Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio

-An interview with Pawlina






Regular listeners to Nash Holos will be familiar with the name Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. This Toronto-based privately organized multinational initiative sponsors the long running series on the show, Ukrainian Jewish Heritage. This series of vignettes, cultural capsules and interviews has opened a window on this hitherto little known aspect of the Ukrainian experience.

Alti Rodal is Co-Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Initiative. She is a historian, writer, former professor of Jewish history, and official and advisor to the Government of Canada. She was educated at McGill, Oxford, and Hebrew Universities in history and literature. Her research and writing has focused on aspects of identity, Jewish history and culture, and inter-communal relations.

Alti has been instrumental in a project which began as an exhibition entitled A Journey Through the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: From Antiquity to 1914. It premiered in Toronto in 2015 and also travelled to Winnipeg, Edmonton and Montreal. In a recent skype interview, Alti updated us on this project and other exciting initiatives.

In Part 1 of our interview, we discussed a soon-to-be-published illustrated catalog of the 2015 exhibit and plans for an expanded exhibit in 2020 at the Royal Ontario Museum.

In Part 2 Alti shares information about new collaborative projects promoting the introduction of content on Ukrainian Jewish history and heritage to museums in Ukraine.





Pawlina: Alti, we had a great discussion earlier about the travelling exhibit in Canada. You’re moving it to Ukraine and this is part of the “Museums in Ukraine:” project. So can you enlighten us about that?

Alti: Yes, well it’s in a stage of formation; we don’t have a concept fully developed yet. But the fact that there are other organizations that are doing related activities has come to our attention. We’re a very small organization and the fact that we can build and work with other organizations is part of our own mandate. We don’t want to duplicate what other organizations do and therefore try to stay abreast of what else is happening, and who else is doing things that would advance our goals and missions.

We found a number of such organizations and have approached them. They are very interested in working with us to promote the introduction of content on Ukrainian Jewish history and heritage to Ukrainian museums in Ukraine.

I can speak about some of these organizations that have already agreed to work with us. In some cases it’s not organizations but individuals who have done very interesting work and are now in a state where they would like to transition out of further involvement in the work they’ve done… but don’t want to lose the momentum that they’ve built and approached Ukrainian Jewish Encounter to see if there is interest in taking their achievements and moving them forward further.

One such case is a child of survivors who lives in Denver, Colorado. His father survived as a partisan in Volyn during the war and comes from a town called Manevychi. After his father passed away he travelled with his son to visit this town, the ancestral home of the family. He wanted to find out something about the Jews that had lived there before the war. So they went to the museum and befriended the museum director who said that there wasn’t much that he had on the Jewish community, which was in fact the bulk, the majority of the population of the town before the war. But he would welcome content, whether photographs or stories, that he would be happy to include these in his museum.

So the fellow from Denver, whose name is Joel, thought of what he could bring. He’s not a historian,