The bravery of Soviet Jews should be remembered this VE Day

The story of Soviet Jewish soldiers in World War II is both familiar and unique. Like many Jews across the world, they faced a genocidal enemy. But unlike their counterparts elsewhere, they fought in a country that, despite its contradictions, granted them full participation in the war effort. Many seized that chance with remarkable conviction.

Young Soviet Jews, who made up the core of Jewish Red Army personnel, were, for the most part, fervent patriots. They combined faith in communist ideals with a deep sense of gratitude to the Soviet regime, which, unlike Tsarist Russia, had appeared to eliminate antisemitism and opened the doors to education, professional life, and military promotion. During the war, nearly 40% of the approximately half a million Jews in the Red Army held officer rank – by far the highest share of any ethnic group in the Soviet military, and significantly greater than in any other Allied army.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Jews were drafted like all other Soviet citizens. Yet thousands who held exemptions voluntarily gave them up to enlist. At first, this wave of enlistment was driven by patriotic fervour and a naïve belief that the war would be short. “We'll be in Berlin in a few months,” many thought.

But the Red Army suffered devastating losses in those early months. By the end of 1941, millions had been killed or taken prisoner, including tens of thousands of Jews. For Jewish POWs, the danger was extreme. While most Soviet prisoners faced starvation and neglect, Jews were systematically identified and executed.

That grim reality was well understood. Soviet Jews were, in fact, captured in smaller numbers than the average. They knew what awaited them in German hands. Ironically, it was Nazi propaganda—designed to destabilise the Red Army from within—that deepened Jewish commitment to the fight. Leaflets dropped over Soviet positions made it brutally clear: this was a war against “Jews and Bolsheviks,” and the reckoning would be merciless. Faced with the near-certainty of death in a POW camp, many Jewish soldiers chose to fight to the end.

Red Army Veteran: Yakov Kreizer, the only Jewish soldier to be awarded the rank of general post-War[Missing Credit]

There was another burden to bear. Antisemitism within the Red Army itself, while not universal, was real. It stemmed from many sources: enemy propaganda, the breakdown of Soviet social controls, and later, state-sanctioned antisemitism under Stalin. Jewish soldiers were often passed over for promotions and awards, and they felt the weight of mistrust from comrades and superiors alike.

This pressure pushed many Jews to prove themselves on the battlefield. They volunteered for frontline roles to counter the persistent slur that they preferred safer positions at the rear. The term “Tashkent Front”—a sarcastic reference to the distant Uzbek capital where many evacuees, including Jews, found refuge—became a stinging insult. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once remarked dismissively, “There weren’t many of them on the front lines”—a line that reflected the enduring stereotype of Jewish absence from combat.

[Missing Credit]

Information about the Holocaust filtered in slowly. Until 1943, the picture was fragmented. While Soviet media reported atrocities from 1941 onwards, the full scope was not widely grasped. Fragmentary reports from the occupied territories, along with news from the few towns and villages already liberated, such as in Crimea and around Moscow, hinted at something terrible. From early 1942, Red Army troops began entering towns that had been home to vibrant Jewish communities, and found them emptied. By late 1942, few Jewish soldiers still harboured illusions. They knew their families—those left behind in the occupied zones—were being massacred.

That knowledge hit home as the Soviet army advanced into the former Pale of Settlement—regions once densely populated by Jews. Here, soldiers encountered the physical evidence of genocide: execution pits, burned-out synagogues, and silence where entire communities had once lived. Unlike in much of Western Europe, where Jews were often deported to camps, in Soviet lands, they were typically shot close to home. And sometimes, the victims found in those pits were the soldiers’ own relatives.

For many Jewish fighters, the war ceased to be abstract. It became deeply personal. A mission of vengeance.

That same sense of purpose was even more intense among Jewish partisans, estimated at between 25,000 and 30,000. Some were integrated into Soviet units; a few fought in all-Jewish detachments like the Bielski group in Belarus, which operated within the wider Soviet partisan movement. Their relationships with non-Jewish commanders and comrades were often fraught. Some fighters viewed Jews as politically reliable and resilient; others, infected by antisemitism or security fears, distrusted or excluded them.

While the motivations of Jewish partisans were not always ideological, they were always personal. For them, revenge was not just a motive—it was a visceral instinct, shaped by the annihilation of everything they knew.

In the end, Soviet Jewish soldiers and partisans were among the relatively few European Jews who had the opportunity to fight back because, despite the Soviet Union's myriad flaws, its Red Army uniquely managed to repel a full-scale German land invasion. The brutal experiences of war and the Holocaust, marked not only by unparalleled suffering but also by the rare chance for retribution, left an indelible mark on the psyche of Soviet Jews and their descendants.

And of course, the story did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Just a few years after the victory, Soviet Jews—including decorated war heroes—faced a fresh wave of state-sponsored antisemitism. Whatever honours they had earned at the front were soon forgotten. At best, their military careers were frozen; more often, they were dismissed from service altogether. One of the most tragic examples was Alexander Pechersky, a Jewish officer of the Red Army who had led the only successful mass escape from a Nazi death camp—Sobibor. Despite this extraordinary feat, his story was silenced, and he died in poverty and obscurity in the Soviet Union, his heroism unrecognised by the regime he had once served.

Kiril Feferman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at Ariel University. He has published extensively on the Second World War and the Holocaust. His most recent book is "If We Had Wings, We Would Fly to You: A Soviet Jewish Family Faces Destruction, 1941–42" (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2020). ‎