A work trip to Ukraine, a connection with my Eastern European Jewish ancestors

I love being a UX research consultant – I get to jump into projects that are always centered around technology in some way, and learn a little bit about other people’s lives, circumstances and professions.

Often the projects are totally unrelated to me personally, for example, I’ll soon be traveling out of state to meet with truckers as they deal with a new web interface for making payments. But occasionally, a project will hit a bit closer to home.

The project: restore Jewish history to the Ukrainian history narrative

Ukraine used to be home to huge and vibrant Jewish communities and still is home to many Jews, though nothing like the numbers that resided there before the Holocaust.

But aside from perhaps a series of brief mentions, largely centered around tragedies, like the massacre at Babi Yar or the destruction during the Holocaust, Jews don’t figure in much to the narrative of Ukrainian history as it is taught. Yes, there are certainly artifacts – memorials and synagogues, some having been reclaimed and which are in active use today. But largely Ukrainian students don’t learn about the vibrant Jewish history of days past.

An educational organization got a grant to change this situation by creating robust academically oriented documentation and an informative website to help teachers teach about how Jews fit into the Ukrainian historical narrative.

I had the privilege this month of being part of a team that did some preliminary design research – talking with students and faculty interested in Ukrainian Jewish history and this project, essentially “friends” of the organization. One part of the project involved individual interviews with undergraduate and graduate university students in Kyiv, while the other part involved multiple focus groups with faculty.

It’s personal

I loved this trip – it blew away any of my own stereotypes about life in a post-communist country. But beyond having the lens of tourist, this trip felt a bit more personal.

I’m completely of Eastern European/Jewish descent. This was confirmed recently when my daughter used a popular DNA test kit that told her she was 100% Eastern European with origins of Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Western Russia, and Poland. Genealogy research has matched specific relatives to several of those countries, with my direct ancestors immigrating to the United States between 120 and 150 years ago. Although I can’t pinpoint any of my family specifically living in what is present day Ukraine, it’s hard to describe what I felt – through a twist of work serendipity, I was not all that far from my family origins as far back as I could trace.

And as I walked along outside, I noted a number of people around me with physical features that mirrored my own, my eyes and my facial structure. I pondered that with a different haircut (or the right winter hat), a slight tweak in fashion and swapping out my running shoes for more regional foot gear, I could easily fit into the crowds around me. 

Ethnic vs. religious identity

The fascinating and slightly disconcerting thing, however, given that I live in a country where national identity and religion are different things, is that I heard people who strongly support the idea of this project describe themselves as “I’m not Jewish, I’m Ukrainian.” I want to be clear that this was not said with any kind of negative intent, but it does have clear roots in the past, when one could not be perceived as both and when there were significant negative ramifications to being “Jewish and not Ukrainian.” Still, in a country where both the president and prime minister identify as Jewish, things are changing.

But on the flip side, there are still Ukrainians who hold cultural stereotypes of Jews – the mildest of these stereotypes perhaps that Jews can always be identified as having a Hasidic Jewish appearance. And some would say that they haven’t met a Jew personally largely because of these stereotypes, not recognizing that someone who identifies as Jewish could look and be dressed just like they are.

Again, just because someone believes this stereotype does not in itself apply any negative intent, especially because the only Jews that actually can be recognized on the street as Jews in Ukraine do look Hasidic. But what it does imply is a significant lack of knowledge about what it means to identify as Jewish, which, of course, goes back to the origins of this project.

Thursday: Ukrainian national history

As a matter of course, stakeholders permitting, I’ll plan for a “recovery day” after significant travel – that is, a day that my hotel and travel expenses may be covered, but that I’m not planning on getting paid for any work.

As a researcher, if I want to be at my best, this recovery day helps me sync up with my environment, getting a little more comfortable with the time zone and city that I just arrived in. The project stakeholders supported this idea, and in fact suggested it.

So on my first full day in the city, I hired a private tour guide and along with a colleague from the organization staff, took a walking tour of Kyiv. The tour guide, Kate from Guide me UA did an excellent job (I’d highly recommend!). And I enjoyed seeing some of the key sites that provide a flavor of Ukrainian history.

I got to see beautifully ornamented churches, historical buildings and statues and get a sense of the rich (although often painful) history of the city. I also appreciated the Putin toilet paper being sold in multiple outdoor kiosks. 

The only thing I found a bit jarring was that while I had learned in my own courses on Jewish history that Cossacks were bad, very bad in fact and killed Jews, there were statues to Cossacks that were protectors of Ukraine – two different historical narratives at odds, which would require reconciliation. (Although I wonder if this is really any different than the painful Confederate monuments that are still present in some southern states here in the US).

Friday & Sunday: Ukrainian Jewish Scholarship

On Friday, we interviewed students with an interest in Jewish and Holocaust history in Ukraine, and on Sunday we conducted focus groups with faculty. While in the United States it would be expected that many students interested in Jewish history would themselves be Jewish, based on what these students said, none of them were in fact Jewish. Rather there had been some trigger in learning some aspect of Jewish history or some faculty member’s interest that sparked their interest.

Shabbat (sabbath) services: Friday night and Saturday

On Friday night, I went to services at Chabad – a Chassidic form of Orthodoxy that is largely focused on outreach to less-affiliated Jews around the world. I do go to synagogue regularly, and the services themselves felt familiar. Everyone had a siddur, or prayer book that was Hebrew on one side and Russian on the other.

For the most part, attendees were young, perhaps in their twenties and thirties and some in their forties – maybe 40-45 people in all. After the services, I joined them for a communal dinner. As I got to talking with them mostly in English, with some Hebrew here and there, I learned that most were expat-Israelis, living in Kyiv for business, although there were also a few Ukrainians. Aside from the Chabad rabbi, his family and maybe two of his peers, most weren’t religious.

One Israeli told me that when he was in Israel, he never went to the synagogue, but here he did. In Israel a Jewish identity is easy to come by, but not so much in Ukraine. One attendee had a huge number of very obvious Jewish-themed tattoos covering his body, which is not something common to see in a synagogue since there is a cultural taboo among religious Jews not to get tattoos, especially with that much salience and overall skin coverage.

I would have loved to talk with him but never got the chance. I did make tentative plans with one of the Ukrainian-born attendees to go out to a bar on Saturday night and talk about Jewish life in Ukraine but in the end the plans didn’t pan out.

On Saturday morning, I went back for morning services, and was surprised to see an entirely different scene. Perhaps 25 very old attendees, all men and none of whom spoke English or Hebrew at all. The only Siddur they used was a siddur with Russian transliteration of the Hebrew words on one side and Russian translation of those words on the other side. I felt sadness for the Soviet occupation in which they grew up, and which probably took away any opportunity for them to even sight-read Hebrew words in their youth. 

I wish I could have spoken with them and I tried in English and in my (broken) Hebrew but I couldn’t gain any traction. I joined them for a communal lunch and then an older Rabbi gave a talk about something that I couldn’t understand. There was a Q&A that I didn’t understand either so after eating and watching for a bit, I left. It was still a fascinating insight into a post-Soviet world among those who spent perhaps the majority of their lives in a Soviet world. I just wish I could have understood more.

Coming back

With my off time in the evenings, when I wasn’t exploring Ukraine, I was inspired to finish the draft script of one of my two upcoming LinkedIn Learning courses on conducting International User Research to be filmed in a few months and published later this year.

Meanwhile, now it’s time to get down to business compiling the slides that will form the report of what I learned from the interviews and focus groups. I’m excited that this project will have a second round of research in a few months and I’m going to get the opportunity to come back to Kyiv and explore a bit more!

Cory Lebson (@corylebson) has been a user experience consultant for over 20 years and is the Principal and Owner of Lebsontech LLC. Lebsontech is focused on user research and evaluation, user experience strategy, UX training, and mentoring. 

Cory is the author of The UX Careers Handbook and is a LinkedIn Learning instructor. Cory also speaks frequently on topics related to UX career development, user experience, user research, information architecture, and accessibility. He has been featured on the radio and has also published a number of articles in a variety of professional publications.

Cory has an MBA in marketing and technology management, as well as an MA in sociology and a BS in psychology. Cory is a past president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) International and is also a past president of the UXPA DC Chapter. 

#LinkedInLearning #UX