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The Jewish Heritage

Olyanna Travel is able to create the perfect group tour to explore your Jewish Heritage. Olyanna Travel has over 20 years experience organising tours for Jews in Ukraine

The history of the Jewish people who lived in Ukraine is a blend of tragedy and triumph in adversity. In the mid-seventeenth century the Jewish population were caught up in the murderous Ukrainian nationalist movement led by Hetman Bogdan Khmelnytsky. About 20,000 Jews, about half the Ukrainian Jewish population, were killed. This traumatic event and the Holocaust stand as grim markers between which Jewish creativity and religious philosophy flourished in Ukraine.

Many of the Jews in Ukraine lived in villages away from the Talmudic scholarship predominant in the urban centres in Poland and Lithuania. There was a need within these rural communities for a simpler and more spiritual faith. It was this need that enabled Hassidism to take root. Founded by Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (Ba'al Shem Tov or Besht), who established a centre in Mezhbizh (Medzhybizh near Khmelnytskyi), where his great-grandson Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was born. Also known as Nachman of Uman, it was he who really established Hassidism as the inspirational source of Jewish teaching it remains to this day. The wonderful town of Uman, a day trip from Kiev, with its spectacular gardens, is the destination for Rosh Hashanah pilgrimages to the grave of the famous Rabbi which date from a year after his death in 1811.

Odessa is a noted centre of Jewish creativity and talent. Ze'ev Jabotinsky a fierce and determined Zionist was born in Odessa and wrote for a local newspaper before becoming actively involved in the establishment of the State of Israel. The writer Isaac Babel created the Jewish underworld of Benya Krik, the King, in his Tales of Odessa. Nathan Milstein and David Ostrakh were both born in Odessa and learnt the violin under the same teacher. It is perhaps fitting that when the Soviet Union began to relax its emigration laws in the 60s and 70s that Odessa should have been the main exit for Soviet Jewry to Israel. Today there is a regular boat to Haifa across the Black Sea.