This is a photograph of Haya Lea Kats and her Hashomer Hatzair youth group. The black-and-white photograph was taken in 1935 in the city of Lvov, which was then Poland and is now Ukraine. Haya Lea was fifteen years old at the time of the photograph and can be seen in the second row, second from the right. Haya Lea lived in Rovno, Poland, but in this photograph she was on a camping trip in Lvov with her youth group. The members of the group are wearing a uniform of grey shirts and dark blue ties. Some of the young people are wearing hats or kerchiefs and one boy has a rucksack on his back. Wooden buildings can be seen in the background. In the interview that Haya Lea gave to interviewers from the Centropa organisation, she related that during their time in Lvov they stayed in an attic and slept on hay. Some of the people in the photograph eventually moved to Israel; the fates of the others are unknown.
Haya Lea Kats was arrested by the Russians in 1941 for being a member of Hashomer Hatzair, which they considered an anti-communist organisation. Haya Lea was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and forced labour in Siberia followed by five years of exile. During her imprisonment, the Germans captured her hometown and her parents and sister were executed. While in exile, Haya Lea met her husband. After her sentence was completed, she moved to Leningrad with her husband and son. Although she had planned to move to Israel in her youth, she never managed to do so but was able to visit her brother who moved to Israel after the Holocaust.
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Hashomer Hatzair – Hashomer Hatzair, the first Zionist youth movement, was founded in Europe in 1913. The goal of the group was for members to immigrate to Israel and join the kibbutzim. The first Hashomer Hatzair group made aliyah in 1920, and the first Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, Beit Alfa, was established in 1922. Hashomer Hatzair was also involved in the early days of the Haganah, the Israel Defense Forces, and other institutions of the new State of Israel. In Europe, members of Hashomer Hatzair became leaders in the ghetto uprisings and joined the partisans. Today there are Hashomer Hatzair groups in twenty-one countries, and they educate towards the values of socialism, social justice, humanistic Judaism, peace, equality, and democracy.
Jewish Community of Ukraine – Jews first arrived in Ukraine in the ninth century seeking refuge from Byzantium, Persia, and Mesopotamia. Jews were allowed to practice Judaism openly and prospered during this period. In the 1500s, a large influx of Jews from Western Europe arrived in Ukraine, which became an important centre of Jewish life. However, in the ensuing periods, anti-Semitic sentiment grew in Ukraine, and the Cossack uprising of 1648 resulted in the murder of over 20,000 Jews and the departure of many others to more tolerant countries. At the end of the eighteenth century, Ukraine was made a part of the Russian Pale of Settlement. Although this was a difficult period for Ukrainian Jews, new ideas and organisations developed such as Hasidism, the Haskalah (the Jewish enlightenment), and Zionism. As a result of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Pale of Settlement was dissolved and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. Under communism, Jewish and Zionist activity moved underground as the party did not allow such activity. During the Holocaust, it is believed that a million Jews were killed in Ukraine, including those killed in a large massacre at Babi Yar and others murdered by the Einsatzgruppen. The Germans were joined by Ukrainian collaborators, and according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “Ukraine has, to the best of our knowledge, never conducted a single investigation of a local Nazi war criminal, let alone prosecuted a Holocaust perpetrator.” After the war, Jews who returned to their former homes in Ukraine were met with hostility by the local population. In the 1980s and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many Ukrainian Jews emigrated to Israel and other countries. Currently, Ukrainian Jewish life is being rebuilt, with various Jewish denominations active. Today, the Jewish community of Ukraine is the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe and the eleventh in the world, with an estimated population of up to 140,000 people.
