Marina Sapritsky-Nahum’s Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine offers a snapshot of the effort undertaken by western philanthropy and Jewish activism to establish an Orthodox Jewish community in Odesa after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. While geographically situated in the former tsarist Pale of Settlement (1835–1917), Jewish Odesa developed along lines very different from what Jewish life generally looked like in the rest of the Pale. Modernist, cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial, and internationalist in outlook, Odesa’s Jews did not actively engage in the patterns of Jewish religious behavior associated with the Hasidic and traditionalist Jewries of Lithuania, Volhynia, and Podolia. Quite the contrary, in the nineteenth century, traditional Jews warned that the “fires of hell began just beyond the outskirts of Odesa.” Soviet rule and the subsequent destructive Romanian occupation during World War II continued to undermine whatever expressions of traditional Judaism persisted. Thus, the effort to make Odesa religiously Jewish was not a reconstruction or renewal of what existed earlier; rather, it was a project to fashion a new and different Jewish community there.

Sapritsky-Nahum’s study is based on interviews recorded between 2005 and 2007. The range of her effort is broad and comprehensive. She interacted with and reported on the generation of Jews that survived WWII and the post-war decades through the Mikhail Gorbachev era. Many of her respondents came from mixed Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds, while others had had no contacts at all with the rituals and beliefs associated with traditional Judaism. Sapritsky-Nahum identified the key western and Israeli players and institutions that structured the new Jewish community of Odesa. While the older generation, acculturated into Russian life, viewed these expressions of Jewish identity with skepticism, many of the younger Jews joined and supported the schools, synagogues, summer camps, and cultural centers created in the twenty plus years of Ukrainian independence. Significantly, these Jewish initiatives were also supported by many in Odesa’s non-Jewish community, highlighting the spirit of tolerance and general acceptance that characterized Jewish-Ukrainian relations through these first decades of Ukrainian independence. Sapritsky-Nahum did not restrict her research to the city exclusively, as she also explored the distinctive Odesa diaspora to elicit perspectives on the city and its place in the sentiments of many of those who had chosen to settle elsewhere but still referred to the city as Odesa-mama.

What are the overall findings that emerge from this study? The author demonstrates that the Jewish character of Odesa has been radically transformed. While the feelings of its residents and expats continue to promote the Odesa mystique, the active manner in which Jewish life is being lived in the city is dramatically different from what an ethnographer would have found on a visit one hundred years earlier. However, this study also leads to the conclusion that the future of this Jewish Odesa is not really settled. Both internal and external factors challenge the prevailing structure of Jewish life there. One asks, will the local community be able to fund and sustain these institutions when external philanthropy will diminish? At the same time, will the community be able to generate its own home grown leadership committed to the strict Orthodox rituals brought to Odesa by the visiting experts, or will it always be dependent on foreign assistance?

The second challenge comes from the wider geopolitical reality in the region. Sapritsky-Nahum visited Odesa again in 2014 and 2019 to review the impact of the Maidan Protests and the ensuing Russian assault on Ukrainian territorial integrity. These themes are presented in the concluding chapters and epilogue. The author notes the emigration of many Jews from Odesa, including communal leaders, when the conflict became a military one. Yet despite Putin’s rhetoric, which placed aspects of the historic Jewish-Ukrainian experience into the mix to justify the invasion, the author notes the solidarity with Ukraine among Odesa’s Jews, most of whom were Russian rather than Ukrainian speakers. She writes: “Jewishness was used not to undermine Ukrainization but to support it and undermine Putin’s claims about Odesa being a Russian city” (227).

Her conclusion is a hopeful one as it invokes the spirit of Odesa—progressive, tolerant and international-minded with the hope that these attributes will continue to shape the local Jewish community, the city, and the country. As she notes, this story has not yet reached a decisive end point, and she is committed to exploring how it will continue to unfold. We look forward to the next installment.