Inherited Anti-Semitic Prejudices

Under the Axis occupations of Ukraine, anti-Jewish sentiment in the Ukrainian Christian community could be attributed to factors that can largely be classified as either non-theological (economic and later political) or theological, though the two were not mutually exclusive.^{Footnote 6} While some manifestations of anti-Semitism may have been transitory, that is, they appeared suddenly and without precedent in previously unprejudiced Ukrainians now seeking preferential treatment under the occupying regimes, most were the result of enduring, cumulative historical ideas.^{Footnote 7} Cultural disparities—from the different languages spoken within each community to dietary restrictions to modes of dress—historically also contributed to othering and created obstacles to social interaction, but these barriers weakened significantly over two decades of Jewish assimilation in the greater part of Soviet Ukraine. What is more, primary testimony, from oral history to memoires, provides numerous examples of non-Jews being invited to dine with Jews on religious holidays in the interwar period both in these areas and in the territories annexed from Poland in 1939.

Amongst non-theological factors contributing to anti-Semitism were inherited prejudices and discontent stemming from historical Jewish leaseholding, especially in the latifundia of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where Jews acted as financial middlemen between Polish magnates and poor Ukrainian peasants. Conspiracy theories claiming Jewish plans for economic domination also circulated as early as the Middle Ages, reaching an unprecedented height in the early twentieth century with the 1903 publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a fabricated document purporting to be the minutes of a nineteenth-century meeting of Jewish leaders planning to gain control of the world’s presses and economies. The idea of the corrupt, capitalist, money-loving Jew intent on inhibiting the social mobility of his non-Jewish neighbors stood in irrational contrast to another anti-Semitic myth—that of the socialist Jew out to destroy existing society from the inside out—a concept that was generously exploited by the Nazi propaganda machine.^{Footnote 8} At the time of Nazi occupation, belief in the Judeo-Bolshevik canard offered the strongest non-theological basis for anti-Jewish prejudice in Ukraine. This conspiracy theory maintained that Jews, occupying important positions in the Soviet administrative apparatus, were at the forefront of Communist movements across the world, and had engendered collectivization, dekulakization, and other acts of repression.

The most deep-seated anti-Semitic sentiments were, arguably, felt by non-Jewish Ukrainians who, like their counterparts across Europe, upheld any number of centuries-old theologically influenced beliefs, the most prominent being the early notion that Jews were responsible for the betrayal and death of Jesus Christ. This viewpoint solidified and gradually spread across Europe after Theodosius the Great’s 380 CE Edict of Thessalonica established Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire and, correspondingly, a need arose for a non-Roman scapegoat for the crucifixion of Christ, despite the very Roman nature of the punishment in question.

Subsequent theologically influenced beliefs included medieval accusations of host desecration, well poisoning, and the blood libel, the latter of which maintained that Jews were kidnapping and crucifying non-Jewish children to harvest Christian blood for ritual use. Furthermore, as was common across Christendom, many non-Jewish communities in Ukraine espoused supersessionist theological views that Christians had succeeded, or replaced, the Israelites as the holders of a covenant with God—a premise that could be traced back to the first century, and, particularly, to the New Testament’s Hebrews 8, which is traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul.^{Footnote 9} Paul, unlike his predecessors, chose to spread the teachings of Christ not to Jewish populations, but to non-Jewish populations across the Mediterranean. In the first century, to be a Christian meant to be a member of a sect of Judaism that accepted Jesus as the prophesized messiah. Whether they were born Jewish or converted to Judaism, early Christians were practicing Jews, just as Jesus, whose teachings existed within the confines of Judaism, had lived and died as a Jew. Up until this point, it was largely a given that a non-Jew could not achieve salvation without first adopting Jewish law, a position that was even espoused by the apostle Peter. But this soon became a matter of debate. In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul, though himself an observant Jew, spoke out against those who sought to impose adherence to Mosaic Law on non-Jews as a prerequisite for participation in the Church, which was emerging as a multiethnic entity across the Roman Empire during this period, arguing that the “new covenant” was based not in law but in faith in Christ.^{Footnote 10}

Finally, in certain communities, theologically derived anti-Jewish discontent was tied to the belief that the refusal of Jews to convert to Christianity had impeded the redemption of humanity pending, as maintained by Augustine of Hippo, conversion in the “last days before the judgment.”^{Footnote 11} Augustine’s writings, however, historically also offered an explanation as to why Jews were allowed to coexist with Christians, as it was he, in a slight departure from a longstanding tradition of defining Judaism as incompatible with Christianity, who reinterpreted the Jews as “witnesses” to the doctrine of the Church.^{Footnote 12} Referring to Ps 59:11 (“Do not kill them, or my people may forget; make them totter by your power and bring them down, O Lord, our shield.”) in his homilies, Augustine depicted the Jewish people as the subjects of both “punitive wandering and of divine protection,” observes historian Paula Fredriksen.^{Footnote 13} Certain Christian communities hoped that the conversion of these Jewish witnesses would catalyze the Second Coming.

Regardless of their origin or nature, theologically influenced anti-Jewish sentiments led some Ukrainian Christians, despite the compassionate doctrine of their faiths, to display anti-Semitic tendencies before and during the Second World War. Some Ukrainian Christians even collaborated with the Nazis as perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence. However, a minority of Ukrainians, just as a minority of their counterparts across occupied Europe, found the courage to rescue Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Historian John-Paul Himka estimates that, on the eve of the war, of the 41.2 million people who constituted Ukraine’s ethnically diverse, yet majority Ukrainian population, 2.5 million would have been considered Jewish by the Germans.^{Footnote 14} Of these, less than a million were evacuated east by the Soviets upon the German invasion in 1941 and about 1.5 million remained in occupied territories and were murdered in the Holocaust.^{Footnote 15} For a myriad of reasons, it is impossible to accurately determine the number of Jews who survived the Holocaust in Ukraine, though of those who did, the vast majority received at least marginal if not tangible (and substantial) assistance from the non-Jewish population.

Faith-Motivated Rescue Work in Ukraine and Beyond

Primary testimony provides numerous examples of faith-motivated rescuers representing a wide breadth of religious experiences in Ukraine.^{Footnote 16} Some were publicly observant members of institutionalized congregations, while others chose to practice individually in the privacy of their homes; still others did both. Some were members of the clergy, while others did not partake in ritual acts of worship but, nevertheless, adhered strictly to the tenets and moral teachings of the Christian tradition. Despite exposure to Soviet atheization, most faith-motivated rescuers were, to varying degrees, devout and ritually observant, whether clandestinely or openly (often at risk of persecution, depending on the period and political regime), and all strongly attributed their rescue work to their belief in God, religious obligation, or ideological inclinations resulting from their faith (including Christian philo-Semitism).

In Ukraine, as was the case across Europe, most faith-motivated rescue work, whether the organized efforts of large institutions or that of individuals representing prominent branches of Christianity, was often attributed to an ecumenical Christian sense of duty to love one’s neighbor as oneself and to act as good Samaritans. The same sense of Christian duty often also held true for faith-motivated rescuers from minority religious groups. Baptist rescuer Nikolay (Mykola) Kuchmiy, for instance, wrote in a letter to Yad Vashem that when Shmerko Sirota appeared on the Ukrainian’s doorstep in the village of Teremkivtsi in what is today the Khmelnytsky oblast, the latter could not turn Sirota away, thinking to himself that “the Lord never sent away anyone who came to him for help.”^{Footnote 17}

Some historians have suggested that members of the clergy, due to access to institutional facilities and resources, should have found it easier than laypeople to effectuate rescue operations during the Holocaust, because churches were, by their very function, accustomed to accommodating people in need and offered widespread networks through which to find hiding places and forge documents such as baptismal certificates.^{Footnote 18} Nevertheless, despite numerous examples of successful church-initiated humanitarian operations under occupation, institutional rescue was not always a given in practice. Amid the Holocaust by Bullets, though many non-anti-Semitic Ukrainian clergymen and laypeople did not engage in anti-Jewish violence, most remained bystanders in the face of Nazi atrocity. This was largely due to a lack of political influence, a sense of socioeconomic instability, or more pressing priorities related to their own survival under occupation.

Beyond the previously discussed notion of Christian humanitarianism, primary testimony provides ample evidence to suggest the validity of the underdog thesis as a motivating factor behind rescue operations led by minority religious groups or their individual members. As a general rule across Europe, argues historian Timothy Snyder in his book Black Earth, “church leaders and Christian believers who were used to a certain amount of tension with political authorities and with the surrounding population [before the war] tended to be more open to the possibility of opposing German policies,” including by means of engaging in rescue operations.^{Footnote 19} In a more specific context, the sociologist Robert Braun evaluates the plausibility of the minority hypothesis by mapping where 93 percent of all Dutch Jews lived against their geographic proximity to Catholic and Protestant churches and whether these Jews evaded deportation. Braun’s spatial regression models “demonstrate a robust and positive correlation between … proximity to minority churches and evasion,” where “proximity to Catholic churches increased evasion in dominantly Protestant regions” and “proximity to Protestant churches had the same effect in Catholic parts of the country.”^{Footnote 20}

It can be argued that rescue work by members of Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church, which was regarded as lesser than the Roman Catholic Church in interwar Poland, was similarly motivated by the underdog mentality. Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Andrey Sheptytsky, for instance, saved some 150 Jews, mostly children, in occupied Poland with the participation of about 550 monks and nuns.^{Footnote 21} Sheptytsky is remembered by many as a noble rescuer today, though his position on the Nazi occupants is considered ambiguous by some historians due to his somewhat incompatible desires, on the one hand, to prevent anti-Jewish violence and, on the other, to help the Ukrainian people gain political independence by way of tolerating the occupation as a means to an end.^{Footnote 22}

Beyond feelings of empathy for the mistreated, reasons for the high frequency of rescue work amongst religious minorities may have been that these individuals were able to cultivate a sense of mutual allegiance and trust in the face of collective persecution and of open-mindedness as a result of regular, unorthodox discussions on faith in communal settings.^{Footnote 23}

Such inclinations could be observed in many French Huguenot (Calvinist) communities that had been persecuted by French Catholics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. In one case study, the Huguenot community of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, situated today in the region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, rescued 5,000 refugees during the war, about 3,500 of whom were Jewish men, women, and children.^{Footnote 24} Though not all families living in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the surrounding villages participated in the rescue efforts, not a single person ever informed against his or her neighbors, which suggests a high level of social trust.^{Footnote 25}

Indeed, their own experience of persecution and, correspondingly, their underdog mentality, predisposed these Protestant rescuers to empathize with persecuted Jews. Their spiritual leader, Pastor André Trocmé, himself an underdog throughout his life, historically stood in conflict with even wider Protestant doctrine in France, espousing a position of “uncompromising pacifism and non-violence” at a point when the church hierarchy upheld that all citizens had a duty to bear arms to protect their nation in belligerent times.^{Footnote 26} As a result of his individualism, Trocmé—who, from the very start of his career, openly informed church leaders that he would not refrain from sharing his pacifist beliefs with his parishioners—received assignments with delay and was only reluctantly permitted to serve “marginal parishes where his dissenting voice would not be widely heard,” writes historian Michael Bess in his introduction to Magda and André Trocmé: Resistance Figures.^{Footnote 27}

Thankfully, the parishioners of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Trocmé was assigned in 1934, proved receptive to his ideas. These Protestants sheltered refugees in schools, farms, and personal homes; forged documents in support of false identities; and helped those who elected to do so traverse the border across the Rhône valley into Switzerland.^{Footnote 28} In addition to the underdog mentality, they were motivated by their esteem for the practical application of theoretical spiritual values, an outlook consistent with Trocmé’s own social Christianity. The pastor believed not in “a naïve faith inhabited by angels, Christ-figures, [and] miraculous shows of divine intervention, but a faith in which action and free will play a large role,” maintaining that he had no interest in that which could not “be translated into deeds and action.”^{Footnote 29}

Trocmé urged his parishioners to “do the will of God, not of men” and advocated non-complaisance with any man-made laws that violated their Christian conscience, reminding them of their duty to offer shelter to the persecuted in cities of refuge, that is, sanctuary cities.^{Footnote 30} Trocmé’s congregation is also known to have been especially universalist, espousing an egalitarian idea that all people, regardless of background, have the same fundamental worth, as evinced by its choice to refer to its charges not as Jews, but as French neighbors.^{Footnote 31} When the rescue activities in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon attracted the attention of the local Vichy police and Trocmé was asked to give up the names of the Jewish charges being helped by his congregation, the pastor refused, saying: “I do not know what a Jew is. I know only human beings.”^{Footnote 32}

While the underdog status of both Trocmé and his parishioners is evident, as is the faith-based nature of their empathy and universalism, the community of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon may also have been driven to rescue by a sense of respect for the Jewish people—if not its own, then that of its leader. Vocal about the biblical heritage shared by Jews and Christians, Trocmé is known to have urged his congregants to shelter “the people of the Bible.”^{Footnote 33}

While many individual Greek Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainian rescuers loom large in popular consciousness, the stories of rescuers from minority Protestant communities are seldom brought to light. Depending on the region and political regime, Protestant communities existed not as proper churches, but more as groups of “believers” in pre-war and wartime Ukraine, often holding baptisms in rivers and congregating informally in makeshift home-based “spaces” of worship. Even those communities that managed to establish “houses of prayer” did not always have access to them.^{Footnote 34} Such a setup may have made room for greater spiritual intimacy or theological discussion between the faithful. As these discussions were often clandestine and unchronicled, it is difficult to verify the precise sentiments any one such community could have had towards the Jewish people and, therefore, impossible to come to any overarching conclusions about the extent to which philo-Semitism was a universal value.

Post-war testimonies of rescuers from Protestant groups in Ukraine certainly reveal the same patterns observed universally in faith-motivated rescuers, that is, a sense of Christian duty and, in minority religious groups, the underdog mentality. In The Righteous, historian Martin Gilbert quotes the testimony of the Baptist-rescued David Prital (formerly Prinzental), who suggested that the knowledge that other Christians were hiding Jews “undoubtedly encouraged” Christian rescuers by sufficiently assuaging their anxiety for their rescue work to continue.^{Footnote 35} Prital’s conviction is especially plausible in the context of Protestant rescuers because, while most rescuing families across Ukraine sought to conceal their rescue work from neighbors, rescuers from non-dominant denominations of Christianity sometimes brought their charges before their entire congregations or encouraged said charges to seek out other members of the denomination in question for help. This “grapevine” rescuer recommendation system is well documented in the stories of Ukrainian Protestant rescuers and is illustrated many times later on in this article.^{Footnote 36}

A young Jewish girl called Hana Kvasha, for instance, sought refuge in the home of devout Evangelicals Mikhail and Aleksandra Gorupay (Mykhaylo and Oleksandra Horupay) after the Jews of Pykiv in the Vinnytsia oblast were massacred in May 1942. After several weeks, the Gorupays sent Hana to neighboring villages in search of other Evangelicals who could help her. Eventually, Hana’s wanderings led her to the village of Yaniv (today Ivaniv), where she met the couple Matvey and Anna Bogachuk and their daughter Tatyana (Matviy, Hanna, and Tetyana Bohachuk), who too were Evangelicals. Hana presented herself as Gorupay’s granddaughter, claiming to be a Ukrainian girl seeking to avoid being sent to Nazi Germany for labor. She was welcomed without question, and once the Bogachuks realized that she was actually a Jewish girl in hiding, they invited her to stay indefinitely. She remained with them almost continuously until liberation in March 1944.^{Footnote 37}

This tendency to turn inward towards one’s community may be one of the reasons why minority Protestant rescuers were sometimes willing to legally integrate their charges into their families. Not only did evangelical couple Mikhail (Mykhaylo) Ponomaryov and Mariya Ponomaryova from Zhytomyr buy off their neighbor’s silence during their rescue operation, Mikhail also obtained a false birth certificate for their charge, Nyusya, and registered her as the couple’s daughter.^{Footnote 38} On one occasion, during an unexpected inspection of their home, aforementioned evangelical rescuers Matvey and Anna Bogachuk even bribed a Ukrainian policeman with what was most likely lard and money to prevent him from taking their charge, Hana, to the local police station when the girl could not produce documents verifying her false identity as Anna’s niece from the village of Solomirka.^{Footnote 39} Sabbatarian nurse Nadezhda (Nadiya) Lutsenko procured Soviet identity papers for her Jewish charge Arkadiy Gertsberg in the name of her missing husband Vladimir (Volodymyr), who had been exiled to Siberia in the 1930s, though she was uncertain as to whether the latter was still alive.^{Footnote 40} Nevertheless, integrating charges into one’s family was not exclusive to Protestant rescuers.

In summary, as was the case with Trocmé and other Protestant rescuers in countries where Protestantism was a minority religion, the underdog experience always went hand-in-hand with humanitarianism and a sense of basic Christian duty in faith-motivated rescue work in Ukraine. Nevertheless, as illustrated in the following pages, primary testimony reveals that individual rescuers within these Protestant communities sometimes felt a remarkable and profound sense of philo-Semitism that both derived directly from their faith and emerged as the primary motivating factor behind their rescue work.

The Hebrew Bible and Philo-Semitism

Protestantism’s abandonment of the priesthood as a mediating factor between God and the faithful established the Scriptures as a critical means of understanding the Creator.^{Footnote 41} Some denominations—particularly evangelical Protestants—adopted the doctrine of prima or sola scriptura, which placed canonized Scripture above all other sources of divine revelation and religious truth. Correspondingly, the exegetical tradition of low-church Protestantism entailed an intimate study of both the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. In placing more emphasis on the Bible than did Catholics, writes historical theologian Yaakov Ariel, Protestants extended their interest to the “biblical narratives about the Israelites’ trials and tribulations.”^{Footnote 42}

For low-church Protestants, the Hebrew Bible served three fundamental purposes: first to offer insight into the Jewish covenant with God, that is, the covenant preceding that of Christianity; second to be a source of necessary scriptural legitimization of the Christian claim that Jesus was, indeed, the long-awaited messiah and that the new religion had, accordingly, fulfilled a Jewish prophecy; and third to offer a source of greater religious connection to Jesus—a Jew.^{Footnote 43}

If Martin Luther’s Reformation in Germany was catalyzed by improvements to printing technology from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth century, Protestant communities in Ukraine also benefited from “extensive publishing and education activities,” despite a lack of institutional structure.^{Footnote 44} Furthermore, under the reign of Russian Tsar Alexander I, and specifically between 1813 and 1826, the Russian Bible Society printed and distributed over 500,000 copies of the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible in forty-one languages across Russia, including 40,000 copies of the former in Russian.^{Footnote 45} Much of southern Russia, which included substantial parts of present-day Ukraine, “experienced a religious ferment as a result of the sudden appearance of Bibles and an increase in people who would interpret and spread the Holy Scriptures,” writes historian Nicholas Breyfogle.^{Footnote 46} The availability of printed materials made it easier for the faithful to devote time to reading or listening to Scripture in the privacy of their homes. It must be noted that a close study of the Hebrew Bible did not mean an acceptance of other Jewish texts (such as the Talmud or Kabbalistic writings) as sacred.^{Footnote 47} Nevertheless, many philo-Semitic Protestants felt such ardent fascination towards Jewish culture that they sometimes learned Hebrew and studied the aforementioned non-biblical Jewish texts for leisure and continue to do so to this day.

As Breyfogle also noted, the appropriation of Jewish practices, for example the Sabbath, by certain Protestant groups, such as the Subbotniki—a subgroup of Sabbatarians in the Russian Empire—“serves as an important reminder … [that] Jews and Christians should be understood as forming part of a spectrum of religiosity with the hues and shades of faith and practice often blending with one another and influencing each other.”^{Footnote 48} Breyfogle’s assessment offers an important synopsis of the theological framework of particular Protestant groups that saw an intellectual and spiritual continuation between Judaism and Christianity, such that loosened the boundaries between them and provoked philo-Semitic tendencies.

With regard to supersessionism, “many, if not most Protestants agreed with Roman Catholics that Christianity had replaced Israel in its covenant with God,” writes Ariel. “Yet some Protestants took a different approach, expressing an appreciation of the Jews … as continued heirs to the covenant between God and Israel.”^{Footnote 49} Adherence to a dual-covenant, or non-supersessionist, theological viewpoint lessened the probability of doctrine-based anti-Semitism and increased the probability of philo-Semitism by making room for God’s covenant with both the Jewish people as descendants of the Israelites and with Christians.

Nevertheless, despite the great potential for philo-Semitism amongst members of these denominations, there remained a strong historical basis for anti-Jewish sentiment as a result of the theological factors delineated earlier in this article. This article, therefore, in no way serves to suggest that all minority Protestant denominations were inclined to rescue Jews from the Holocaust, nor does it ignore any anti-Semitism that Protestants may have been guilty of.^{Footnote 50} It serves only to highlight the activities of an important category of rescuers.

Ultimately, as suggested by Eva Fogelman’s rescuer interview project, feelings of philo-Semitism in any individual rescuer were often informed by overall household attitudes towards Jews. Fogelman gives the example of the Ukrainian Zakhaykevich (Zakhaykevych) family, which had a tradition of Judeophilia passed down from one generation to another.^{Footnote 51} Suspicions of having some Jewish blood oneself often (though certainly not always) increased the incidence of Judeophilia, as did pre-existing relationships with Jews.^{Footnote 52}

Baptist Yevdokim Marinets (Yevdokym Marynets) worked on a construction site supervised by Jewish engineer and professor Israel Punkin before the war and afforded shelter to Punkin, his wife Tamara Lyubarskaya, and their two sons Vladimir and Iosef.^{Footnote 53} Baptists Anton and Pelageya (Pelaheya) Ozarchuk and their three daughters Nadezhda (Nadiya), Mariya, and Marta sheltered the family of Jewish grocer Yakov Zilberberg, whom Anton used to supply with surplus produce from the private khutor—an isolated farm—the Ukrainians owned near the town of Tuchyn in the Rivne oblast.^{Footnote 54} Similarly, Sabbatarians Gennadiy (Henadiy) Sobochev and Mariya Sobocheva from Velyka Zhmerynka in the oblast of Vinnytsia had many Jewish friends before the war, amongst them Olga Zektser and her children Klara and Leonid. Despite being in great financial difficulty, the couple welcomed the three charges in 1942 and always fed Olga’s father Rabbi Zektser when he came to visit from the ghetto. Mariya also traveled once a week to a market 30 kilometers away in order to be able to sell possessions and purchase flour and grain without arousing her neighbors’ suspicion.^{Footnote 55} Nevertheless, “friendship and love” as a motive for rescue were certainly not restricted to Protestant rescuers.

The Judeophilia exhibited by the Protestant rescuers singled out in this article was unique precisely because it emerged from their faith and their approach to theological study. While religious education in these households certainly served to strengthen any positive sentiments towards Jews that may have developed due to pre-existing relationships, it also had a remarkable capacity to produce profound feelings of appreciation even in those situations where Protestants had never even laid eyes on a Jew before the start of the rescue operation.

Linguistic and Doctrinal Challenges

Primary testimonies from wartime Ukraine, including those in Yad Vashem’s collection on the Righteous, do not always clearly distinguish between various groups described as Baptists, Evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists, and Sabbatarians. In some testimony, the words Baptists and Sabbatarians or Seventh-day Adventists and Sabbatarians are used interchangeably, though in the latter case, the confusion is justifiable because Seventh-day Adventists, who observe the seventh-day Sabbath, are a subset of the more general category of Sabbatarians. Sometimes, the word Sabbatarians seems to refer to the Subbotniki of the Russian Empire, though there was a wide breadth of theological variation even amongst the Subbotniki, from those who considered themselves Christian but adopted Mosaic Law—even circumcision—due to their conviction that such practices would bring them closer to God and salvation, to those who considered themselves Jewish, learned Hebrew, and married Jews. Similarly, sometimes individuals referred to in one testimony as Baptists appear in another testimony as Stundists, an inconsistency that is only confounded by the fact that, as observed by historian Sergei Zhuk, people who live in Ukraine’s central and southern oblasts tend to call all evangelicals Stundists.^{Footnote 56}

The historical record testifies to the existence of numerous proto-Protestant and Protestant trends in the lands that today constitute Ukraine and neighboring countries, which signifies that the groups that are the focus of this study on rescuers did not appear in a vacuum. The presence of Protestantism in the multiethnic, multilinguistic, and religiously diverse Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was made possible by a history of relative tolerance, both de facto and de jure, for centuries before the country’s establishment in 1569.^{Footnote 57} This tradition ensured that even radical reformist groups, such as the Anabaptists, though still subjected to suspicion, were treated with far more consideration in Poland than they were in the countries they were fleeing.^{Footnote 58}

According to historian Janusz Tazbir, a group of 200 Anabaptist exiles appeared in Poland in August 1535. The staunchly Catholic King Sigismund I issued an edict forbidding starostas (local governors) from accommodating these refugees, an edict that was widely cited by the starostas of Kraśnik, who tried to prevent a second group of Anabaptists from Moravia from making its way through Poland. But, after a series of interventions, the reformers were released and some even found permanent refuge at a time when Anabaptists and antitrinitarians (or nontrinitarians—Christians who rejects the mainstream doctrine of the Trinity of God in three divine persons, that is, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, united as one) were ruthlessly being persecuted as heretics by Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists and subjected to execution, including by beheading and burning at the stake, in various parts of Western and Central Europe.^{Footnote 59} Part of this second group of Anabaptists, maintains Tazbir, created a commune in the city of Volodymyr (previously Volodymyr-Volynsky) the first radical reformist commune in what is today Ukraine.

This landscape also produced groups with an interest in Jewish doctrine, as well as Judaizing movements, such as, for example, the Ebionite current of the Polish Brethren. The current, whose name derived from the word ebyonim (English: “the poor ones”; Hebrew: אביונים), was led by the Belarusian Symon Budny; it was non-pacifist, followed Mosaic Law, and rejected the divinity of Jesus and the virgin birth while recognizing Jesus as the messiah.^{Footnote 60}

Between 1772 and 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fell to three partitioning powers—its neighbors, Austria, Prussia, and Russia; a major share, including most of what today constitutes Ukraine (save for the lands of the historical region of Galicia), was annexed into the Russian Empire. Considered the predecessor of a broad evangelical movement, Ukrainian Stundism emerged in the southern parts of the Russian Empire in the mid-to-late nineteenth century amongst emancipated ethnic Ukrainian and Russian peasants who worked for and participated in the religious gatherings of Pietistic German and German Mennonite colonists, two groups that were respectively undergoing a religious awakening and a religious revival at the time.^{Footnote 61} These ethnic Germans were amongst the more than 139,000 foreigners who came to the Russian Empire by 1850 in the decades following Catherine the Great’s Manifesto of 22 July 1763, which was signed shortly after the Seven Year’s War—a conflict that left much of Western Europe in socioeconomic turmoil.^{Footnote 62} The Manifesto, advertised generously in German-speaking lands, offered foreigners the opportunity to enter Russia and settle in the province of their choice while enjoying a wide range of rights and benefits, including freedom of religion; tax breaks; land and assistance in setting up farms, manufactories, and factories; paid travel expenses; and exemption from military service, amongst others.^{Footnote 63} The earliest Mennonites relocated to southern Russia from Prussia in 1789–1790 to avoid mandatory military service.^{Footnote 64}

German Lutheran pietists from the historical territory of Württemberg settled in Russia’s Kherson gubernia (province) in 1817 in the colony of Rohrbach, bringing with them a new religious practice of studying and discussing the Bible in private houses during the hours (Stunde) following church worship.^{Footnote 65} From the 1840s through the 1860s, this movement coincided with the religious revivals of the German colonists in the Nazareth sect of Bessarabia and the Mennonites of the Ekaterinoslav and Tavrida provinces, notes Zhuk, and, under the influence of German missionaries preaching the Western European Baptist faith, these converging phenomena produced a popular radical “reformation”—the Ukrainian Stundist movement—amongst peasants who adopted these ideas.^{Footnote 66} The movement grew from several hundred followers in the 1830s to 400,000 followers in 1883, engaging over three-fourths of the rural population of the Kherson gubernia and entire villages in the Kiev gubernia in the 1880s and 1890s.^{Footnote 67} “Like the Western Protestants,” writes Zhuk, “the new sects denied the universal authority of the established church hierarchies (of the Pope or of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy) and affirmed the Reformation principles of justification by faith alone, the priesthood of all believers, and the primacy of the Bible as the source of revealed truth.”^{Footnote 68}

The Baptist movement is considered to have spread to Ukrainian peasants on 11 June 1869.^{Footnote 69} On this day, Efim Tsymbal, a Stundist peasant from the village of Karlivka (previously the German settlement of Alt Danzig) in what is today the Kirovohrad oblast, was baptized by a Baptist minister alongside 30 German colonists; later that year, Tsymbal baptized Ivan Riaboshka who, in turn, baptized a religious community of 49 people in 1871.^{Footnote 70} These newly baptized leaders then “introduced elements of Baptist theology and ritual into the Ukrainian Stundist communities,” writes Zhuk, becoming its first ministers—an innovation that some Stundist peasants rejected. These developments eventually split Ukrainian Stundism into two groups: the conservative Stundo-Baptists and the more radical “New” or “Young” Stundists who stressed “unmediated spiritual communication” with God.^{Footnote 71}

The 1870s saw the start of a steady stream of Ukrainian emigration from both the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to North America. Amongst these émigrés were Ukrainians seeking financial stability and about 15,000 German Mennonites hoping to escape military service after Tsar Alexander II’s 1874 revocation of the exemption accorded by Catherine the Great.^{Footnote 72} Some of these individuals, amongst them Greek Catholic Ukrainians from Galicia, joined the Presbyterian Church in the United States; others joined evangelical Protestant communities, such as the Seventh-day Adventists.^{Footnote 73} As early as the 1880s, evangelical “papers and tracts,” including pamphlets on Sabbath-keeping, were making their way across the Atlantic to relatives and friends of converted immigrants—a phenomenon that facilitated the work of missionaries seeking to spread the gospel and establish churches on the ground, which, in turn, resulted in a significant growth in evangelical communities.^{Footnote 74}

In this way, the earliest formal congregation of Seventh-day Adventists in what is today Ukraine was founded in 1886 by the missionary Ludwig R. Conradi in the Crimean town of Berdebulat. Conradi wrote that year:

Upon the fall of the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1910s and the rise of a short-lived independent Ukraine, some Ukrainian émigrés returned to their homeland; many brought reformist thought with them.^{Footnote 76} Sometimes individuals educated in particular traditions in the United States joined communities formed in slightly different traditions in Ukraine, thereby mixing doctrines in a way that makes labelling any particular evangelical community with precision problematic. Furthermore, because many of these congregations were geographically distant, it is reasonable to assume that there was some confusion or adaptation as knowledge of traditions quietly made its way to new communities.

According to primary testimony, Baptists, Evangelicals, Seventh-day Adventists, and Sabbatarians each produced rescuers in occupied Ukraine. The linguistic uncertainty surrounding these designations, however, makes it possible that certain rescuers who self-identified as adhering to one denomination should actually, in light of precise doctrine and spiritual practices, be categorized as adhering to another. For this reason, it is difficult to trace the origins of any particular community mentioned in the testimony or determine which elements of their doctrine may have contributed to Judeophilia.

It is also unclear whether any of these movements subscribed to Calvinist notions of predestination. Though the Russian Union of Baptists is said to have adhered to the Calvinist doctrine of salvation in the early twentieth century, by the end of the 1990s, most evangelical Christians in Ukraine adhered to the Arminianist model of salvation, which establishes the human being’s free will to accept God’s salvation.^{Footnote 77} The evolution of the latter doctrine in Ukraine and corresponding changes in perceptions of predestination in society may have contributed to a greater sense of theological affinity with the Jewish people, as “a basic principle of Judaism is that man can gain God’s favor by his own conduct.”^{Footnote 78}

These are all distinctions that could, even if slightly, have affected the principles and values by which any particular denomination lived as a collective, as well as each individual rescuer’s motivations for wartime humanitarianism.

Case studies of Philo-Semitism from Primary Testimony

Of the 2,659 Ukrainian rescuers recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem as of January 2020, 165 were members of minority Protestant groups during the war; 103 of these rescuers were Baptists, 30 were either Seventh-day Adventists or Sabbatarians, 27 were Evangelicals, and 1 was a Jehovah’s Witness. In terms of geographic distribution, over 64.8% (107 rescuers) lived in the lands that today constitute Ukraine’s Rivne oblast and Volyn oblast, with 77 rescuers and 30 rescuers respectively; over 84.4% (65 individuals) of minority Protestant rescuers living in the Rivne oblast were Baptists. According to preliminary estimates, at least 31.5% (52 individuals) of Protestant rescuers in Ukraine had strong Judeophilic tendencies, though this figure is likely to increase with further examination of testimony.^{Footnote 79}

Those Protestants whom I identify with certainty as being philo-Semitic are those who directly expressed admiration for their Jewish charges or the Jewish people as a whole specifically because of the “Jewishness” of the people in question. The nature of this expression was diverse, ranging from prayer, to song, to general words of encouragement, to ardent Judeophilic declarations before entire congregations.

The testimony of Holocaust survivor David Prital, for instance, as cited by Martin Gilbert, related the following philo-Semitic episode:

This Baptist rescuer was called Ivan Yatsuk. Along with his wife Serafima (Serafyma), Yatsuk offered Prital shelter in his home in the village of Pidhaitsi in the Volyn oblast. Though it is unclear whether, in saying “the remnants of the Jews will be saved,” Yatsuk presented an Augustinian idea of imminent Jewish conversion or a non-supersessionist idea that Jews too, on par with Christians, would achieve salvation, his general commentary reveals an ardent philo-Semitism.^{Footnote 81} In claiming that he too was a Jew in “spirit,” Yatsuk evoked a Jewish-Christian understanding of Christianity, that is, one in which Mosaic Law and, by extension, Judaism had not yet become redundant—an idea that is reflected in the stories of several other Judeophilic rescuers.

“Baptists were a minority in [Pidhaitsi], which was mostly Russian Orthodox and antagonistic towards the Baptists,” reads the corresponding Yad Vashem account, revealing that this particular community was, indeed, at a disadvantage in its locality.^{Footnote 82} “[Prital] occasionally stayed with the Yatsuks for short periods,” continues the account, “but through them he met other Baptist families in and around the village that were willing to help him.”^{Footnote 83} When Yatsuk sent Prital over to a Baptist neighbor for refuge, the neighbor, concerned that his Jewish guest was sad, said: “ ‘I will sing you a song that may help raise your spirits.’ The peasant then started to sing from the Psalms: ‘When God returned the Jews to Zion’—and sang, Prital noted, ‘in Hebrew!’ ”^{Footnote 84}

An appreciation of Hebrew Scripture, culture, and language remained important for some aging Protestant rescuers to their dying days. In August 2017, when I interviewed Valentin (Valentyn) Cheremukha, a now deceased, once Rivne-based Baptist rescuer, the Ukrainian showed me his Hebrew Scriptures and sang several songs to demonstrate his deep philo-Semitism.^{Footnote 85} One of these songs was Israeli folksong Hava Nagila. Valentin’s home, clothing, and use of language all suggested a sincere sense of Judeophilia. The rescuer wore a shirt that bore a pattern slightly resembling interlacing Stars of David and relied on Yiddish to explain that his eldest sister had passed away or, to use his words, had geshtorbn (English: Died; Yiddish: געשטאָרבן).^{Footnote 86}

During German occupation, Valentin, his parents Andrey (Andriy) and Anastasiya, and his two siblings lived on a khutor near the village of Kharaluh in the Rivne oblast. One day in autumn 1942, the family was paid a visit by their Jewish acquaintance Haya Tessler from the Mezhyrichi ghetto over 14 kilometers away.^{Footnote 87} The local Judenrat had allowed Haya to leave the ghetto briefly on condition that her brother Israel and their nephew Mordecai Tennenbaum remain as collateral were she to not return.^{Footnote 88} The risk was great, but the young lady was desperate—there were rumors that the Germans intended to launch a second Aktion to coincide with the Jewish festival of Sukkot, which was several days away.^{Footnote 89} Haya’s parents and husband had been killed in the first Aktion, that of 22 May 1942, so she came to the Cheremukhas and asked for help fleeing the ghetto with her remaining family. “Save our souls,” she said to them.

The Cheremukhas spent the night devising a plan and, in the morning, Anastasiya and Valentin journeyed to the town by horse-drawn cart on the pretense that Anastasiya was ill and wished to consult a ghetto doctor called Horokhovich.^{Footnote 90} Their intention was to bribe the Judenrat with food and drink, pull the charges out of the ghetto one by one, disguise them as Ukrainian peasants, and transport them to the Cheremukhas’ home. But rescuing was fraught with challenges and there was little guarantee that the escape would go as smoothly as the Cheremukhas had planned.

“As mama was leaving … she asked me to bend down because she was already on the ground and I was [sitting] atop the [cart],” Valentin told me in an emotional interview.

The charges settled in a small hideaway beneath the floorboards, heated from above by a nearby stove.^{Footnote 92} They were permitted to surface at night to stretch their limbs and earned their keep by knitting goods that the Baptists then exchanged for food. Valentin voluntarily shared a bed and ate with the family’s charges, he said in our interview. Throughout his life, he attributed his family’s commitment to the rescue operation to their fervently philo-Semitic faith and upbringing.

Haya and her relatives remained in the Cheremukhas’ hideout for nine months before being relocated to a granary in one of the family’s fields. The move made the logistics of rescuing especially difficult, so the charges moved on, eventually joining the Soviet partisans. Though he survived the war, Andrey Cheremukha, who started working for the Soviet authorities after the Germans retreated, was killed by Ukrainian nationalists while conducting a census in the neighboring village of Koloverty just short of a year after liberation. It is likely that this rescuer was executed not for being a Baptist or for having rescued, but for cooperating with the Soviets.

Judeophilic rescuers believed that rescuing Jews was an honor. Aforementioned Baptist rescuer Nikolai Kuchmiy, who, along with his wife Olga (Olha), rescued three Jews in the village of Teremkivtsi both in their own home and the home of trusted neighbors, reflected on this sentiment decades after the war in another letter to Yad Vashem, this one addressed to Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, the former Director of the Department of the Righteous:

Minority Protestants often spoke to their charges about the Scriptures, a propensity perhaps best evinced in the story of twenty-year-old Fanya Rozenfeld from Rafalivka, also near Rivne. In August 1942, the adolescent escaped the liquidation of the ghetto in her native town and ran towards a Baptist community in search of food. By September, she came upon Filip and Teklya Kotsubaylo (nicknamed Konyukh, presumably because either Filip himself or his ancestors had, at one time, cared for horses), Baptist farmers in Mulchytsi (Rivne oblast), who believed rescuing to be a blessing from God.

One night, Fanya had a dream in which she saw herself holding a Russian-language Bible for the very first time yet somehow knew the precise location of a particular passage. Upon awakening, she found the Bible and began searching for the passage, and when Filip entered the room, she told him of her dream. Knowing the Scriptures well, the impressed rescuer immediately located the passage in the Book of Isaiah and, that very evening, took his charge to a Baptist meeting in the nearby village of Mlynok. There, Fanya read a sermon before the entire congregation, which felt moved to save her life.^{Footnote 94} Fanya was treated like family in the Kotsubaylos’ home and nicknamed “Saint Feodosiya” by the congregants, who considered her holy.

Through Fanya, the Baptist community extended its help to other Jews hiding in the forest, including eleven-year-old Masha Dreizen (later Wolfstahl), from the town of Kamin-Kashyrskyi, whom Fanya found lying alone in the woods at the end of 1943 after the child’s family had been murdered in an Aktion. Dreizen would recall in a post-war interview:

The Kotsubaylo family also sheltered Sender Appelboim and his father Shlomo, who had escaped from the Volodymyrets ghetto.^{Footnote 96} Inspired by local Baptist spiritual leader Konon Kalyuta, whose sermons spoke of the importance of rescuing Jews, Filip told the Appelboims: “God sent you to me, and I consider it an honor to save Jews.”^{Footnote 97}

In late 1942, the search for Jews and partisans intensified in the surrounding area and it became necessary for the charges to leave the Kotsubaylo home. Fanya would spend the next year hiding in the village of Mlynok at the home of preacher Kalyuta, his second wife Anna (Hanna), their four children, as well as his two daughters from his first marriage—Anna (Hanna) and Mariya.^{Footnote 98} With the arrival of anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalists to the area in the second half of 1943, Fanya was forced to move again, this time to the home of Baptist leader Andrey (Andriy) Kuyava, his wife Yarina (Yaryna), and their son Nikolay (Mykola) in the nearby village of Sudche (Volyn oblast).

Judeophilic rescuers often occupied themselves with their charges’ emotional and psychological wellbeing in addition to meeting their physical needs of sustenance and shelter. Aforementioned evangelical rescuer Tatyana Bogachuk used to lend literature to her family’s charge Hana Kvasha to help her pass the time. Hana wrote in her post-war testimony:

Baptist rescuer Mefodiy Logatskiy (Lohatskyy) lived on a khutor with his wife Kseniya and their children Darya and Fyodor (Fedir) near the village of Dovhovolya (Rivne oblast) not far from Volodymyrets. While working for a wealthy Jew in Volodymyrets before the war, Logatskiy met many Jewish locals. Just before the 28 August 1942 liquidation of the Volodymyrets ghetto, Logatskiy offered shelter to his Jewish friends, of whom four, Abraham and Reuven Susel and two young women, accepted his offer. In late 1942, Shlomo and Sender Appelboim (previously housed by the Kotsubaylos) also relocated to Logatskiy’s home, and two other Jews—Lyova and Srulik—eventually did so too.

As devout Baptists, Logatskiy and his wife felt it was their duty to rescue Jews, whom they too believed were God’s Chosen People.^{Footnote 100} “During periods of depression and despair, Logatskiy encouraged the Jews hidden in his home and shared his belief with them that they would later reach the Holy Land,” reads an account of the rescue on Yad Vashem’s website, suggesting that the rescuer was conscious of and empathetic towards Zionism and his charges’ hopes for Aliyah—another indication of his Judeophilia.

By spring 1943, most of the guests had moved on, but Lyova and Srulik remained, only to be found by German soldiers and instantly killed. During his interrogation, Logatskiy was asked whether he knew that rescuing was punishable by death, to which he replied: “You can take my body, but not my soul.” The Germans executed Logatskiy, burned down his house, and stole his livestock. Kseniya and her children were left homeless and themselves went into hiding until the liberation.^{Footnote 101}

As suggested previously, some Judeophilic Christian rescuers espoused Jewish-Christian views of Christianity or adhered to Mosaic Law to varying degrees. Amongst such rescuers were Sabbatarians, that is, those who observed the Sabbath. Adopting Mosaic Law gave these rescuers a sense of closeness to God and a corresponding confidence that God would deliver them from any challenges that they encountered because of the purity of their faith and spiritual practices.

Nadezhda Lutsenko (mentioned earlier) and her husband Vladimir were such Sabbatarians from Kyiv. Vladimir was exiled to Siberia in the 1930s during the era of Stalin’s repressions and Nadezhda never heard from him again. Amongst Lutsenko’s Jewish acquaintances were the three Gertsberg brothers, the eldest of whom were married to her two friends and serving in the Red Army since the start of the war. The youngest brother, Arkadiy, did not enlist and was spared Aktion at Babyn Yar because he tried to escape to the east.^{Footnote 102} But his train was bombed by the Germans and he was unable to flee. Though at first Arkadiy sought refuge with one of his sisters-in-law, he eventually turned to Lutsenko for help.

In her testimony to Yad Vashem, Lutsenko wrote: “I had faith that God would save both me and him, because I adhered to the commandments that God conveyed onto Moses and Abraham and knew that [h]e protected his righteous servants.”^{Footnote 103}

Lutsenko gave Arkadiy her husband’s birth certificate and, when she learned that her charge would be unable to obtain German identity papers without first presenting his Soviet papers, “placed a notice in the local newspaper declaring the loss of identity papers in the name of Vladimir Lutsenko,” reads Yad Vashem’s online account.^{Footnote 104} Gertsberg, who hid in Lutsenko’s basement while awaiting Vladimir’s new papers, left shortly after receiving them, found a job, and started renting his own home on the city’s outskirts. But fearing that his real identity would be discovered, he returned to Lutsenko in autumn 1943 and remained hidden for the remainder of the occupation. The pair married within six months of liberation and lived together for half a century thereafter.

While many faith-motivated rescuers were vocal about their faith and God throughout their testimony, marginalized Protestant rescuers, especially Judeophilic rescuers, consistently revealed both a sense of ardent gratitude to God for the opportunity to rescue and a profound awareness of God’s constant presence in their lives. This was likely the result of both genuine gratitude and a habitual outspokenness about their faith born of a constant need to defend their spiritual beliefs in the face of persecution, before, during, and even after the war in the Soviet Union.