HISTORY OF JEWS IN UKRAINE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AS A SUBJECT OF TEACHING AT A UNIVERSITY: METHODICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SPECIAL COURSES

Abstract

One of the methodological paradigms in teaching the history of Ukraine as a Ukrainian political nation is a multiethnic approach, in this connection the urgent task is to develop university courses, the purpose of which should be the disclosure of mutual intersections and the specifics of the historical development of individual ethnic groups or national minorities as components of Ukrainian society. The proposed projects of general and local history courses «Jews in Ukraine in the Twentieth Century: People, Events, and Places in the Context of Transformation of Social Landscape» and «The Jewish Population of Odesa in the Twentieth Century: People and Events in the Space of a Large City» correspond to this task. In the development of the content of the courses, the approaches of oral history, local history as well as spatial approache were used. Chronologically courses embrace the twentieth century, namely as the «short» twentieth century, as the period from 1914 to 1991, which began with deep changes in the situation of the Jewish population in Ukraine during the First World War and revolutions, and ended in the late 1980s and early 1990s, due to a significant decrease in the number of Jews in Ukraine and the city of Odesa in next decade according to comparative data of censuses. The information on the content of the courses is inserted into their annotations, which discribe the features of their methodology, structure and content. The content of the developed courses include 8 topics each. It should be noted that that, among other things, the courses deal with the relations between Jews and non-Jews in Ukraine, the facts of mutual aid and rescue during the Holocaust, the joint efforts of the political Ukrainian and Jewish opposition in the USSR on certain issues, etc. In the development of the courses, special attention was paid to the work of students with literature and sources, mainly oral, Internet resources, in connection with which special tasks for independent work were developed. The proposed methodological materials for the two special courses, on the one hand, reveal various aspects of the history of the Jewish population of Ukraine in the twentieth century, allow to consider the specifics of the historical experience of Jews in Odesa. On the other hand, their content is determined by a common for them spatial approach to the presentation of events, while "space" is understood as both the concept of a geographical nature and the broader concept of the historical environment. The materials of these courses have been partially applied and can be used in the future in the development of work programs (syllabuses) of university courses, including courses of a local history. The presented programs are the author's view of the problem and offer to start a discussion, in particular, on the use of a spatial or other modern approach and the use the potential of oral sources in the development of the content of university courses on the history of the Jewish population or the history of other ethnic groups in Ukraine.