“For Your Old but True Homeland”: Ukrainian-Jewish Relations through the Prism of Goldelman-Bykovsky letters

This article explores how such ego-documents as letters can be used in tracing the history of Ukrainian-Jewish mutual understanding in the decades after the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920. Solomon Goldelman (1885–1974) of Poalei Zion was one of the active proponents of Jewish-Ukrainian cooperation. In the 1950s, Goldelman and one of his former Ukrainian students, Lev Bykovsky (1895–1992), started exchanging letters. After the pogroms of the revolutionary period and the Holocaust, Ukrainian-Jewish relations seemed damaged beyond repair. However, using letters between Goldelman and Bykovsky, this article reconstructs the thread of Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue emerging in the post-WWII world.