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Particular Tasks
Silent witnesses of previous centuries are hidden within the depths of the Ukrainian panorama amongst its hills, streets, and ruins. Ukraine’s Jewish cultural heritage survives not solely in phrases and recollections but in addition in kinds, textures, half-erased inscriptions on matzevot, cracked synagogue partitions, and light façades of historical buildings. These traces of the previous are the main target of the Jewish Heritage particular class inside Wiki Loves Monuments, a photograph contest launched greater than a decade in the past. UJE’s workplace in Ukraine has supported this picture contest for the previous seven years.
It isn’t nearly photos. It’s concerning the digicam turning into an instrument of cultural reminiscence, with pictures not solely recording actuality but in addition bringing forgotten objects again into the main target of consideration. The aim of the picture competitors is to gather pictures of all cultural heritage websites worldwide and place them in Wikimedia Commons, which can allow the supply of illustrations for Wikipedia articles seen every day by tens of millions of individuals globally. The particular class supported by UJE attracts consideration to things of Jewish cultural heritage. In 2024, it obtained greater than 1,100 contributions depicting 210 objects (112 of which didn’t have official safety standing) from 20 areas of Ukraine. Images of 56 monuments had been uploaded for the primary time. A complete of 1,102 monuments have been registered throughout the contest, of which 768 are usually not protected by the state.
UJE helps this initiative exactly as a result of it permits us to see the invisible — objects that slowly disappear from the map however stay in historical past. The jury, composed of researchers, photographers, and cultural heritage guardians, chosen the 17 finest pictures in three classes: Locations of Worship, Cemeteries, and Different Buildings. The actual worth shouldn’t be solely in successful but in addition within the very technique of looking, documenting, and learning.
On 31 Might 2025, the winners obtained their awards throughout a solemn ceremony in Kyiv. Vladyslav Hrynevych, Jr., Regional Supervisor of UJE’s Workplace in Ukraine, addressed the viewers, thanking the picture contest’s organizers, jury, and members and emphasizing the significance of constant the competition sooner or later.
“An method that has taken form and turn out to be conventional in international and home research of Ukrainian-Jewish relations focuses on complicated and dramatic pages within the historical past of each peoples. It considers the historic experiences of Ukrainians and Jews on Ukrainian lands as separate and just about unrelated.
By way of such publications as Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence by Paul Robert Magocsi and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, UJE affords an vital method to a conceptual overhaul of conventional fashions in learning the historic previous of Ukrainians and Jews. We consider this method is critical for setting up a holistic historic image of the relations between the 2 peoples. On the identical time, this doesn’t, in fact, imply that we should always exclude or scale back the depth of analysis on troublesome intervals within the historical past of Ukrainian-Jewish relations (anti-Jewish pogroms, the Holocaust, and manifestations of state and home antisemitism). As a substitute, the concept is to realize a whole presentation of the subject and, most significantly, obtain an affordable stability in its protection, which ought to lastly put an finish to the distorted image of the historic previous, the place the relations between the 2 peoples are restricted to dramatic historical past,” Vladyslav Hrynevych, Jr., mentioned in his deal with. He additionally introduced the winners with certificates and the newest UJE-supported books.
See the highlights of the ceremony within the pictures beneath.
Vladyslav Hrynevych, Jr., Regional Supervisor, UJE Ukraine
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vasyl Starko
