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Op-Ed: UKRAINE?  Yes, but…

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Op-Ed: UKRAINE?  Yes, but… 

By: Marion DS Dreyfus 

 

Recent exegeses on the frankly unlovely history of Ukraine toward its Jewish citizens, noting randomly from the medieval centuries’ murderous extermination of hundreds of village Jews for the crime of being Jewish, down to the scalding black notes of Ukrainian Cossack Bohdan Khmelnytsky in mid-17th century, the hetman [supreme leader] of the Cossack uprising  [1648-55] against the Polish overlords, in which organized resistance he caused the direct death with maximal torment of thousands of Ukrainian and Polish Jews. Tailing down to WWII, where Ukrainians were among the bloodiest rejectors and not- unwilling participants in merciless, unprovoked pogroms against the Jews.

 

Not needing the tailwinds of the German tinpot tributing to be encouraged to shed his nation’s sheepskin mute minority.

 

As heavily catalogued and archived as Jews have been, it is not in our nature to have so soon forgotten the murderous massacres, rapes and caustic brutalities of the past and recent regional cruelties.

 

A brilliant writer and close friend, Dr. Phyllis Chesler, analogizes the missing Jews as the erasure of “whole family trees” whose etiology and terminus the world has not recorded or transcribed. Chesler writes in a white rage of those long dead in terrible ends, trying to find healing in the appalled sorrows we feel at the rubbling of the once-thriving country of 44 million now scorched by the Russian despot, Vladimir Putin. In his determined bid to reunite the disparate chunks of the former Soviet empire. To thug man Putin, ex- of the harsh KGB and like organizations, the “greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the rin of the Russian empire.”

 

Jews today however are deeply involved and hyper-aware of the old sores but the new scald at the missiles, rockets, mortaring by Putin’s forces of all the borderline cities of Ukraine, outnumbered and, at least for the nonce, outgunned by the bear of Russia’s 160,000 tank-driven soldiery.

 

The soul of sentient people reels and cries in sympathy at the barbarism tumbling entire high-rise buildings, maternity wards, hospitals, kindergartens, cancer wards.

 

Blistering slap in the head for those who try to suppress the schadenfreude of Jews with a long memory..

 

It’s hard for many perhaps to wrap their heads around the no stop torture, slaughter and endless, relentless abuse of we Jews.

 

Many Jews today, living more than not in the comfort of non-pogrom Western countries, those who preen themselves as “free,” and proudly “nonreligious,” too easily forget the millions of us who preceded their births, who were just the exceedingly fortunate survivors of the nonstop pogroms that splintered, extinguished and erased so many, many of us.

 

How painful it is can be seen in your stated queasiness, and mine, and many others’, in connection with the sorrowful mixed story of Ukraine, now at their lowest point for many decades–yet we  hesitate in full-throated support because in our DNA, in our bones, we feel those horrors ghostlike  hovering above, crying for justice undone.

 

The Babi Yars without their monument. The millions slain without witness, by Gentile children who saw but little understood what it was they were seeing with the blessings of their murderous parents, police, curates, soldiery. By those silenced by fear of reprisals perhaps, for the slightest trace of empathy for the always hated, dismissed and expendable Jew in their villages for a mere several hundreds of years. Contributors, neighbors, friends; neighbors, supporters.

 

Perhaps even, from time to time, friends and business colleagues. Perhaps.

 

 

We cry for justice for Ukraine now. But we also cry for justice for our

‘whole family trees’ extinguished and forever unarchived.

 

Despite our being here, strong, perhaps, but unable to climb that slippery wall of avenging our blood, our family trees made to vanish in their maximal pain and horror.

 

Let it not be thought, however, that this schadenfreude means we welcome the terrible reign of obscene death from above and below perpetrated by the despot whose childhood prepped him for a cruelty and unremitting harshness that shock even the jaded to war. We feel profound sadness and unsettledness at what we see on our screens and hear on our airwaves for too many days.

 

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