As soon as Israel eased quarantine restrictions, a meeting was held in Tel Aviv between the Tel Aviv University administration and the President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine Boris Lozhkin, during which further steps have been discussed to implement a joint project to study the history of Ukrainian Jews, which dates back more than a thousand years and remains insufficiently studied. This has been shared by the JCU President Boris Lozhkin on Facebook.
According to the JCU President, historians of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center of Tel Aviv University will study the history of Jews on the territory of current Ukraine.
“According to the director and research supervisor of the project, Professor Simkha Goldin, the history of Jews in Ukraine is one of the most unexplored aspects of Jewish history in all of Eastern Europe. Despite the fact that many of the main events in the historical path of the Jews of Eastern Europe have taken place namely in Ukraine, the peculiarities of the Ukrainian context remain insufficiently studied,” writes Lozhkin.
In his opinion, insufficient study of the history of Ukrainian Jews happened due to the fact that for a long time Ukrainian Jews had been considered as a constituent part first of the Jewish community of the Russian Empire, and then of the Soviet Union.
The project of the JCU and Tel Aviv University foresees singling out the Ukrainian Jewry with its more than a thousand-year-old unique history and culture as an independent object of research.
“I would like to thank the President of Tel Aviv University, Professor Ariel Porat, and the CEO of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, Head of International Programs Department at Tel Aviv University, Dr. Haim Ben Yaakov, for their willingness to join this important and interesting project. We are looking forward to the discoveries of historians. I am sure there will be a lot of them,” writes Lozhkin.