When Oleg Rostovtsev hovered between life and death after a serious operation last April, he asked friends and family to do something that, until recently, had been impossible — to pray for him by reading the Tehillim, the Hebrew Book of Psalms, in Ukrainian.
Hebrew or Ukrainian, he requested, just not Russian.
“For someone who is sick, someone who is in trouble, you have to do something. We (Jews) read the Tehillim. If we don’t know Hebrew, why should we read the Tehillim in the language of an aggressor?” said Rostovtsev, a prominent member of Ukraine’s Jewish community and well-known local journalist and historian.
Ukraine is the birthplace of the Hasidic Jewish movement, played a key role in the development of Yiddish literature, and has deep roots in Jewish history stretching back more than a thousand years.
Yet crucial sacred texts — including the Torah — have never been translated into Ukrainian.
Only recently has this started to change, through the efforts of Jewish Ukrainians. Although their work began in part prior to 2022, it has radically expanded and accelerated after Russia’s invasion.
While religious texts are often the most widely translated texts on the planet, the absence of Ukrainian translations of Jewish texts is a consequence of the long-lasting effects of the Holocaust and Soviet rule and repression on Jewish life in Ukraine.
The single most destructive event on the Ukrainian Jewish population remains the Holocaust, when historians estimate over one million Jews were killed in Ukraine. But before and after World War II, repressive Soviet policies and antisemitism took their toll as well, undermining Jewish cultural identity. Russification efforts pushed Jewish and non-Jewish Ukrainians alike to switch to the Russian language.
And, even after Ukraine gained its independence and Jewish life began to revitalize, the Russian language provided a bridge for a still weakened Jewish community to millions of other Russian-speaking Jews in former USSR states, the U.S., and Israel.
Many Jewish communities today are centered in the eastern regions of Dnipro and Odesa, where the Russian language has historically been more prevalent than in western Ukraine.
“The inertia of the Russian language in the Jewish environment is quite powerful,” said Leonid Finberg, a sociologist and director of the Center for Studies of East European Jewish Culture and History in Kyiv.
But Russia’s war in Ukraine has galvanized efforts to provide Ukrainian-language Jewish texts to those seeking to deepen their national identity or sever ties to Russia.
Work for Ukrainian translators has “doubled, maybe tripled” since the full-scale invasion began, estimates Inna Zerkal, a member of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine’s (FJCU) team dedicated to translating classical Jewish literature into Ukrainian.
The prayers read by Rostovtsev’s friends are one of several new translations spearheaded by the FJCU who, among other groups, are working to make Jewish texts available in the country’s national language.
Translators work through power outages and tote laptops to bunkers. The printing presses publishing their work in Kharkiv have come under barrage from missiles. But because of the country’s history, the greatest challenge, say those leading the project, has been gathering translators and editors who have a deep knowledge of Jewish religion and texts as well as fluent enough Ukrainian to capture the nuances and sacred meanings of holy texts.
‘It will happen and we will work on it’
Despite these challenges, these efforts have already borne fruit in just a few years. For Passover last year, Ukrainians were able to read the holiday’s sacred text, the Haggadah, in Ukrainian for the first time.
Several children’s books about Hanukkah were printed just before the winter holiday, and thousands of copies of the Tehillim are already in circulation.
Many of these Tehillim copies have been delivered to Jewish fighters on the front lines, says FJCU Chaplain Yakov Sinyakov, brought by volunteers along with food, generators, and protective equipment.
“The soldiers carry these books with them, in tanks and in their pockets.”
FJCU Chaplain Yakov Sinyakov with a pocket-sized Tehillim in Dnipro, Ukraine, on Dec. 11, 2024. (Chris Jones / The Kyiv Independent)
“It is specially made in such a format that it can be carried with you,” he said, displaying a palm-sized copy. “The soldiers carry these books with them, in tanks and in their pockets.”
And now, over a thousand draft copies of the newly translated Torah are circulating in sections for feedback and editing ahead of an official printing later this year.
“Those who fight on the front, those who are in the rear, they simply do not want to watch YouTube in Russian, nor read books in Russian, nor have anything to do with the Russian language,” said Rostovtsev, who himself began switching to Ukrainian in 2016, two years after the Russian invasion of Crimea.
“Those who fight on the front, those who are in the rear, they simply do not want to watch YouTube in Russian, nor read books in Russian, nor have anything to do with the Russian language."
“Many people say that they do not want the Russian language — which, for example, I was raised in — to be passed to the next generation,” he said. “I want my grandchildren to go to synagogue so that my grandchildren have a Jewish identity. And when they come, there should be a Torah in Ukrainian.”
Beyond responding to the Jewish community’s needs, however, Rostovtsev sees the translation as important for fighting anti-semitism by making the Jewish religion more accessible to more non-Jews.
“When you understand something, you don’t feel that it’s something so new and unpleasant. People don’t like when something is not clear,” he said.
Not everyone saw the reasoning behind the translation project right away, said Rabbi Levy Engelsman, who heads the FJCU’s publishing department. Some initially felt the existing Russian translations were more practical for the community. When he proposed a new push for Ukrainian translations of holy texts at the start of the full-scale invasion, an acquaintance of his said he didn’t see the point.
“Half a year passed, and this same person is not only interested, but he became a sponsor” of the project, said Engelsman, who expects a final version of the Torah to be printed in the coming months.
“Today, no one asks whether it is necessary at all. It is clear to everyone that we have to do it. It will happen, and we will work on it.”
‘If you distort the meaning a little, the whole message is lost’
Translating the Torah has far less wiggle room than, say, translating Hamlet or The Great Gatsby.
“Every word in the Torah has a certain meaning. If you distort this meaning even a little, the meaning of the whole text, the whole message to people, is lost,” said Zerkal, the translator.
While there is no official process for approving a new translation of the Torah, a group of rabbis oversees the project and consults on difficult passages and decisions.
Converting a Russian version into Ukrainian might have been simpler, but they determined that starting from the original Hebrew would bring the final version closer to the original meaning. Every translation, after all, is a series of compromises.
“Russian and Ukrainian are different languages. They have different idioms, different pronunciations of verbs,” explained Shaul Melamed, who volunteers his time as an editor on the Torah translation. “There are many idioms that you can use in Ukraine that are much closer to the original Hebrew meanings.”
"There are many idioms that you can use in Ukraine that are much closer to the original Hebrew meanings."
Melamed worked remotely, editing his portions of the text on weekends and evenings after he finished his IT job, one of a team of around ten focused on the Torah. He consulted rabbinical commentaries on spiritual nuances, read translations in English and Russian to see what decisions their editors made, and — when he got stuck — called friends and acquaintances for advice.
From where he lives in Hungary after fleeing the war with his family, he says it helped him stay connected to Ukraine: “This is part of what I can offer to my motherland.”
Shattered Norms
Russian was not always the main language for Jews in Ukraine. At the start of the twentieth century, many Ukrainian Jews lived in villages and small towns, where they mostly spoke Yiddish and Ukrainian.
That changed over the century. Russian became the dominant language for Jews in Ukraine through relocation to cities, Soviet Russification pressure, and the devastation of the Holocaust.
Before the Holocaust, Ukraine had been one of the largest Jewish centers in Europe. In Ukraine alone, researchers estimate that over a million Jews were killed — potentially as high as 1.6 million. Their numbers further shrunk during Soviet rule through antisemitic discrimination and religious suppression.
“The few synagogues that remained of the thousands of synagogues that were in Ukraine, they were very weak. People were persecuted for going to synagogue,” said Finberg, the sociologist. “Jewish schools were liquidated and therefore the community, as a national community, began to be restored only in the late 70s and in the early 80s of the last century.”
Estimates vary, but many believe the number of Jews today who call Ukraine home stands somewhere in the tens of thousands.
As a result, people fluent in both the Ukrainian and Hebrew languages are rare, said Finberg.
The shift to Ukrainian has not been easy for many who’ve spent their entire lives practicing their religion in Russian, Hebrew, and, in the case of some who immigrated to Ukraine from abroad, other languages.
Rabbi Mayer Stambler, chairman of the FJCU, takes classes twice a week. “To change a language is pretty difficult. But even the ones that continue speaking Russian, they want their children to speak Ukrainian,” he says.
But the war has broken norms for every community in Ukraine. Stambler recalls using his phone on Shabbat, the holy day of rest, for the first time in his life when the war broke out. The FJCU was coordinating evacuations, so in this case, it was a matter of life and death — which overrides the traditional prohibition for Orthodox Jews of using the telephone on Shabbat.
In total, the organization evacuated 30,000 people, regardless of religion: “whoever came and needed help.”
“So many Jews fled the country, but what we have now is very interesting. There are new people that have started coming to synagogue,” Stambler notes. Many have Jewish roots but were raised in the communist era without religion.
Despite the war’s devastation, Stambler pauses to reflect on the ways that it has fueled the Jewish community and deepened its connections to the rest of Ukrainian society.
“The Lubavitcher Rabbi taught us to find in every change — in anything we see in the world — to find the positive,” he said, referencing Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 1900s.
“Of course, you see the negative as well. But we must see the positive.”
Andrea Januta
