So when the rabbis’ successors meet for pancakes and sour cream, they will be far more likely to introduce themselves as the rabbis of Luhansk, Lviv and Dnipro, the Ukrainian names for their hometowns that have become the standard in English. Many Jews, similarly horrified by the sight of thousands of Russian soldiers pouring over Ukraine’s borders and wishing to demonstrate their Ukrainian bonafides, have made the same choice - even as it means disrupting a long linguistic tradition. But after the Russian invasion, many Ukrainians decided they wanted to speak less Russian and more Ukrainian. Russian has long been the first language for a wide swath of Ukrainians, including the majority of the country’s Jews. How could they? Like the vast majority of Jews in Ukraine, none of them speaks the country’s official language. They named their hometowns as Lugansk, Lvov and Dnepr, the Russian names for Ukrainian cities that have vaulted into international headlines since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.Īlthough they were focused on Ukraine’s progress in the fighting, the rabbis uttered not a single word in Ukrainian. LVIV, Ukraine ( JTA) – Three rabbis sat around a breakfast table in this city’s Tsori Gilod Synagogue, discussing Russia’s war on the country where they work in a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian.
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