Jewish–Ukrainian relations in Eastern Galicia

Eastern Galicia was the heartland of the medieval Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, currently spread over the provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil in modern western Ukraine.

Relations between Jews and Ukrainians were much more peaceful on the Austrian side of the post-1795 border than they were in the territories east of the Zbruch river that had become a part of Russia.

[2][dubious – discuss] The national agitation that emerged among the Ukrainian community in the second half of the 19th century was anti-Polish and anti-Jewish in nature.

[3] Such was the nature of the newspaper Batkivshchyna [uk], founded in 1879, that in its very first issue it declared that Ukrainians in Galicia have "two terrible enemies: one of them is the clever Jew, who sucks our blood and gnaws our flesh; the other is the haughty Pole, who is after both our body and soul.

"[4] In 1881, Batkivshchyna praised the anti-Jewish pogroms happening in Russian Ukraine as being directed against exploitation and truly Cossack in spirit, but advised against organizing them in Galicia, since in the end only Jews gain from them.

In contrast to the antagonistic position by Polish authorities towards Jews, the West Ukrainian government actively supported Jewish cultural and political autonomy as a way of promoting its own legitimacy.

The Poles boycotted the elections, while the Jews, despite declaring their neutrality in the Polish–Ukrainian conflict, participated and were represented by approximately 10 percent of the delegates.

Localized anti-Jewish assaults and robberies by Ukrainian peasants and soldiers, while far fewer in number and less brutal than similar actions by Poles, occurred between January and April 1919.

The government publicly condemned such actions, intervened in defence of the Jewish community, and imprisoned and even executed perpetrators of such crimes.

By the orders of Yevhen Petrushevych, it was forbidden to mobilize Jews against their will or to otherwise force them to contribute to the West Ukrainian military effort.

Although Jewish political organizations officially declared their neutrality in the Polish-Ukrainian struggle, many individual Jews offered their support or sympathized with the West Ukrainian government in its conflict with Poland.

[11] Jews were also able to create their own police units,[14] and in some locations the Ukrainian government gave local Jewish militias responsibility for the maintenance of security and order.

During this time relations between the two communities were initially positive – reflecting decades of previous cooperation – but subsequently deteriorated.

In the early 1920s Ukrainians and Jews, at the initiative of Jewish leader Yitzhak Gruenbaum, formed a unified Bloc of National Minorities which sought to defend both groups' interests in the Polish government.

[16] Relations between Ukrainians and Jews soured somewhat when, in 1925, Jewish political leaders signed a separate agreement with Poland in order to guarantee certain rights for their community.

It was widely assumed that Schwartzbard was a communist agent, and his assassination of Petliura promoted the stereotype of Jewish cooperation with Bolshevism.

The assassin's acquittal by a French court and defence by a French lawyer – and his support from the Jewish community around the world – suggested to many Ukrainian Galicians that the Western democracies, Jews, and Communists were all opposed to the idea of an independent Ukraine – an idea that contributed to Galicians' orientation towards Germany in the interwar period.

[18] During Soviet rule, eastern Galicia experienced a large influx of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi terror on the other side of the new German-Soviet border; hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived in the territories newly annexed by the USSR.

[19] The civilian administration in those regions annexed from Poland was drawn mostly from the occupation force of eastern Ukrainians and Russians; only 20% of government employees were from the local population.

The reason for this belief was that most of the previous Polish administrators were deported, and the local Ukrainian intelligentsia who could have taken their place were generally deemed to be too nationalistic for such work by the Soviets.

[24] Ukrainian police, who organized the "Petliura Days" pogrom in Lviv in 1941 which claimed between 2,000[28] and 5,000[29] lives, were particularly prone to anti-Jewish activities but were not alone in doing so.

[21] During the war, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a large underground military force controlled by the OUN, engaged in the ethnic cleansing and killing of Poles and destruction of Polish villages.

In February 1942, Sheptytsky addressed a letter to Heinrich Himmler condemning anti-Jewish actions which resulted in the German administration closing the Ukrainian National Council.

Additionally, he and his brother, the monk Klymentiy Sheptytsky, concealed 150 Jews, primarily children, in Ukrainian Catholic Studite monasteries.