On October 1, 2026, the open online course “The Short 20th Century. Jewish Life in Ukraine, 1917–1991” (The Short 20th Century. Jewish Life in Ukraine, 1917–1991) will start — 10 lectures on the history of Jews in Ukraine throughout almost the entire Soviet period. From the revolution and the vibrant Yiddish culture of the 1920s — to the Holocaust, Stalinist persecutions, the “Doctors’ Plot,” and the late USSR.
Author: Alexander Khmelnitsky
The course is taught by Professor Anna Shternshis from the University of Toronto, one of the researchers of Soviet Jewry and Yiddish culture.
Participation is free, registration is required.
Register for Anna Shternshis’s open course
Organizers also promise a certificate to those who complete the test assignments.
And for the Israeli reader, there is one not-so-small detail. Despite the fact that the program is conducted by Ukrainian academic and Jewish institutions, the lectures will be delivered in Russian — this is explicitly stated in the official registration form. It turns out to be a course that a fairly large part of Russian-speaking Israel can join without a language barrier.
Not only the Holocaust: how Jews lived between 1917 and 1991
Soviet-Jewish history has a perception problem. For many, it breaks down into several familiar points: revolution, Holocaust, Stalin’s anti-Semitism, refuseniks, aliyah. Between these points, almost three generations of ordinary life remain — school, theater, profession, family, songs, books, childhood memories, attempts to preserve one’s culture or, conversely, to dissolve into the Soviet environment.
This is precisely the period that Shternshis’s program targets. In the course description, organizers specifically emphasize that history will be examined not only through state decisions and political campaigns but also through literature, memoirs, folklore, cinema, personal stories, and music. The question is posed quite simply: not only what the Soviet state did to the Jews, but also how the Jews themselves lived within this state.
This is already noticeable in the schedule:
- October 1 — revolution: Isaac Babel, S. An-sky, Peretz Markish, David Bergelson;
- October 8 — creation of a new Jewish culture and the ‘Kultur-Lige’;
- October 15 — ‘Jewish in form, Soviet in content’: ‘Red Haggadah’, banquet on Yom Kippur, and everyday life;
- October 27 — Jewish schools and childhood;
- October 29 — Jewish theater, Kyiv GOSET, and amateur theaters;
- November 12 — family, profession, and ordinary life;
- November 23 — Holocaust in Ukraine and Yiddish music in Transnistria;
- December 7 — Jews in evacuation in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan;
- December 10 — late Stalinism, arrests of Yiddish writers, struggle against ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘Doctors’ Plot’;
- December 17 — Jewish and non-Jewish experience in Ukraine in the 1960s–1980s: what was common and what remained different.
By the way, there was a small discrepancy in the announcements. The initial announcement states that lectures take place on Thursdays at 20:00, but the detailed registration form also schedules classes for Tuesday, October 27, and Mondays, November 23 and December 7. Therefore, before joining, it is better to focus on the specific date sent to registered listeners, rather than just remembering ‘every Thursday’.
What is the ‘Kultur-Lige’ and why Kyiv
The name ‘Kultur-Lige’ may sound like another Soviet organization to the Israeli reader. But it emerged even before the final establishment of the Soviet system — in Kyiv in early 1918, during the period of the Ukrainian Central Rada.
It was a large Jewish cultural organization primarily focused on secular Yiddish culture. In Ukraine, it created schools, kindergartens, libraries, theater studios, music circles, and trained teachers. According to the YIVO Encyclopedia, by the summer of 1918, branches of the ‘Kultur-Lige’ existed in almost a hundred Ukrainian cities and towns.
And then begins a story quite characteristic of the USSR. The new government first uses and finances part of the cultural infrastructure, later the autonomous space becomes increasingly subordinate to ideology and state control.
Therefore, the lecture on the ‘Kultur-Lige’ is not only a story about books or theater. Through it, one can see the moment when Kyiv was one of the notable centers of modern Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe, a culture that was not museum-like but lively and very urban.
This line has already appeared from another angle in NAnews. In the material about the connection between Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, we explained why Yiddish in Ukrainian cities was not some ‘foreign language of the diaspora’, but an everyday language of a huge number of people, which lived alongside Ukrainian for centuries. ‘Ukrainian is not “almost Russian”: why its history leads to Yiddish and Hebrew’
Then this world almost disappeared
By the 1930s, Soviet policy significantly changed the conditions of Jewish life. Religious institutions were closed, independent public organizations disappeared, cultural institutions came under state control. In Odessa, for example, synagogues, religious schools, independent libraries, theaters, and publishing houses were closed; similar processes occurred in other cities of the USSR.
But this does not mean that people stopped being Jews overnight. Some continued to speak Yiddish at home, some abandoned it. Some knew Jewish holidays only from family memory, while others had religious relatives. A special Soviet-Jewish identity emerged — often secular, sometimes almost entirely Russian-speaking, but still passed down within the family.
And this story is already very close to Israel. Not abstractly: families from Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, and hundreds of other cities of the former USSR brought it with them.
Explanation for Israeli readers: Transnistria here is not today’s Transnistria
One of the lectures is titled ‘Holocaust in Ukraine: Yiddish Music in Transnistria’. Here, without explanation, it is easy to get confused.
Transnistria during the Holocaust period is not just the current unrecognized Transnistria. From 1941 to 1944, it was the name of a large territory between the Dniester and Southern Bug, occupied and administered by Nazi Germany’s ally Romania. A significant part of it was located on the territory of modern Ukraine, and the administrative center was Odessa.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Romanian authorities and local auxiliary formations killed approximately 280,000–380,000 Jews in this zone — through mass shootings, deportations, starvation, disease, and inhumane conditions created by the occupation regime.
Therefore, the topic of Yiddish songs there sounds almost strange — until you understand that such songs became testimonies of people who knew what was happening around them.
Anna Shternshis and the songs that were considered lost
The course is taught by Anna Shternshis — a professor at the University of Toronto, holding the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies and directing the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Her main research topics are the history and culture of Soviet Jews, Jewish-Slavic cultural connections, Yiddish popular culture, music, and theater. Shternshis received her doctorate from Oxford University in 2001.
Among her books are Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, dedicated to Jewish folk and popular culture in the USSR, and When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin — a study of Jewish everyday life during the Stalinist period, based in part on oral testimonies.
But Shternshis’s connection to Ukraine is not only through a general interest in Soviet Jewry. While working with Ukrainian archival materials, she turned to a unique corpus of Yiddish songs from World War II, collected by folklorist Moisey Beregovsky. For a long time, a significant part of these texts remained unknown to the general public.
Based on the found materials, Shternshis, together with Psoy Korolenko, created the project Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II, reviving songs written and recorded by Jews during the war. The project was nominated for a Grammy, and in 2020 Shternshis herself received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
She continues to research Yiddish music created during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Therefore, the separate lecture on the Holocaust and Yiddish songs in Transnistria does not appear as a random addition to the program but as one of the topics Shternshis has been professionally working on for many years.
And this changes the way of talking about the Holocaust. On November 23, the discussion will not only be about the decisions of the occupation administrations, deportations, or the number of victims. Through songs, the voice of a specific person emerges: they remember home, fear, anger, sometimes joke, record what is happening around — and thus leave a testimony that survives the war along with the text.
The ‘Doctors’ Plot’: what is meant
Another term in the program that may mean nothing to a young Israeli reader is the Soviet ‘Doctors’ Plot’.
In 1952–1953, a group of prominent Soviet doctors, a significant part of whom were Jews, was accused of conspiring to kill Soviet leaders. The campaign was accompanied by anti-Semitic propaganda, arrests, and torture. After Stalin’s death, the case was closed, charges were dropped, arrested doctors were released and rehabilitated.
For the course, this is not a logical point in itself. It is preceded by the destruction of a significant part of the independent Jewish cultural environment, the struggle against so-called ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’, and the persecution of Jewish intellectuals and writers.
And then Stalin dies — but Jewish life does not instantly reappear. That is why the tenth lecture ends the story not in 1953 but extends it to the last decades of the USSR.
Ukraine today is once again gathering its Jewish history
The course is conducted by the International Interdisciplinary Certification Program in Judaic Studies under the auspices of the A. Krymsky Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in cooperation with the Zionist Federation of Ukraine and with the support of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In September, 23 new students were admitted to the main program this year after 32 interviews.
And this is not a separate story. On September 22–23, Ukraine is also hosting an international conference of the Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies, where researchers from Ukraine, Israel, the USA, and Hungary discuss another question — who and how over the past two centuries has formed knowledge about Jews in encyclopedias. NAnews detailed this program and the opportunity to connect online. ‘The Ukrainian Association for Jewish Studies gathers researchers’
It turns out to be two events less than two weeks apart. Some researchers are analyzing how Jewish history was recorded. Another course — how this history was lived by people.
For NAnews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency, this is where one of the direct lines Ukraine — Israel passes. Jewish history in Ukraine today is returning not only through monuments and mourning dates but through language, family documents, songs, university research, and attempts to restore ordinary life around the catastrophe.
We recently told, for example, how in 1966 several dozen people first independently came out to commemorate the murdered Jews of Babyn Yar — at that time, the Soviet system called such gatherings ‘Jewish nationalism’, and participants had to hide the filmed footage from the authorities. ‘In 1966, the first rally in Babyn Yar took place’
Shternshis’s course allows us to see what happened on both sides of this date — and why by 1966, the simple public articulation of Jewish memory was already becoming an act.
How to join from Israel
The course starts on October 1, 2026 and consists of ten online lectures. Participation is free, but registration is mandatory; the organizers send the connection link to the participant’s email. To receive a certificate, it is necessary to complete test assignments.
The registration form specifically states that Anna Shternshis is a Canadian citizen, has never lived in Ukraine, and delivers lectures in Russian. The participant must confirm that they understand and accept this condition.
Register for Anna Shternshis’s open course
For a Russian-speaking listener from Israel, the format is therefore quite simple: Zoom, ten meetings, and a topic that for many families actually begins not in a textbook. It begins with the grandmother’s surname, the grandfather’s city of birth, a couple of incomprehensible words in Yiddish, or that very Soviet answer: ‘We didn’t really talk about it at home.’
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