Art historian and Jewish heritage researcher Dr. Eugeny Kotlyar, a professor at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, was forced to flee from Kharkiv to Lviv after Russian forces bombarded the city.
In this powerful personal essay he describes his journey through Ukraine, which took him and his family through favorite Jewish places he had researched and written about for years — former shtetls which had been home to historic Tzaddikim.
He reflects on how he somehow felt safe in these places, redolent of Jewish history and heritage, and the prevailing power of the sages.
(The cover picture shows the view from his car, driving through Talne.)
Safe In Jewish Places: The Journey Of A Jewish Researcher, Now A Refugee In War-Wracked Ukraine
By Eugeny Kotlyar
May 16, 2022
For a man who has devoted 30 years of his life to studying the Jewish heritage of Ukraine, salvation in his favorite shtetls has become an existential dialogue with the past.
This could have been a moving and exciting journey if it had not been an escape. We left Kharkiv on the sixth day of the war, on the day when a Russian cruise missile hit the Regional State Administration, blowing up the city center and all our illusions about an imminent peace.
In a moment of calm, my wife, two children and I got in a car and “jumped out” of our hometown like a bullet. A day later, after stopping over for the night with friends, we reached Kremenchug. We stayed there for two days: we repaired the car — barely managing to fill the tank — and took a deep breath in a peaceful city that did not know shelling and bombing.
At dawn on the third day, we left for Uman. As we drove we passed favorite Jewish places…. Smela, Rotmystrivka, Shpola, Talne… places about which I have read a lot and even written. Something told me that on our journey we would somehow be under the protection of the great Tzaddikim who had lived there.
The Ukrainian authorities prudently hid all the road signs, and I only saw on the navigator screen how the GPS slowly led us through the former Pale of Settlement, along a road lined with sandbags and anti-tank “hedgehog” barriers.
In this part of Ukraine lie buried two brothers — the offspring of the famous Chernobyl dynasty: Reb Yochanan Tversky (1816-1895), called “Hune,” in Rotmystrivka; and in Talne the famous “Tolner Rebbe” Duvidl Tversky (1808-1882). A little further on, in Uman, is buried the great Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), who brought the tradition of folk tales to Hasidism and whose grave draws tens of thousands of pilgrims at Rosh Hashanah.
My research and writing have given me a long personal history of contact with Jewish memory connected with these Tzaddikim.
As we drove into Talne, I recalled one of the most amazing stories of my work, which led me five years ago to a descendant of the Talne (Tolner) dynasty in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yitzhak Menachem Weinberg. In his hospitable home, I told the Rebbe about the fate of the great Ukrainian art historian Danyla Shcherbakivsky (1877-1927). In the 1920s, Shcherbakivsky united around his studies of Jewish art a whole school of his students, who were later repressed by Stalin.
The Rebbe listened with admiration and looked at Shcherbakivsky’s century-old photographs of the Jewish buildings in Talne, as well as our recent reconstructions of the Talne wooden synagogue built by his ancestor in the middle of the 19th century. These materials enabled the Rebbe’s assistants to create a replica of the original Torah Ark in the new building of the Tolner Synagogue in Jerusalem, thus establishing a visual connection with their ancestral home.
And then, I remember the Rebbe asking me about the fate of the long table made of pure gold, which, according to legend, was in the house of his ancestor in Talne until the October Revolution of 1917… the legend persisted, but I couldn’t answer….
We arrived in Uman at dusk.
It felt to me as though this city, covered with the glory of the great Rebbe Nachman, was somehow made ready for our salvation by all previous Jewish history. Located in the central part of the country, far from the crowded regional centers, it was one of the safest shelters in those days. Empty of the pilgrims, the hotels and streets with Hebrew inscriptions, and later an empty pilgrimage apartment, seemed to take us to another – safe — dimension of the Ukrainian space.
From Uman, we headed to Medzhybizh, where the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, or Besht (1698-1760), is buried. It was still dark when we left, and we crawled along the road into a sea of cars… We passed through Gajsyn, Nemyriv, Letychiv; former shtetls with former Jewish shops along the main streets.
Typical facades and pediments, crippled by time beyond recognition — but I remember them from the photographs taken by Ukrainian local historians and museum workers in the 1920s and ‘30s and the brilliant essays by Benjamin Lukin and Alla Sokolova in their guidebook “100 Jewish Shtetls of Ukraine.”
A few years ago, I also wrote about the Jewish development of cities and shtetls for the encyclopedia “Jews,” published in St. Petersburg in 2018. At that time, I regretted that almost everything had entered into oblivion, thanks to the destruction of two world wars. … And now, another war. What will remain of this whole world after the “Russian liberation”?
The bombing of my native Kharkiv floats before my eyes. Two damaged synagogues, a mutilated Holocaust monument in Drobitsky Yar, a blown-up Jewish school where my daughter studied, and the Hillel student club, which my wife and I and our children went to… all that I lovingly described in my numerous articles and in a historical guide to Jewish Kharkiv published in 2011.
I had visited Medzhybizh for the first time 20 years ago, when from the height of the ancient Medzhybizh castle I savored the view — poetic expanses, green meadows, and the overflowing banks of two rivers – the Southern Bug and Buzhok, between which Medzhybizh is spread. Not long after that first visit, the old beit midrash of the Baal Shem Tov was rebuilt, and an ohelwas erected over his grave.
In the 1930s, the Ukrainian art historian Pavlo Zholtovsky (1904-1986), who did so much to preserve and study Jewish heritage, visited here and wrote about it in his memoirs:
I was then in Medzhybizh, where Bal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, lived and was buried. Above his simple grave with a modest matzevah, there was a low rendering of a wooden canopy on four thin legs – the only thing that distinguished the grave of this venerable Jewish saint from the ordinary graves of his fellows. The entire grave was strewn with paper notes. These were letters addressed to the righteous. Those who sent them were waiting for an answer from the righteous in a dream. Then I also saw a small yeshiva, all dirty, dark, smoky, in which Besht prayed. Interior renovations have never been done here, to keep it intact from the days of the Baal Shem.
I remembered this description when I took a staged photo 10 years ago, stylized as an old photograph in the newly built beit midrash.
The photographs I took in my earlier visits included shots of Jewish tombstones from the 18th century, which then stood scattered on the places of the graves they marked. Today, Hasidim have arranged them in rows on concrete foundations — this current artificial “clean-up” has destroyed the dying authenticity.
For many years I have been looking at carved lions and double-headed eagles, photographing them in different light, allowing light and shadow to play in the intricate folds of the expressive carving. Nowhere else I have seen such a number of double-headed eagles, expressing the idea of the dual unity of God, merciful and punishing.
Once I regarded these stones of Jewish history, as I did my origins and artistic creations, as mysterious and closed gates to the past. Now these places, like a mystical portal, have opened up for me, and my family and friends, as a wonderful evacuation channel to save us from suffering. Fleeing our home, I found myself again in this holy place, and with my wife prayed in front of the grave of Besht – we prayed for the end of the war and a speedy peace.
Later, I feverishly photographed all the valuable tombstones, fearing that the cemetery might not survive a bombardment if the front advanced. A walk to the old castle from the cemetery to the sound of an air raid siren, photos of dilapidated buildings and stone buildings that still stood intact; all this united me emotionally with numerous keepers of Jewish antiquity of the past. Each of them tried, in the circumstances offered by life, to preserve this memory for posterity.
As did I. Could I have dreamed ten years ago that I would return here with my family, as if to a shelter?! That I would mentally speak with all the generations of my dear predecessors, standing with them on the same line of life, between war and peace, memory and oblivion, trials and predestination …?
After two days, we left our Jewish hiding place and headed to Lviv. That same evening, we reached the apartment of my friend and colleague Vita Susak, with whom we discovered the Jewish heritage of Ukraine. To the place where the beautiful family of Marla Raucher and Jay Osborn from America, the keepers of the Jewish and Ukrainian antiquities of the town of Rohatyn, have been living for years. Now we are under their care and in a new Jewish shelter. That evening, a new chapter of our evacuation began and continues to this day; our life in the Jewish-Ukrainian space of our country, defending its independence and democracy throughout the world.
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Dr. Eugeny Kotlyar is a Professor at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, curator of the Center for Oriental Studies of KSADA, and editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. His main research areas include Jewish art, synagogue wall-painting decorations, and local Kharkiv Jewish history. He is the author of about 200 publications (articles, catalogs, books, and edited books) and participant of numerous congresses and conferences in Europe, North America, and Israel. Trained as an artist in monumental arts and as an art historian, he has participated as a designer and stained-glass artist to restore synagogues and Jewish community centers in many cities of Ukraine. He also created exhibitions in several Jewish museums, including the multimedia space of the Drobytsky Yar Memorial in Kharkiv.