The Year of Agnon at KNU: How Kyiv is Reconnecting with Israel through the Jewish Nobel Laureate

At the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, they launched not just a cultural cycle, but a large conversation about memory, language, translation, and the shared intellectual biography of Ukraine and Israel. The occasion was the “Year of Agnon” — a university project, which on March 26, 2026, was discussed by the head of the “Nativ” representation in Ukraine and advisor to the Israeli Embassy in Ukraine, Mark Dovev.

For the Israeli reader, this story is important not only because it concerns Shmuel Yosef Agnon — one of the main names in modern Jewish literature.

What is important is that in Kyiv, his figure is used as a focal point for a conversation about cultural bridges, which today must not only be remembered but literally re-illuminated. Agnon was born in Buchach, present-day Ukraine, and in 1966 received the Nobel Prize in Literature along with Nelly Sachs.

Why Agnon ended up at the center of this project

At KNU, they say directly: “Year of Agnon” is conceived as a platform for a deeper understanding of Ukrainian-Jewish cultural ties and the intellectual legacy of the writer. According to Mark Dovev, the initiative to honor Agnon’s literary heritage belongs to KNU Rector Volodymyr Bugrov, and the Israeli cultural center “Nativ” became a co-organizer of the project.

This is an important detail. Because it’s not about a one-time exhibition or a formal “day of remembrance” in the university calendar. Kyiv is trying to integrate Agnon into a living academic and cultural context — not as a museum figure, but as an author through whom one can talk about home, loss, return, language, and identity. And here, the Ukrainian and Israeli experiences unexpectedly begin to resonate together.

For Israel, such a framework is almost intuitively understandable. Agnon is not just a classic and not only a Nobel laureate. He is a figure through which Jewish tradition, modernity, exile, memory of the native place, and return to historical time have generally become part of a large literary language. That is why the attempt to return him to the Ukrainian cultural space through translations, exhibitions, and university dialogue does not look like a decorative action, but a serious gesture.

What has already happened at KNU and what lies ahead

According to the university, within the framework of the project, the solemn opening of the “Year of Agnon,” the exhibition “Strangers’ Homes” by artist Matvey Weisberg, and the international scientific-practical conference “Ukrainian-Jewish Cultural Code: History, Identity, and Perspective” have already taken place.

Representatives of two Israeli universities — Ariel and Bar-Ilan — participated in it, and one of the participants was researcher and lecturer Velvl Chernin, who came to Kyiv with the assistance of the Israeli Embassy in Ukraine.

That is, the project has already gone beyond the purely Ukrainian university environment. It has become a platform where academic Kyiv and Israeli intellectual institutions try to communicate not in the language of protocol, but in the language of joint cultural work.

Ahead, KNU also has a non-symbolic program. The university announced a theatrical philosophical dialogue between Hryhorii Skovoroda and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, which they want to stage as an immersive event with the participation of well-known Ukrainian directors and actors. In addition, a presentation of the Ukrainian translation of one of Agnon’s novels, on which historian Anna Nekrasova is working, is being prepared, and the book is being published by the “Dukh i Litera” publishing house. In May, the university also plans to discuss a novel by Vasyl Makhno, whose main character is Agnon.

A separate emphasis is the April exhibition “Kyiv — Jerusalem. From A to Z.” At KNU, it is described as an artistic journey through two ancient cities through the works of artists from Ukraine and Israel. The university also clarifies that the new version of the project will showcase graphic works by Israeli artist Philip Shpolsky.

Somewhere here, the very nerve of the topic appears. Because when a Ukrainian university places Kyiv and Jerusalem side by side, and makes Agnon’s figure the axis of this conversation, it is no longer just a humanitarian program. It is an attempt to re-describe the shared space of memory — without cheap pathos, but also without the usual post-Soviet embarrassment about the Jewish theme.

Why this story is important for Ukraine and Israel right now

Mark Dovev formulates this quite directly in an interview with KNU: for Israelis, Agnon is a cultural symbol who was born and formed in Ukraine, absorbed its cultural code, and Ukraine itself was historically home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world.

In the same conversation, he reminds of Golda Meir’s Kyiv origins and emphasizes that the task of such initiatives is to “highlight the bridges” connecting both peoples.

For the Israeli audience, there is another layer here, which is read between the lines in KNU’s news. Ukraine today is trying to speak with Israel not only through war, security, and diplomacy but also through the history of origin, through shared biographies, through literature and urban experience. This is a more complex but also more sustainable conversation.

That is why the story with the “Year of Agnon” seems noticeably more important than ordinary university chronicles. It shows that the connection between Ukraine and Israel can be built not only around crisis, aid, missiles, and front-line reports. There is another level — cultural, intellectual, human. The one on which memory works longer than the news cycle.

NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency sees not just an academic news story from Kyiv in such stories, but a symptom of a broader process. Ukraine is increasingly trying to return Jewish plots to its modern identity not as an appendix to the “big history,” but as one of its pillars. And if this turn indeed becomes sustainable, it will be important not only for universities, museums, and translators but also for the very quality of future dialogue between Kyiv and Jerusalem.

Agnon’s figure is almost perfectly suited for such a conversation. A writer born in the territory of present-day Ukraine, who became a classic of Hebrew literature and a Nobel laureate in Israel, is already a bridge in himself.

The only question is how seriously both sides are ready to walk this bridge — not during the jubilee season, but beyond.

Вопрос только в том, насколько серьезно обе стороны готовы по этому мосту идти — не во время юбилейного сезона, а дальше.