Olga Petrova

The aim of the project is to analyze publications and conference records of the Institute for the Study of the USSR (the Munich Institute) and place them in the context of Ukrainian émigré intellectual thought as well as Ukrainian-Jewish relations. The main goal of the Munich Institute, which functioned between 1950 and 1972, was to produce works critical of the USSR, particularly of its treatment of non-Russian nationalities. However, as the Institute’s Ukrainian group involved Solomon Goldelman in its work, the Institute became the first publisher of Goldelman’s Jewish National Autonomy in Ukraine in Ukrainian (in 1963) as well as played the role of a meeting point for figures involved in Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. This research will argue that this transnational dialogue, including Goldelman, located in Israel but attending the Institute’s conferences in Europe, resulted in a reevaluation of Ukrainian-Jewish relations, the effect of which one could see over the last decades in the rapidly developing field of Ukrainian Jewish studies.