Ukrainian Jews have historically spoken Russian. The war is changing this.

Three rabbis were sitting at breakfast in the Tsori Gilod synagogue of this city, discussing Russia’s war against the country where they work in a mix of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian.

They named their hometowns as Luhansk, Lviv, and Dnipro — the Russian names of Ukrainian cities that made international headlines after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, writes the JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY.

Although they were focused on Ukraine’s successes in combat, the rabbis did not utter a word in Ukrainian. How could they? Like the overwhelming majority of Ukraine’s Jews, none of them speak the country’s official language.

Russian has long been the first language for many Ukrainians, including the majority of the country’s Jews. But after the Russian invasion, many Ukrainians decided they wanted to speak less Russian and more Ukrainian. Many Jews, also frightened by the sight of thousands of Russian soldiers crossing Ukraine’s border and wishing to demonstrate their sincere Ukrainian loyalty, made the same choice — even though it means breaking a long-standing linguistic tradition.

Therefore, when the rabbis’ successors meet over pancakes with sour cream, they are much more likely to introduce themselves as rabbis of Luhansk, Lviv, and Dnipro — the Ukrainian names of their hometowns, which have become the standard in English. They are also likely to be able to pass on to their students and congregants Ukrainian-language versions of central Jewish texts, which currently simply do not exist.

“Many of my friends say they are embarrassed to use Russian as a language.

They say we are Ukrainian Jews, and Russia is a terrorist country at war with us, and that we should not use their language,”

— said Rabbi Meir Stambler from Dnipro. “Others say that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin does not own the Russian language. That’s the problem.”

He added: “This is what people discuss all the time.”

Ten years ago, half of Ukrainians said they spoke Russian as their native language. This number has decreased to 20%, partly due to resentment over Russia’s aggression in Crimea, a contested region it forcibly annexed in 2014. (Russian and Ukrainian are linguistically related, but their speakers cannot understand each other.)

In Russia’s war with Ukraine, Ukrainian Jews are playing catch-up. Stambler, who heads the Federation of Jewish Communities, an organization associated with the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement that operates a network of 36 synagogues across Ukraine, offers a grim forecast: “In 10 years, every Jew in Ukraine will speak Ukrainian.”

The dominance of Russian among Ukraine’s Jews, whose numbers before the war were in the tens of thousands, has deep roots.

“The historical path of Jews on the territory of present-day Ukraine led to them adopting Russian, not Ukrainian, in the 19th century,” says historian Natan Meir, a professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University. “This happened because Ukrainian was perceived as a peasant language, not associated with high culture, and because there were no economic advantages to adopting Ukrainian at the time.”

Now the benefits of switching to Ukrainian — demonstrating national loyalty during the war — are more apparent than ever.

“Jews feel fully integrated into Ukrainian society, but switching to Ukrainian, even if it is gradual, will make this more tangible than ever,” said Meir, calling the Russian invasion “an absolute game-changer” for Ukrainian Jews. “They will be perceived even more strongly than before as fully Ukrainian and part of the fabric of Ukrainian society.”

Most Ukrainian Jews, especially those educated after the collapse of the Soviet Union, now speak some Ukrainian. But their abilities often depend on where they grew up: many Jews in traditionally Russian-speaking cities like Odessa, Dnipro, or Kharkiv may struggle with the language, while their grandparents often do not speak it at all.

“At home, no more than 20% were Ukrainian-speaking,” says Stambler.

“Take President [Volodymyr] Zelensky. He knew Ukrainian, but did not speak it at home, and had to polish it when he became president.”

The Jewish community will find it challenging to suddenly switch to Ukrainian, the most widely spoken European language, without a standardized translation of the Torah.

Two years ago, a group of translators working in Israel, Austria, and Hungary began creating Ukrainian-language Jewish texts. But before the Russian invasion, the efforts had only produced a Ukrainian book of Psalms, or Tehillim.

In May, two months after the war began, a decision was made to accelerate work on the daily prayer book. The Torah could follow.

“Chumash is difficult,” said Stambler, who oversees a team of half a dozen translators from his base in Dnipro, using the Jewish word for the printed form of the Torah. “We are working on it.”

While translating sacred texts may take years, other changes have happened more quickly. Flyers, brochures, and calendars, which are integral to any Jewish center in Ukraine, were quickly replaced from Russian to Ukrainian, at least at the federation’s headquarters. Until February, they were often produced and printed by Russian Jewish communities and shared with Ukrainians for simplicity.

“This differentiation from Russian Jewry will be huge,” said historian Meir. “Until this point, they essentially formed one linguistic and cultural space, between which all Jews could freely move, whether in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus.”

Now, maintaining ties between these communities is logistically challenging — trade routes have been severed — and they could potentially become problematic at a time when anyone in Russia or Ukraine showing closeness to the other country may face suspicion or punishment.

“This shift, if it truly happens, will mean a completely new cultural space for Ukrainian Jews and almost a declaration of independence,” said Meir. “Or at least it’s an aspiration, because their heritage is so much still based on the Russian language that it will take a long time before they can fully separate.”

The process of separation, which most clearly began to take shape after 2014, has accelerated. “We started doing things ourselves,” said Stambler. “We used to do about 20% in Ukrainian for Jews in western cities like Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Uzhgorod, but now we are making a much stronger push.”

He estimates that about 75% of the materials distributed by the Federation of Jewish Communities among Ukrainian Jewish communities were in Ukrainian by September, compared to 20% to 35% in January.

Young rabbis who come from the US or Israel to serve small Jewish communities across Ukraine now say they had to add Ukrainian to their Russian language lessons.

“I started with Russian,” said one of those rabbis working in Vinnytsia until he decided over the summer that he needed to learn Ukrainian. “I realized I had to learn Ukrainian because I needed it on the street. I needed to talk to the government and the media.”

Some Ukrainian Jews are voting with their voices.

“I spoke only Russian all my life,” said Olga Peresunko, who lived in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine before the war. “But after February 24, I speak only Ukrainian.”

This fall, Peresunko was speaking near the Lviv synagogue, where she and other refugees were waiting for food packages. She fled Mykolaiv, which was repeatedly attacked by Russian troops, to Lviv with her mother and two children while her husband is on the front line.

Her children are struggling to adapt to the exclusively Ukrainian environment in Lviv, but she is confident they will manage. “They will speak Ukrainian as their native language,” said Peresunko.

The question of how much the switch to Ukrainian will change local Jewish communities is a matter of debate. Rabbi Shalom Gopin, who fled to Kyiv in 2014 from his native community in Luhansk, a predominantly Russian-speaking city captured at the time by pro-Russian separatists, said he also believes Ukrainian will replace Russian as the language of communication for Ukrainian Jewry.

“They are starting to slowly speak Ukrainian,” he said. “It’s not a problem. In America, many Jews speak English. We live here and speak the languages of the places where we live. It’s normal.”

But Gopin said the linguistic shift “means nothing” in the face of other issues facing Jews in Ukraine, where the Russian war threatens to undo 30 years of Jewish community building, largely though not exclusively led by Chabad, Gopin’s Orthodox movement.

“The problem for Jews in Ukraine is not the language,” he said. “It’s about how often they go to the synagogue or how many children attend Jewish schools, not what they speak about.”

45-year-old Natalia Kozachuk, a Jewish businesswoman from Lviv, sees only positives in abandoning Russian, her native language. She has started speaking to her children only in Ukrainian.

“It would be very good if Jews spoke more Ukrainian,” said Kozachuk. This is the only way Jews can truly “learn more about the Ukrainian people,” she said, “about its history, positive qualities, and strengths of Ukraine.”

“Only good can come from this,” she added. “We will understand each other better.”

Ukrainian Jews have historically spoken Russian. The war is changing that.

Ukrainian Jews have historically spoken Russian. The war is changing that. – source www.jta.org