On February 27, the Kyiv office of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) hosted a public lecture by EAJC General Council member, historian and political studies scholar Vyachelav Likhachev. The lecture was titles “From Holy Scrolls to Sacred Oaks: A Tradition Invented in the Crimea.”

The lecture was dedicated to the formation of the self-awareness of Eastern European – first and foremost Crimean – Karaites. The Karaites are a small Turkic-speaking group that adheres to a marginal version of Judaism. For the last 150 years, they were able to practically rewrite their own history, rethink their identity, and, moreover, to incredibly effectively convince everyone else of their own mythopoetic historiosophy. The case of the Crimean Karaites is extremely interesting both from the perspective of the historic material and as an obvious example of very successful example of national-romantic myth creation.

The EAJC partner in organizing the event was the Omelyan Pritsak Center for Oriental Studies (director – Igor Sribnyak) of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA), which is currently helping the development of Jewish Studies in the Academy. Earlier, a special edition of the Ukrainian Oriental Studies dedicated to Jewish Studies (science editor – Vitaliy Chernoivanenko) was published with the support of the JDC and the EAJC.