A Sharing of Diversities: Proceedings of the Jewish Mennonite Ukrainian Conference, "Building Bridges"

T.D. Regehr is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
He is the author of Mennonites in Canada, 1939–1970: A People
Transformed, The Beauharnois Scandal: A Story of Canadian
Entrepreneurship and Politics, and Remembering Saskatchewan:

Jews, Mennonites, and Ukrainians share a common history, but it is a
history fraught with misunderstanding, suspicion, and sometimes
hostility and hatred. All three were minority groups in the Russian
Empire and then in the Soviet Union. Each suffered discrimination, but
in their individual histories of oppression and antagonism they tended
to see one another as enemies rather than as friends and fellow
sufferers. The experiences of the three ethnic groups during the
Stalinist purges of the 1930s and the Holocaust of World War II were
particularly tragic and resulted in serious interethnic antagonisms in
Canada.

The 1995 conference was an attempt to build bridges between the three
groups. Leading scholars and community leaders from each group sought to
present and interpret the story and experiences of their people in an
open but nonconfrontational way. While many of the tensions between the
three groups are rooted in their shared life in Ukrainian or New Russian
residence, the primary focus of the conference was not on those Old
World roots, but rather on the distinctive settlement patterns and
subsequent experiences of each group in Canada, and on the interactions
between the three ethnic groups.

The book is divided into several thematic sections. The first,
consisting of only one essay, focuses on a plan implemented in Ukraine
whereby successful Mennonite farmers undertook to offer instruction to
Jewish colonists. Two of the papers deal with comparative ethnic
landscapes in Canada, while five others focus on the immigrant
experiences of members of the three ethnic groups. A rather eclectic
section entitled “Encounters and Responses” deals with
Jewish–Mennonite–Ukrainian intergroup perceptions; intergroup
competition in Winnipeg municipal politics; and the very different
Mennonite and Ukrainian interpretations of the career of Nestor Makhno,
the Russian revolutionary anarchist and military leader who terrorized
many of the Mennonite villages. There are essays on ethnic literature,
theatre, and art, and the volume concludes with several historically
reflective essays.

Like the conference on which it is based, this volume of well-argued
and carefully researched essays marks the beginning of more open
dialogue between three of Canada’s ethnic groups.