page_title: Jewish–Ukrainian relations in Eastern Galicia
section_title: Between the First and Second World Wars
hierarchical_section_title: Jewish–Ukrainian relations in Eastern Galicia / Between the First and Second World Wars
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of interior minister in the temporary government Yitzhak Greenbaum. עברית: פורטרט, שר הפנים בממשלה הזמנית יצחק גרינבוים.
context_page_description: Eastern Galicia was the heartland of the medieval Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, currently spread over the provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil in modern western Ukraine. Along with Poles and Ukrainians, Jews were one of the three largest ethnic groups in Eastern Galicia with almost 900,000 people by 1910. From the late 18th century until the early 20th century eastern Galicia had the largest concentration of Jews of any region in Europe.
context_section_description: After Polish victory over the West Ukrainian People's Republic in the Polish–Ukrainian War, Galicia's Jews and Ukrainians found themselves living within the Polish state – and were that state's largest ethnic minority groups. During this time relations between the two communities were initially positive – reflecting decades of previous cooperation – but subsequently deteriorated. In the early 1920s Ukrainians and Jews, at the initiative of Jewish leader Yitzhak Gruenbaum, formed a unified Bloc of National Minorities which sought to defend both groups' interests in the Polish government.
  Relations between Ukrainians and Jews soured somewhat when, in 1925, Jewish political leaders signed a separate agreement with Poland in order to guarantee certain rights for their community. Ukrainian leaders accused Jews of preferring to reach an agreement with the Polish government instead of maintaining solidarity with the Ukrainians. The assassination in 1926 of Symon Petliura, Ukraine's exiled president, by Sholom Schwartzbard – a Jewish relative of victims of pogroms in central Ukraine – served to significantly furthermore undermine Ukrainian Galician attitudes towards Jews. Although Petliura was unpopular in Galicia due to his agreement to cede Galicia to Poland in exchange for Polish assistance in the war against the Soviet Union, his assassination and the subsequent acquittal of Schwartzbard sparked outrage within the Galician Ukrainian community. It was widely assumed that Schwartzbard was a communist agent, and his assassination of Petliura promoted the stereotype of Jewish cooperation with Bolshevism. The assassin's acquittal by a French court and defence by a French lawyer – and his support from the Jewish community around the world – suggested to many Ukrainian Galicians that the Western democracies, Jews, and Communists were all opposed to the idea of an independent Ukraine – an idea that contributed to Galicians' orientation towards Germany in the interwar period. In 1930 the coalition between the Jewish and Ukrainian parties collapsed due to the Ukrainian parties no longer wanting to run under its name. When in 1935 the largest Ukrainian political party, the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, came to an understanding with the Polish state, antisemitic actions – neither encouraged nor condemned by Ukrainian leaders – increased within Ukrainian society.
  In spite of the worsening attitudes towards Jews within the Ukrainian community, political cooperation between Jews and Ukrainians did continue throughout the 1930s.  When the Polish government attempted to limit the kosher slaughter of meat, Ukrainian political parties voted alongside their Jewish colleagues against this ban out of a feeling that limiting Jewish practices would set a precedent for limitations of their own traditions by the Polish state.  This act of solidarity with the Jews was then condemned in the Polish press.  When Jews were attacked by Poles in Brześć in 1937, an article in the Ukrainian press condemning this pogrom was titled "After the Jews Will Come Our Turn."  In the face of increasing anti-Ukrainian actions by the Polish state, Ukrainian leaders began to once again call for cooperation between Jews and Ukrainians, while at the same time condemning supposed Jewish support for Communism.  In spite of their criticism towards Jews, Ukrainian political leaders consistently rejected Polish offers of mutual cooperation against the Jews.
  While the mainstream Ukrainian political parties cooperated with the Jews, and the leaders of the largest Ukrainian political parties refused to explicitly encourage antisemitic acts, the underground radical rightist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) – operating illegally in Galicia – developed close ties with the Nazi regime in Germany.  Founded in 1929, the OUN was originally a fringe movement within eastern Galicia, although its popularity grew throughout the 1930s in response to Polish persecution against the Ukrainian community, often provoked by the OUN's terrorism. Initially supportive of Jews, the
caption: Yitzhak Gruenbaum, Jewish leader who initiated the Bloc of National Minorities in Poland that brought together Ukrainian and Jewish political parties
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