Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jewry, has virtually disappeared as a living medium of communication across Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states due to Soviet-era cultural assimilation and the mass emigration of its last native speakers in the 1990s. However, it served as a pivotal symbol of the Jewish revival between 1988 and 1992—just prior to the dissolution of the USSR and during the early post-Soviet period. The activities of the Jewish Cultural Societies established during those years were centered precisely around the restoration and development of Yiddish culture; the first such society in Ukraine (and the second in the USSR) was founded in Lviv. In subsequent years, however, this factor was relegated to the periphery of local Jewish identity. Following a quarter-century hiatus, interest in the subject is undergoing a resurgence, albeit now as an academic discipline, driven primarily by the efforts of non-Jewish intellectuals and local cultural figures. While this process is highly welcome in itself, Jewish community leaders should consider what underlies this trend. Is it a general liberalization of the humanities, an attempt to examine national history responsibly in light of the fate of their Jewish neighbors, or is it the phenomenon, observed in several Eastern European countries, of converting Jewish culture into a "memory unit" privatized by the local non-Jewish majority?

The revival of Yiddish-language culture in Lviv (known in Yiddish and German as Lemberg)—which served as the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria under the Austrian and later Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1772 to 1918—began in the late 1980s under the auspices of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society. This association, the first of its kind in Ukraine, was founded in 1988 at the very inception of the Ukrainian Jewish cultural revival, through the initiative of the writer Aleksandr Lizen, the engineer and journalist Boris Dorfman, and other activists.

As was the case elsewhere, in Lviv it was Yiddish—as the dominant element of the fading traditional culture of East European Jewry—that was perceived as a premier symbol of the local community's Jewish identity, which is why its instruction became a primary objective of the society. Notably, at that time, Yiddish was taught by native speakers. The Jewish community was joined by interested Ukrainian scholars and writers, including the poet Ivan Luchuk and the Orientalist Yarema Polotniuk. However, similarly to other regions of the former USSR, the Sholem Aleichem Society and other Jewish institutions in Lviv soon shifted their focus to Hebrew instruction. The challenge lay not only in the decline of interest due to the mass emigration of native speakers but also in the acute shortage of professional Yiddish instructors in Lviv.

The academic study of Yiddish in Lviv developed alongside the growing interest in Jewish history at large. This interest was primarily stimulated by summer schools on Jewish history in the context of a multiethnic past, organized by the Center for Urban History between 2010 and 2016. These programs included introductory Yiddish courses taught by Joanna Lisek (Wrocław), Wojciech Tworek (Wrocław), Valentina Fedchenko (St. Petersburg), and Arnaud Bikard (Paris). Over the course of six years, these summer schools hosted one hundred and twenty participants, mostly from Ukraine, but also from Belarus, Russia, and Poland. They acquired basic knowledge of Yiddish, which inspired many to pursue further language study at other summer schools and universities. In 2012–2014, three summer school participants—historians Vladyslava Moskalets, Evgeny Polyakov, and Oksana Sikorska—established a Yiddish club where they read literature in the language together.

The initiative to offer Yiddish and Hebrew as permanent courses emerged alongside the concept of establishing a Jewish Studies program at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU). The objective of the program was to train specialists capable of researching the Jewish history of Ukrainian lands. What would distinguish such a historian from a graduate specializing in the history of Ukraine or Central and Eastern Europe? In addition to a specialized curriculum of historical courses, it was to be the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, which very few in Ukraine can read and almost no one teaches, unlike other regional languages such as Polish, Latin, or German. Consequently, UCU began offering Yiddish and Hebrew instruction in 2015. However, securing permanent instructors remained a challenge, as Yiddish in the summer schools had been taught by visiting professors. The first permanent Yiddish instructor was Asya Fruman, a teacher from Kharkiv who relocated to Lviv.

Asya Fruman taught for six semesters, laying the foundation for Yiddish studies at UCU. She introduced the language of Ashkenazi Jews to students who previously had little exposure to it. In February 2018, she was succeeded by UCU graduate Oksana Sikorska, who continues to teach the course. Prior to this, Oksana Sikorska had taught Yiddish at the Hesed-Arieh organization.

Currently, UCU offers three levels of Yiddish study: elementary, intermediate, and advanced. Some students are now in their fifth semester of Yiddish study at the university, and several have participated in short-term intensive programs, such as the Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program (Tel Aviv) and the International Summer Seminar in Yiddish Language and Culture (Warsaw). These students demonstrate a profound interest in Yiddish. The majority are not Jewish, but Ukrainians who recognize the significance of the Yiddish element in Ukrainian history and culture. Our students are highly motivated; today, Yiddish is not a language of practical utility and is used almost exclusively for academic and research purposes. Nonetheless, many enrolled in the course out of a genuine interest in this culture and in Yiddish literature. They are a diverse group of individuals, primarily historians (from the Department of Jewish Studies working on Jewish themes in their research), art historians studying the Jewish art of Galicia, and literary scholars and philologists aiming to translate from Yiddish. In addition, there are Yiddish enthusiasts who study with great dedication and draw inspiration from the courses.

Nadiya Skokova, a postgraduate student in the Jewish Studies program, describes her experience studying Yiddish at UCU as follows: "For me, learning Yiddish was the entry point to exploring a parallel culture that was once a vibrant and equal presence on Ukrainian soil. It is a dynamic, diverse, and highly expressive language. Studying Yiddish demonstrates that, however distant Jewish and Slavic cultures may seem at first glance, they quietly and harmoniously formed a symbiosis—Yiddish contains numerous Slavic loanwords, and Slavic languages historically adopted Jewish terms. This is likely why Jewish folktales in Yiddish feel simultaneously familiar and foreign. The symbolism in Jewish folklore often shares much with its Slavic counterpart, while at other times retaining its own unique, distant quality. For me, Yiddish classes represent not only the study of the language of European Jewry but also a space where parallel cultures that once coexisted intersect."

We are gratified that Lviv now offers the opportunity for anyone interested to study Yiddish at the university level, and we see great prospects for Jewish studies in Ukraine. We are confident that our students will soon begin working on translations and engage in projects where they can apply the knowledge and skills acquired during their study of Yiddish.

Oksana Sikorska, Vladyslava Moskalets

Editorial Afterword

This article was written by young researchers from Lviv for the literary almanac "Yiddishland," published in Yiddish in Tel Aviv, which aims, among other things, to inform readers about the teaching of the Yiddish language and its literature in various countries and cities worldwide. Of particular interest in this regard are the countries of Eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, which in the historically recent past constituted the natural habitat of this language. Lviv was a prominent center of Jewish literature; it suffices to mention that the twentieth-century classic of Jewish poetry (in both Yiddish and Hebrew), Uri Zvi Greenberg, began his creative career in this city. In the early twentieth century, approximately 60,000 Jews resided in Lviv (according to the 1910 Austrian census), accounting for over a quarter of the total urban population.

Today, following the Holocaust and the emigration of the majority of the surviving Jewish population, the ethno-linguistic landscape in Lviv is fundamentally different. According to the 2001 Ukrainian national census, only 1,900 Jews resided in the city, representing a mere 0.3% of the local population. When taking into account descendants of mixed marriages and non-Jewish family members who meet the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return and are consequently involved in the activities of Jewish organizations, the total "extended Jewish population" of the city is currently estimated at 6,000 to 8,000, or by other estimates, 12,000 to 15,000 people. However, as a result of linguistic assimilation, these individuals generally do not know Yiddish. Native speakers, most of whom possess only a passive understanding of Yiddish and are unable to speak it, are found exclusively among the older generation.

Indeed, the revival of Yiddish and traditional Yiddish-oriented culture was the banner of the Jewish Cultural Societies (JCS), which became the first legal form of Jewish civic associations in the Soviet Union during the modern period. The creation of a significant number, if not the majority, of these associations was initiated at the height of Perestroika by pragmatists from the declining official establishment, who sought to maintain influence over the emerging Jewish movement in the country. Consequently, independent of the authorities' actual intent and with the support of the liberal factions of local nationalist and democratic movements, many JCS became a platform for legitimizing the remnants of the Jewish national-democratic movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Under the conditions of Gorbachev's liberalization and the onset of mass Jewish emigration from the USSR, these activists returned to the concept of establishing independent Jewish organizations[1].

In the late 1980s, one of us (Velvl Chernin) attended the inaugural formal meeting of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Cultural Society in Lviv. He was personally acquainted with the society's first chairman, the writer Aleksandr Lizen, who wrote in Yiddish and Ukrainian and is mentioned in the article by Oksana Sikorska and Vladyslava Moskalets. At that time, Yiddish was still spoken in Lviv; as noted in the article, the instructors of the language were native speakers, and the students enrolled in these courses were predominantly Jewish, driven by national self-awareness as their primary motivation for learning the language.

A quarter-century later, both editors returned to Lviv as Israeli guest lecturers, teaching courses in Jewish literature and contemporary Israeli society, respectively, at the Ukrainian Catholic University, which features an excellently structured Jewish Studies program. By this time, Yiddish had virtually disappeared from Lviv. Even in the local synagogue, Velvl Chernin spoke in Russian. The only person with whom he conversed in Yiddish during that visit to Lviv was the journalist Boris Dorfman, who is mentioned in the article. Furthermore, the students attending our lectures at UCU were exclusively Ukrainian.

Thus, the article by Oksana Sikorska and Vladyslava Moskalets captures a dramatic juncture: the decline of Jewish cultural activity in Yiddish—once the living language of the local Jewish community—and its subsequent "posthumous reincarnation" as a subject of academic inquiry within a local non-Jewish academic institution dedicated to researching the history of Ukraine in all its cultural and linguistic diversity. Under these circumstances, the fact that both current Yiddish instructors and the students studying the language may be Jewish is, in essence, purely coincidental. The replacement of Asya Fruman, who is Jewish, by Oksana Sikorska, who is Ukrainian, as the Yiddish instructor at UCU did not alter the fundamental nature of this situation.

It must be emphasized that this is not a phenomenon unique to Lviv, but rather part of a much broader trend unfolding before our eyes in several European countries, such as Poland, which warrants close attention. While in the 1980s, Aleksandr Belousov (1948–2004), an ethnic Russian who became a renowned Yiddish poet, was viewed with some perplexity, today non-Jews have become an integral part of contemporary Yiddish culture—highly proficient Yiddish specialists who produce noteworthy literary works in the language (such as Marek Tuszewicki of Kraków or Thomas Soxberger of Vienna, both of whom learned Yiddish as part of their academic training). It is entirely possible that new authors of contemporary Yiddish literature may emerge from among those currently enrolled in Yiddish courses at UCU.

While these developments are highly welcome, we must examine the underlying drivers of this evolution in attitude toward the Yiddish language and culture. Is it simply a liberalization of the humanities that has little bearing on contemporary Jewish communities? Do intellectuals in the established and emerging democracies of the former communist bloc seek, through the study of Jewish history, to understand something about themselves and perhaps engage in what is termed in Hebrew "cheshbon nefesh"—a critical assessment of their own national history in light of the fate of their Jewish neighbors? Or are we witnessing a process, active in many Eastern European countries, of converting Jewish culture into a "memory unit" privatized by the local non-Jewish majority? We do not doubt that the initiators of academic programs and public recognition of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, including the authors of the aforementioned article, act out of the most noble and tolerant intentions.

However, the question of whether Jewish communities in Ukraine, Eurasia, and the world at large should remain passive in this process, delegating authority to local researchers, intellectuals, and ultimately politicians, remains highly relevant.

Velvl Chernin, Ze'ev Khanin[2]

[1] For further detail, see: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, "Perestroika and Jewish Cultural Associations in Ukraine, 1987-1991," Jews in Eastern Europe, Jerusalem, No. 2 (42) (Fall 2000), 5-24.

[2] Velvl (Vladimir) Chernin is a Jewish poet (Yiddish), ethnographer, translator, and literary scholar, who teaches Yiddish language and culture at Ariel University in Samaria; Vladimir (Ze'ev) Khanin is the Academic Chairman of the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (IEAJS) and teaches political science and sociology of modern Jewish communities at Ariel University and Bar-Ilan University, Israel.