Museum Talks
Jewish Narrative in the History of Bukovina: Between Misunderstanding and Deliberate Ignoring
07-11-2023
Keynote speaker: Mykola Kushnir, historian, director of the Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovinian Jews.
Main discussant: Oleksandr Fylypchuk, historian, researcher, Assistant Professor of the Department of History of Ukraine at Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University.
Invitees: local researchers, teachers, mass media representatives, cultural managers, representatives of Chernivtsi museums, the State Archive of the Chernivtsi Region, national cultural societies, the Jewish community, and others.
Summary of the speeches
Mykola Kushnir:
The Jewish history of 20th-century Bukovyna is one of the most exciting and instructive pages of this part of Europe's past. At the same time, this topic may remain the least studied in Ukrainian historiography. Moreover, the sharp decline in the local Jewish population that occurred at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, primarily as a result of emigration, led to the erasure from the collective memory of the region’s inhabitants of entire layers of the local Jewish narrative, including those related to anti-Semitism, Stalinist repression, and the Holocaust. Due to the disappearance of the carriers of this memory, Jewish content is also gradually disappearing from the region’s public space. In 2008, the opening of a museum in Chernivtsi, which was dedicated to the history and culture of the Jews of Bukovina, aimed to counteract this negative trend. Over the previous decade, the museum has done much in this regard. At the same time, practice has shown that new approaches and innovative solutions are urgently needed in this area. As a result of the search for such new approaches, the House of Memory project appeared. The project aims not only to offer the latest multimedia tools for conveying the historical norm to the minds of the younger generation but also to intensify the relevant discussion in society. Today, it is clear that the many years of activity of the Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovinian Jews in preserving the memory of the Jewish past in the region have had a generally positive effect. However, it must also be admitted that it cannot face such a great challenge alone, especially in the absence of sufficient and stable funding, as well as other conditions for development. What is needed is the combined efforts of various actors and the corresponding synergy.
Oleksandr Fylypchuk:
Although the history of Bukovina has traditionally been one of the main objects of research conducted by scholars at Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University and, in particular, by faculty members of the Department of History of Ukraine, the study of Jewish historical topics within Bukovyna studies lags far behind. Few Ukrainian-language publications on this subject and the absence of relevant chapters in collective works on the history of the city and region published in Chernivtsi over the past three decades may also be used as evidence. One of the reasons may be the fact that the leading Chernivtsi historians who laid the foundations of the Modern School of Historical Bukovina Studies in Ukraine were formed within the Soviet historiographical tradition. The financial and material problems that accompanied and continue to accompany the development of modern Ukrainian historical studies, generally and in Chernivtsi, particularly, also had a negative effect. They often hindered the institutionalization of Bukovinian Jewish studies and the formation of a demand for relevant knowledge. Another reason for researchers’ disregard for the Jewish narrative is apparently the dominant paradigm of perceiving the history of Bukovina as separate histories of the peoples who inhabit it, with an emphasis on the ‘Ukrainian line’, which in the first decades of Ukraine’s independence was nationally motivated and unofficially considered a priority. A similar paradigm has been and remains fundamental to the dominant model of memory culture. It is time to change the existing paradigm to a new one. One that would guide researchers to write an ‘inclusive’ history of Bukovina and stimulate the establishment of an ‘inclusive’ model of memory culture in society. The latter task is equally relevant for the state, local authorities, and civil society institutions.
PHOTO REPORT
Museum Talks