Jewish Cossacks And Heroes

In the year 1648 a great uprising swept through Ukraine. Led by the iron-fisted Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Cossacks allied themselves with the oppressed serfs and revolted against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's domination. The violent riots continued for more than a decade and in their course thousands of Jews were massacred as well. However, the relationship between the Cossacks and the Jews had a checkered history. The Cossacks were an ethnically diverse society of mounted warriors and under certain circumstances, or religious conversion, they allowed Jews to join their ranks. A bizarre episode in this regard involves the Russian Empress Catherine the Great's favorite minister, Prince Potemkin, who in 1787 created a regiment of Jewish Cossacks, with the intention of liberating Jerusalem from Turkish occupation. And, in 19th century, the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, descendant of a Frankist family, helped to form a battalion of Jewish Cossacks to fight in alliance with the French, the British and the Turks against the Russian Empire in the Crimean War of 1853-56. In the 20th century, during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920, many Jews served both in the Red Cossacks and the White Cossacks cavalries. Two decades later, in the Second World War, a famous Jewish Soviet Major General, Lev Dovator, was in charge of a brigade of Cossack cavalry. General Dovator was born in 1903 in a Belorussian Jewish family of peasants. He led his cavalry unit to war with great courage and attacked the enemy very efficiently in numerous combats. He fell in battle in the winter of 1941 near Roza; during the Battle of Moscow, in which Hitler's armies failed to capture the Soviet capital and the front was pushed significantly back to the west in a successful Red Army counter-offensive. Dovator was posthumously awarded the title 'Hero of the Soviet Union'. Furthermore, a Soviet postal stamp was issued in his honor. On the stamp under his portrait are written in Russian the words: 'Death to the German Invaders.'