History of the Jews in Ukraine

The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the modern territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus' (late 9th to mid-13th century). Important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, arose there. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine is Europe's fourth largest and the world's 11th largest.

The presence of Jews in Ukrainian territory is first mentioned in the 10th century. At times Jewish life in Ukrainian lands flourished, while at other times it faced persecution and anti-Semitic discrimination. During the Khmelnytsky Uprising between 1648 and 1657, an army of Cossacks massacred and took large numbers of Jews, Roman Catholics, and Uniate Christians into captivity. One estimate (1996) reported that 15,000-30,000 Jews were killed or taken captive, and that 300 Jewish communities were completely destroyed. More recent estimates (2014) report mortality of 3,000-6,000 people between the years 1648–1649. As a result of the massacres, by the 18th century virtually no Jewish population remained in Cossack-governed Ukrainian lands to the east of the Dnieper, although some were able to survive and integrate into the local society by converting to Orthodox Christianity. Many Jews fled to Polish-ruled areas to the west, but in those areas they also suffered from regular persecutions and attacks leading to thousands of deaths.

Following the Partitions of Poland, most of Ukrainian lands ended up part of the Russian Empire, which introduced various limitations against the local Jewish inhabitants and tied them to the so-called Pale of Settlement. During 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odesa, caused by the death of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople, 14 Jews were recorded killed. Some sources claim this episode as the first pogrom. During the second half of the 19th and into the early 20th century, anti-Jewish pogroms continued, leading to large-scale emigration. In 1915, the imperial Russian government expelled thousands of Jews from the Empire's border areas, including parts of Ukraine. In comparison to Russian-ruled areas, Jews living in Austrian-ruled Galicia and other parts of modern-day Western Ukraine were more tolerated, but many of them still suffered from severe poverty, which led to mass emigration.

In the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–1920), Yiddish became a state language, along with Ukrainian and Russian. At that time, the Jewish National Union was created and the community was granted autonomous status. Yiddish was used on Ukrainian currency between 1917 and 1920. Nevertheless, between 1918 and 1920 in the period after the Russian Revolution and ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence, an estimated 31,071 but possibly up to 100,000 Jews were killed in pogroms perpetrated by a variety of warring factions, one of which was the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, formally under the command of Symon Petliura. Pogroms erupted in January 1919 in the northwest province of Volhynia and spread to many other regions, continuing until 1921. The actions of the Soviet government by 1927 led to a growing antisemitism.

Before World War II, slightly less than one-third of Ukraine's urban population consisted of Jews. Total civilian losses in Ukraine during World War II and the German occupation are estimated at seven million. More than one million Soviet Jews, including 225,000 in Belarus, were killed by the Einsatzgruppen and their many Ukrainian supporters. Most of them were killed in Ukraine because most pre-WWII Soviet Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, of which Ukraine was the biggest part. The major massacres against Jews occurred mainly in the first phase of the occupation, although they continued until the return of the Red Army.

In 1959 Ukraine had 840,000 Jews, a decrease of almost 70% from 1941 totals (within Ukraine's current borders). Ukraine's Jewish population continued to decline significantly during the Cold War. In 1989, Ukraine's Jewish population was only slightly more than half of what it was in 1959. During and after the collapse of communism in the 1990s, the majority of Jews left the country and moved abroad (mostly to Israel). Antisemitism, including violent attacks on Jews, was still a problem in Ukraine in 2012, according to UN report. The country's current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.