewish community is thriving in Dniepropetrovsk, Odessa, and elsewhere, it’s far from the world my grandparents inhabited, changed by a century of Soviet atheism and mass emigration. Studying the culture of prewar Jewish Eastern Europe can sometimes feel like studying Ancient Rome; although only half a century has passed, the combative, complex, multilingual civilization that overran Kiev’s Podolia neighborhood and Odessa’s wharfs, the squares of Chernivtsi and Muncaksy and Lviv, is gone, its residents with it.

Part of that world lives on in the many novels and poems it inspired. Part of it lives on in my own Jewish upbringing and that of people like me—cold borscht and potatoes with sour cream on Pesach, Yiddish leaving its unmistakable footprints all over my English speech. And some things remain, even here in Ukraine. But you have to look for those signs, scour the streets, find the people who can still tell you about the past, though there are fewer every day. Being here for a year, through all the Jewish holidays—from Rosh Hashanah to Hanukkah to Pesach—I’ve been teaching myself to look and to listen, although it can be exhausting. But sometimes the past shows itself in unexpected, unlooked-for ways, and, for a wayward moment, a lost world of unimaginable richness comes alive again.

A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Lviv, a city once home to a world-famous Jewish community. Lviv is beautiful, in a delicate, markedly Western-European way that differs from other Ukrainian cities. My friends I went for a walk one late autumn afternoon, watching yellow sunlight fade over pastel houses. When we reached Federova Street, where the sellers of books and antiquities gather, we stopped to peruse their wares—cheap novels, schoolbooks, Soviet hatpins. And then I saw it: on the low table beside a vendor in his mid-30s—who glowered at us, crossing his arms—was a menorah.

Wrapped in brown paper, the menorah lay on its side on the table. The metal was oxidized green with age, but beneath the patina, the Hebrew words lehadlik ner Hanukkah could be made out—to light the Hanukkah candles, the blessing you make before lighting the candles. A lion—symbol of the city of Lviv—reared on spindly legs in its center, holding up the shamash, and a row of oil wells held the remains of charred, degraded wicks. The vendor set his jaw and prepared for a long haggle. I opened my wallet, but to my dismay, I only had a few bedraggled hryvnia (the Ukrainian currency) with me. I had to leave without the menorah—and by the time I managed to find an ATM, the market was closed, the tables packed away. I hadn’t even caught the vendor’s name.

I left the city that weekend feeling like I’d left a friend in captivity. Weeks after my return to Kiev, the menorah still haunted me. Who was it taken from? Who last lit it, and when? The spindly lion, the bent shamash, returned to me again and again. So when I returned to Lviv on a rainy weekend, I knew I had to try my hardest to find it. Hanukkah, after all, was less than a month away.

Federova Square is a sad sight in the rain—the book market is driven away in inclement weather, and it has a typically Ukrainian lack of backup plan. But my train was leaving the next day, and I couldn’t go back to Kiev empty-handed. So I set out on an unlikely quest. After asking a few passersby about the book market, I was directed to an antikvariat (antiques) store not far away. The street the shop was on was little better than a pit, and my shoes were soon covered in mud. I ducked into the shop—Lviv is full of antiques stores, because armies and vanished populations have left wave after wave of historical junk here—and asked whether they had any Jewish objects.

No dice in shop No. 1; he sent me further down the street to yet another antiques store. In shop No. 2, there was a Vilna-printed copy of Vayikra (Leviticus)—nestled next to a copy of Mein Kampf. In the third antiques store were only icons, flat-faced saints that stared at me from behind glass cabinets.

I was exhausted, and chilled to the bone. But the rain had abated and I wasn’t about to give up my search yet. There was one more place to check—the Vernisazh, Lviv’s bustling outdoor souvenir market. I passed piles of wet woolen mittens, wood rosaries, matrioshka dolls; the vendors were on the verge of packing up their things. I paused at the flap of a dim tent, my well-rehearsed query—Do you have any Jewish objects?—on the tip of my tongue, when I saw it. Nestled between a Soviet aviator cap and a pair of spectacles, there it was—the twin of my menorah, down to the green oxide speckling the base of the shamash. The lion grinned at me with bared teeth, his thin paw braced against the frame, and there were the Hebrew letters instructing me “to light the Hanukkah candles.”

When I indicated that I wanted it—and I was ready to pay his inflated price—the vendor dug a yellowed envelope out from under his riot of objects.

“This was sold to me by the same man,” he said, pressing a photograph into my hand. “I don’t know who they are—but they’re Jews, and this photo is from Lviv, before the war.”

In the photo, its image still crisp in black and white, a young boy in the familiar Eastern European keppele (cap) stood next to a bearded man in a broad-brimmed black hat. The two of them held hand-rolled cigarettes, and smoke curled out of their open mouths—the camera had caught them in the middle of a bout of laughter. There was no date on the photograph, no name, and the menorah’s creator hadn’t signed his handiwork. But the menorah was heavy and solid in my hand, the photograph was clear and whole; I could imagine the same hands that held those cigarettes lighting the wicks in the menorah’s wells, the same smoke curling up around the high-cheekboned faces, the blessing escaping from beneath the bushy beard.

I kept the menorah and the photograph in my lap all through the train ride back to Kiev. And as the days grow shorter, as snow begins to accumulate on the statues’ shoulders, I’m waiting for the day when I get to light these candles. I’ll look out over the little houses crowding Dnieper’s banks, over the dancing flames, and know that this is why I came—even if only for an hour, even if only in the privacy of my own room, being here has given me the chance to light up a piece of the past once more, and let it shine anew on the weary streets of this city.

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This Sunday night, the 64th annual Emmy Awards will honor the best in television. Each year a handful of episodes from each of the nominated series are selected to showcase a show’s best work. Since we’re in the business of honoring the best in Jewish television, we present the top five Jewish moments from this year’s Emmy-nominated shows, from Palestinian chicken and Camp Ramah to terrorists and concentration camps.

1. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 8: “Palestinian Chicken”)

Larry (Larry David) and Jeff (Jeff Garlin) try a new popular Palestinian chicken place and deem it the perfect place for Jewish men to bring their mistresses since no Jews would ever eat there. (Alan Dershowitz even sent Bibi a copy!)

Air Date: July 24, 2011
Choice Line: “We’re probably the only Jews that have ever walked in here.”

2. Homeland (Season 1: “The Weekend”)

Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) opens up about his lonely Jewish upbringing to his terrorist suspect passenger while driving back to CIA headquarters, creating an unexpected parallel between their situations.

Air Date: Nov. 13, 2011
Choice Line: “I’d gladly say their prayers, sing the songs. I just wanted to not be alone.”

Unfortunately a YouTube clip doesn’t exist (let us know in the comments if you find one!), but the entire episode is available on iTunes—the scene starts at the 37-minute mark.

3. Boardwalk Empire (Season 2: “To The Lost”)

Butcher Manny Horvitz hides out in the basement of a synagogue as he nostalgically remembers his Ukrainian past and plots out his future.

Air Date: Dec. 11, 2012
Choice Line: “I wake up sometimes and think I’m still there [Odessa], 12 years old, my whole life ahead of me, but then I realize I’m in America. That world is gone.”

4. Mad Men (Season 5: “Far Away Places”)

Copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), explicitly hired to appease Jewish client Manischewitz, reveals that he was born in a concentration camp, turning a punch line about the token Jew into a far more serious self-reflective matter that haunts the office.

Air Date: April 22, 2012
Choice Line: “Are there others like you?” / “I don’t know, I haven’t been able to find any.”

Again, there’s no YouTube clip available, but the entire episode is on iTunes—the scene starts at the 12 minute mark.

5. Girls (Season 1: “Hannah’s Diary”)

The excitable Shoshanna runs into an old friend who remembers her best from a raid she led during their days together at Camp Ramah.

Air Date: May 6, 2012
Choice Line: “You led the most intense kitchen raid I ever saw in my time as a junior counselor.”

Have another favorite Jewish scene from this year? Let us know in the comments!

The post Emmy Awards 101: This Season’s Most Jewish Moments on Television appeared first on Jewcy.

• Visitors to the Ukraine for the Euro 2012 soccer (football?) tournament have been encouraged to avoid the Lvov restaurant where diners wear peyos and haggle over the bill. Tablet’s Vox Tablet podcast profiled the restaurant, Golden Rose, earlier this year.

• We can’t deal with Drake as a Wooly Mammoth in Ice Age 4.

• Take a tour of R.L. Stine’s office, if you dare.

• Homeland star Claire Danes’ TriBeCa loft is for sale. The listing unfortunately doesn’t reveal whether the actress, who plays CIA agent Carrie Mathison on the Showtime series, keeps a color-coded wall full of top-secret CIA documents in her real-life home.

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