Why Israel News Sometimes Starts in Ukrainian Towns

 There is one advantage to writing on a friend’s blog: you do not have to invent a reason for being there.

Stanislav Dayantsev and I have known each other for a long time, and I know the territory he keeps returning to here — Haifa, Israel, Ukraine, people who live somewhere between several cultures, and stories that look local until you follow them far enough.

That is why I wanted to bring him a story that begins neither in Jerusalem nor in Tel Aviv.

It begins in two places that are now on the map of Ukraine.

One is Turka, in the Lviv region.

The other is Troyaniv, in the Zhytomyr region.

And both lead directly into the history of modern Israel.

I write for NAnews as Lev Varshavsky, mostly about Israel, Ukraine, Jewish history and the strange places where these subjects refuse to stay separate. The more I work with this material, the less convinced I am that Israel news should be understood only as news about events taking place inside Israel today.

Sometimes an Israeli story starts a century earlier, in a small Ukrainian town.

Haifa has a street address in Turka

If you live in Haifa, the name Abba Hushi is difficult to avoid.

There is Abba Hushi Boulevard. The University of Haifa stands there. His name belongs to the geography of the city so naturally that it is easy to stop asking who the person behind it actually was.

That question took me back to Turka.

While working on my article about Abba Hushi and his Ukrainian roots, I kept thinking about how strange historical geography can be. A man born in 1898 in a Galician town — then part of Austria-Hungary, today in Ukraine — would eventually become one of the people most closely associated with the development of Haifa.

His original surname was Schneller.

He grew up in a multilingual environment, became involved in the Zionist youth movement and, in 1920, left for Palestine. His early life there was not that of a future mayor posing for ceremonial photographs. He worked on roads, in agriculture and in the labor movement.

Decades later, in 1951, he became mayor of Haifa.

He remained in the position until his death in 1969.

That is nearly twenty years in the life of a city.

What does it mean to “build” a city?

I used the phrase “the man who built Haifa” in the title of my article, but obviously one person does not build a city.

Cities are built by thousands of people, sometimes by hundreds of thousands. Workers, engineers, teachers, immigrants, business owners, doctors, planners, families.

Still, certain people leave a recognizable structure behind them.

The University of Haifa archive devoted to Abba Khoushy lists an unusually broad range of projects connected with his years in the city: the development of the university, the municipal theatre, the Carmelit, cultural institutions, community centers and educational initiatives.

Walk around Haifa today and some of those decisions are still physically there.

This is where biography stops being trivia.

Knowing that Hushi came from Turka does not mean Ukraine somehow gets to claim ownership over modern Haifa. That would be a silly way to read history.

But removing Turka from his biography would be equally artificial.

People do not start from zero when they arrive in a new country.

They bring languages, political ideas, fears, ambitions, memories and habits of organization. Sometimes those things later become part of another country’s institutions.

Hushi’s life is one example.

The second is very different.

Before Degania, there was Troyaniv

Aaron David Gordon feels even more deeply embedded in the familiar story of Zionism.

His name is associated with labor, agriculture, the kibbutz movement and an idea that physical work could become part of Jewish national renewal.

You can encounter Gordon in Israeli street names, educational programs and histories of the early Zionist movement.

But before all of that, there was Troyaniv.

Today it is in Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region.

When I worked on the story of Aaron David Gordon and the movement that carried his ideas forward, I became interested not only in Gordon himself but in the world from which he came.

Troyaniv had a substantial Jewish community. There were synagogues, a prayer house, craftsmen, shops and a cemetery that still preserves old gravestones.

This matters because people like Gordon did not emerge from an empty landscape.

They came out of communities.

Then those communities were broken apart by migration, pogroms, revolution, war and finally the Holocaust.

The person became part of Israeli national history.

The town he came from moved in the opposite direction — toward obscurity.

Israel remembers the person better than the place

There is an imbalance here that fascinates me.

In Israel, Gordon is remembered.

But ask the average Israeli where Troyaniv is and the conversation becomes much more difficult.

The same can happen with Abba Hushi.

The Israeli chapter is familiar.

The Ukrainian chapter fades.

And yet you cannot fully understand the Israeli chapter without it.

Gordon moved to Ottoman Palestine in 1904, already a middle-aged man. He deliberately chose agricultural labor despite having no background that naturally prepared him for it. His thinking later influenced young Zionists across Eastern Europe.

After his death, Gordonia emerged as a youth movement inspired by his ideas. Its center operated in Lviv, and young Jews prepared for aliyah, studied Hebrew and trained for agricultural life before moving to Palestine.

So the line did not simply run:

Ukraine → Palestine.

It also ran back again.

Ideas formed in the new Yishuv returned to Jewish youth in Eastern Europe, were organized there, and then travelled west and south with another generation of immigrants.

History was moving in a loop.

This is why I wanted to write this here

Stanislav’s blog has never made much sense to me as a place for one narrow subject.

One post can be about Haifa.

Another about Ukrainian culture in Israel.

Another about Uman, security, a concert, a person whose biography connects several countries.

That apparent mixture is actually the point.

Israel itself is full of biographies that do not fit inside one border.

You can tell the story of Haifa and suddenly find yourself in Turka.

You can start explaining early kibbutz ideology and end up in a village outside Zhytomyr.

That is not a detour.

It is the story.

And it is also one of the reasons we keep coming back to this angle in Israel news. A current Israeli reality often has a much older map underneath it.

Ukraine was not merely a departure point

There is a way of writing Zionist history in which Eastern Europe appears mainly as somewhere Jews had to leave.

There were obvious reasons for leaving.

Antisemitism was real. Pogroms were real. Political instability, legal restrictions and limited prospects were real.

But if we describe these places only as danger zones, we lose something essential.

Jewish life there also produced political movements, writers, rabbis, organizers, thinkers and networks.

People learned there.

They argued there.

They developed ideas there.

They spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, German and other languages in various combinations.

Then many of them left.

The destination changed.

The intellectual baggage did not disappear at the border.

In Gordon’s case, his later philosophy cannot simply be reduced to the place of his birth. In Hushi’s case, neither can his municipal career.

I am not trying to force a Ukrainian label onto men who consciously devoted themselves to building a Jewish national home.

That would miss the point.

Their Ukrainian geography matters precisely because identity and biography can contain more than one place without one cancelling the other.

A street name can hide a migration story

This may be the part I like most about writing these pieces.

You start with something ordinary.

A boulevard.

A university address.

A familiar surname.

Then you pull one thread.

Behind the name comes a town.

Behind the town comes a Jewish community.

Behind the community comes a political movement, a language, migration, catastrophe, rebuilding.

Suddenly a piece of Israeli everyday life has depth again.

I think that is useful journalism.

Not because every reader needs to memorize where every Zionist leader was born. Nobody does.

But because countries become too easy to misunderstand when we imagine they were built only by people who were already there.

Israel is perhaps the clearest possible argument against that idea.

There are thousands of these unfinished biographies

Abba Hushi and Aaron David Gordon are only two examples.

The broader story is much larger.

Entire generations of Jews who later shaped Israeli politics, culture, science, religion, agriculture and urban life came from territories that today belong to Ukraine.

Some came from famous cities.

Others came from shtetls that have almost disappeared from Jewish memory.

Sometimes the only remaining Jewish landmark is a cemetery.

Sometimes even that is gone.

But the Israeli half of the biography survives.

A street bears a name.

A movement remembers its founder.

A university stands on a boulevard named for a man born hundreds of kilometers away.

And we rarely stop to connect the two halves.

The map is not the story

I understand why daily journalism separates things.

Israel goes into the Israel section.

Ukraine goes into the Ukraine section.

History goes somewhere else.

It is convenient. Websites need categories.

Human lives are less cooperative.

Abba Hushi did not become unrelated to Turka because he became mayor of Haifa.

Aaron David Gordon did not lose the first half of his biography when he arrived in Palestine.

And modern Israelis whose families came from Ukraine do not suddenly become less Israeli because someone tries to understand where those families lived before aliyah.

The interesting part is not choosing which country gets the person.

The interesting part is seeing what happened between the two places.

That is why these stories keep pulling me back.

Sometimes what looks like a piece of Ukrainian Jewish history turns out to be part of the infrastructure of modern Israel.

Sometimes Israel news begins long before the news.

And sometimes, to understand a street in Haifa, you first have to travel — at least on paper — to a small town in Ukraine.