Ukraine Seeks Ways to Recall Its Jewish Heritage.
Greg Krasovsky: Ukraine cannot honor properly & sincerely Ukrainian Jews brutally tortured & killed during the Holocaust while at the same time calling and worshiping as heroes Ukrainian Nazis (like the SS Division Galicia) and Nazi collaborators (like Stepan Bandera and OUN-UPA members and Ukrainian Nazi occupation Politzei) who actively participated in the Holocaust.
Selected Excerpts:
"The fall of the Iron Curtain and reopening to the West spurred some countries in the region to re-examine their history and to preserve and rebuild remnants of their Jewish heritage.
In Poland, commemoration of the Holocaust started with relatively small projects before mushrooming with the help of the Jewish diaspora, said Sofia Dyak, director of the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv.
Such projects are spreading now in Ukraine as well, supported in part by public and private donors such as the American Jewish Committee and the German government.
...
Around one million Jews were killed during World War II on the territory that is now Ukraine. The Soviets largely ignored the genocidal nature of the Holocaust, referring to its victims generically as “Soviet citizens” and “civilians.”
After independence in 1991, Ukraine concentrated on reviving previously taboo national narratives, such as the fighters widely seen as heroes here for resisting the Russians and the Poles. But some of those Ukrainian nationalists also collaborated with the Nazi German invaders and were involved in the killing of Jews.
A few Ukrainian fighting units and parties today have adopted nationalist insignia and flags, which Russia uses to tar the Kiev government as a whole.
“Without having a clear history, people distort it,” said Yaakov Dov Bleich, a leading rabbi in Ukraine. “No one [in Ukraine] respects nationalists because they killed Jews, but because they fought for independent Ukraine."
Please read rest of the article at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-seeks-ways-to-recall-jewish-past-1461769089
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