Fall in Central Ohio: October 2021 Ukraine and Russia: My Homeland?

This was very difficult for me to write. People are coming out of the woodwork all over the world to put on their white hats (or blue and yellow hats) while definitively railing against those wearing the black hats (Putin/Russia). I find myself in the most unpopular position of donning a grey hat. Or a white hat that has been battered and beaten.

It has been devastating to watch; destroying entire villages and cities, and killing so many innocent people, including children. For what? For one man’s ambitions? It is a horrible war caused by one person; an evil, arrogant man who is looking towards the end of his life and grasping for the good old days of Czarist Russia. I feel so badly for the Ukrainian people. I feel horribly for the Russian people who are going to suffer because of the madman. Some of them believe him and support him, because he controls what they know about his war. But they will all eventually learn the truth. You can’t destroy your neighbors without having the truth eventually surface for all who are open to reality. Unfortunately, we know that not all will be. There are just some people who refuse to turn the channel.

The notion of denazifying a country by hunting down a democratically elected, Jewish president says all that needs to be said about the irony and evil in his fake news. The damage to Babi Yar from his indiscriminate bombing only magnifies the malevolence in his actions. I didn’t know that denazifying was a thing until I heard his description. As I’ve witnessed the rise in overt antisemitism since Trump opened the doors wide to the good people who are white supremacist, nationalist Jew haters, I’m thinking we’ve got some major denazifying to do right here in the good ole US of A.

I can only hope that the economic pressure we put on Russia will force his people, and more importantly, the wealthy who keep him in power, to find a different path. It is going to mean economic pain for people in the US, and particularly for all of those who do not have the means to bear the increasing costs. Hopefully, this doesn’t go on for long. But we honestly have little choice in this whole mess. He can’t be allowed to just take over another country. Democracy really is at stake. If he succeeds, he won’t stop with Ukraine. And if he succeeds, China will go after Taiwan. We probably ought to be exerting the same pressure on China. We don’t have the economic guts to do it, because we love our Apple products and Niki shoes, and they produce most of the chips needed for every electronic device on the planet. We probably ought to take this opportunity to wean ourselves from dependence on China. They aren’t our ally. I always come back to the thought that we likely depend on China for components of our military technology. What could possibly go wrong with that proposition? We might have to figure out how to become less economically dependent on a country that doesn’t wish us well.

And we probably ought to be economically distancing ourselves from China just based on their unethical and immoral treatment of the Uighurs. Jews in particularly understand how the treatment of religion operates in communist countries where there is concern about how allegiance and loyalty to the state could be diluted from the teachings of the book, regardless of the particular book in question.

This is where I wanted to start because from my seat in the peanut gallery, watching what is happening in Ukraine is a case of good vs evil. There shouldn’t be any confusion about what Putin is doing, nor that the Ukrainians are relatively defenseless victims who have done nothing wrong. There is no ambiguity. This is where my intellect and rationality reside. The rest of this for me is less straightforward and more emotionally complicated.

My paternal grandparents came from Lithuania and Poland, and they both came to the United States as children. My grandmother first settled with her family in Columbus before they moved to Cleveland. They lived in what is now German Village and she went to Beck Street Elementary School. As they came to America as children, they assimilated more easily to our culture.

My maternal grandparents are from what is now Ukraine. They came to America as adults after experiencing all the horrors that happened to Jews in this region. While my grandfather never drove a car, he adapted to the modern world more readily than my grandmother because he had to earn a living in a modern world. My grandmother remained culturally in the old country because her life was centered on family, the Jewish community and their shul. She never really learned English. They spoke Yiddish, the language of the shtetl. My mother and my aunt didn’t know English until they started elementary school. My Russian/Ukrainian/Jewish Bubby and Zadie had an enormous influence on my life. They literally brought the shtetl into my world.

My Bubby was born in Pliskov. Her family remained in Pliskov. My Zadie was born in Tetieve. After they married, they lived with my Zadie’s family in Tetieve. These villages were close to each other and were located just west of Kiev. This was an area known as the Pale of Settlement that was established by Catherine the Great, who wasn’t so great, toward the end of the 18th century. Jews were forced to live there. They weren’t allowed secular educations and they weren’t allowed to own land. My Zadie’s father earned a living by hauling drinking water from the river for the people in his shtetl. Pliskov was a small village. Tetieve was a larger village. They were poor peasants. Perhaps it is the anthropologist in me … I used to listen to my Zadie tell stories about their lives in these villages for hours at a time. He lived until 92, he was sharp as a tack until the end, so I heard a lot of stories and I heard some of them many times over. Some of the stories were sad and horrific.

My Zadie served in the Czars Army, in the cavalry, no less. Jewish boys were conscripted into the military and many of them never made it back home. My Zadie was fortunate. He became an aide (servant) to a lieutenant who took a liking to him. This relationship likely kept him alive, and he was able to return to his life in the shtetl. My Zadie was smart, and he was a survivor. His native language was Yiddish, but through his time in the army, he learned Russian. In the grand scheme of things, my Zadie was a relatively cosmopolitan guy for the Pale. He was also a very religious person. There was only orthodox Judaism in the shtetl.

Around the time of the revolution, most of these villages in the Pale of Settlement became targets of the pogroms. The pogroms entailed the raping, pillaging and killing of the Jewish inhabitants of these villages. We heard the stories in whispers around the Seder table, along with such revelations as Moses was black; not that there's anything wrong with Moses being black. We heard these stories throughout our lives. Some of our relatives wrote about their experiences. Today, you can read many of these first-hand accounts on Eastern European Jewish culture and history websites. Out of respect for my family members, I’m going to leave out the details of the cruelty, the suffering and their deaths. My Zadie got out first and came to America to find work so he could sponsor my Bubby and my uncle. During that time, my Bubby and uncle were on the run, hiding from the people who were perpetrating this mayhem. They were separated from my Zadie for eight years. I can’t even imagine how they survived. The village of Tetieve was destroyed for Jews. During the last pogrom, what was left of the Jewish community hid in their shul. They burned down the shul with all the Jewish villagers inside. After my Bubby and uncle got to America, my uncle died. He was only 13 years old. Another horror story.

They lived through endless horror stories. I often characterize their lives as the shtetl depicted in Fiddler on the Roof, without the great music and highly sanitized to make it viewable by children and those who don’t want to be subjected to the most horrific kind of violence. The word pogrom is Russian, and it means to wreak havoc. When you do some research into who was involved in this killing and destruction, you get answers like Russian mobs, bandits and Cossacks. You can infer from these descriptions that we’re talking about Joe and Ralph the farmers and neighbors who lived in these villages. This all happened in what is in now Ukraine. We are talking about the grandparents and great grandparents of the people who are now being tormented by Russians. Russia has a long history of tormenting people, and particularly the Jewish people. So does Ukraine. Tetieve still exists. I can’t imagine that there are Jews still there. If they are, they might not know that they’re Jews. Most of the Jews from Tetieve are in the cemetery which from the photographs I’ve seen, is overgrown and doesn’t look like a cemetery (which speaks volumes for the history of Jews from Tetieve). Many of the living Jews from Tetieve migrated to Cleveland. They started Tetiever Temple. My Zadie was a founding member and officer. When I would sit in temple with my Zadie, I was surrounded by all these old men (the women were on the other side of the mechitza where they couldn’t distract us from our prayers) who were his good buddies as a child growing up in Tetieve. I can still feel what it was like for me to picture my Zadie and Mr. Henkin running around in the dirt streets as little boys. My Zadie had a large and deep scar on one of his hands caused by an attack from a wild boar in one of these streets. I heard that story many times.

America was truly the land of freedom and opportunity for my family. They came here not knowing English, without educations and with no significant job skills. They made a life for themselves and for generations of their families. Our family will always remember them for the sacrifices they made to make our lives in America possible. We are grateful for and love the freedom we have in America because through their lives and their stories, we understand what life can be like without this freedom.

Not every Jew got out of the Pale during and after the pogroms. For those that remained, they got Stalin. Stalin didn’t want religion muddying up his communist waters. He also required only collective farming. He was all over the game plan laid out by Karl Marx. Marx's father was a rabbi. All the ironies and the tragedies in this part of the world could make your head spin. If you’re interested in the role of sarcasm in Jewish humor, read some Jewish history. The Pale existed as many small private farms. Stalin didn’t want any private anything; everything needed to belong to the state. Stalin’s answer to all things problematic, kill it. Putin had good role models. He rounded up every scrap of food, all the seeds, and all the crops and literally starved to death millions and millions of people. For those of you wondering how it is that you could bomb a maternity hospital filled with pregnant women and infants, start by asking yourself how you could willfully starve to death millions and millions of people? I’m not sure exactly how to characterize the answer in standard American English, but the values are embedded in that notion. The Jews remaining in Pliskov after the pogroms met up with the Homodor (murder by hunger). That there’s a word to describe it is way more than disconcerting. I am named for my Bubby’s two brothers, Srul and Yosef, who were starved to death by Stalin. Their memories should be for a blessing.

Whatever Jews miraculously survived Catherine the Not So Great and the Czars and Joe and Ralph the Ukrainians and their pogroms and Stalin's Homodor, got Hitler and the Nazis. In this area of Ukraine, almost 34,000 Jews were rounded up and shot to death in just a few days. How do you stand next to 34,000 innocent men, women and children and shoot them? How do you stand next to 34,000 of your neighbors and shoot them? Both Pliskov and Tetieve can be found on a map but if a Jew still remains, they are lost, confused or don’t know about their heritage. Pliskov is identified in the Holocaust Museum as having been destroyed by the Nazis.

There are Jews in Ukraine. I recently donated to an organization that is trying to help the Jews that are still there. Some of them are being evacuated. Some of them are going to Israel. Some of them, like the president, are staying and fighting.

My emotions about this turmoil are all over kingdom come. When I blink really fast the Ukrainians and Russians who perpetrated the pogroms and starved my family members to death look the same. No one wants to take much responsibility for all of what happened to the Jews.

Owning the hatred and persecution of their Jewish communities has not been a national pastime for either the Ukrainians or the Russians. They generally don’t want to think about it, talk about it or acknowledge it. I understand. In the US, we have legislators who want laws sheltering people from feeling badly about our own deplorable history. We would rather relegate our history to whispers around the Seder table, rather than honestly and candidly teach about it in school. If I have to explain to my grandchildren why it is that an armed guard stands watch in my synagogue during Sabbath services, are children in schools really too delicate to learn about why this is happening? Why encourage people to own this history (or current events)? One reason might be that to own it, one might stop perpetrating the hatred and all the physical manifestations of this hate.

While this mayhem is going on all day and night long in the news, I’m feeling very sorry for the innocent victims of this evil craziness while I’m thinking about what happened to my family through the evil craziness that was instigated by both Ukrainians and Russians.

I hope this gets resolved quickly. When they’re done beating the crap out of each other, I hope they can find better ways to feel badly about the Jews they beat the crap out of for centuries under a wide assortment of dictators and thugs. Perhaps find the Jewish cemetery in Tetieve, mow the lawn and clean off a few grave markers. Feeling remorse is healing. It’s the start of a good moral perspective.

And before I move on, one might ask, where does this hate for Jews come from? The history has been well documented in books, movies and the theatre. The hatred of Jews is the oldest hate. I urge you to do this reading. Hopefully, we won't ban all of those books. From my perspective, why people hate Jews has everything to do with mythology as opposed to reality. The Jews own all the banks and the media. Now it’s the Jews started the fires in California with their space lasers, bringing Jew hate into the space age. When do I get my bank? I didn't receive Basic Educational Opportunity Grants for college by hiding my bank. It is always fake news. If they wanted to get the peasants all riled up about the Jews, there was never a shortage of economic, political and social rationales. When you do your reading about this history, be sure to focus on the notion of scapegoating. If they needed to get the peasants worked into an altered state of consciousness, all they had to do was find a priest to remind the mobs that the Jews killed Christ. The reality was that it didn’t really take much to get the locals stirred up; that we exist and that we breathe their air was usually sufficient.

The Ukrainians have been courageous through this entire episode, and it doesn’t look like it will end any time soon. I hope the world can pressure Putin to back down. I hope he doesn’t arrest and jail everyone in his country or take away all their food. I hope he doesn’t use chemical or nuclear weapons. I hope he stays out of any of the NATO countries. I hope that Europe and the US aren’t sucked into another world war. I’d love not to be vaporized before I’ve had the chance to spend all the money I saved for retirement. All of that duck and cover stuff I learned in elementary school won't work for me anymore. There's just no way I could get my head down between my legs (like that was going to save us from a nuclear explosion).

What does this mean for America, besides the rising price of gasoline, agricultural products and everything that gets delivered on a truck or plane? If there was ever an opportunity to reflect on what happens when people are convinced that there is a better political system than democracy, we have it right in front of us. We're watching an authoritarian go wildly evil (after stealing his way into being a billionaire many times over) without any checks on his power. He has total control over the press and media so that all of what his people know and understand is only what he is telling them. American democracy depends in large part on a free press and the right for all its citizens to vote, without having to screw themselves into a pretzel to do so. We're watching it every evening on the news, if we want to pay attention to it. We can ignore this reality at our own peril. Please turn the channel.

I need to end this article with the following. Through my work for the Association, I have friends from all over the world. I have friends from those parts of Europe that have the most difficult histories regarding their Jewish communities. I don’t ask people whether their parents or grandparents were hiding Jews in their barns to keep them alive or if they were torching their synagogues after locking all the Jewish men, women and children inside. Societies can perpetuate dangerous beliefs and do evil things. Not every member of that society bears the responsibility. Free will is either a wonderful thing or a dangerous thing. We all get to choose our journeys. I try to surround myself with people who have chosen to be good human beings. Those societies need to own their histories, good and evil. Amen.

And now for the pretty fall pictures from October 2021. Please look for the arrows in the slide galleries.

Olentangy Trail

Hard Road Park

Audubon Wetlands Preserve

Sharonwoods Metro Park

Scioto Audubon Metro Park

Inniswoods Metro Park

Mohican State Park