Jewish Cossacks And Heroes Poem by Paul Hartal

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.'