Voices.
A Mosaic of Ukrainian Jewish life

Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish. As diverse as the languages that Jews have spoken in Ukraine over the last 100 years are the voices that can be heard in our exhibition “Voices. A mosaic of Ukrainian-Jewish life”.

They convey an impressive picture of Ukrainian-Jewish life. They tell of intercultural relations and community life in the shtetl in the 1920s and 1930s. They also tell of the horrors of the Shoah and the struggle for an appropriate culture of remembrance in the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukrainian-Jewish life spread beyond the borders of Ukraine: about 50% of the members of today’s Jewish community in Augsburg have Ukrainian roots. Russia’s current war against Ukraine has led to a renewed wave of migration.

By presenting interviews with contemporary witnesses, the exhibition creates a fragmentary but nevertheless comprehensive picture of the diversity of Jewish life in Ukraine and its connections to Germany and Augsburg. In order to make the exhibition accessible to as wide an audience as possible, the texts are presented in German and Ukrainian, and English and Russian translations of the texts are also handed out in the form of a supplement.

The exhibition was realized in cooperation with our two Ukrainian colleagues. Daria Reznyk arrived in Augsburg at the end of March, and since the beginning of June Andrii Shestaliuk has also been supporting the work on the exhibition. Reznyk and Shestaliuk worked together at the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror” in L’viv before the war began and conducted interviews with contemporary witnesses, including survivors of the Shoah. Their stay at the Jewish Museum Augsburg Schwaben is made possible by scholarships co-financed by the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung.