Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania. They’re all the same to many American Jews. I’ve never heard an American Jew boast about his Ukrainian heritage. (One of my grandfathers was from Ukraine, and I’m not bragging.)

Regina Brett, a Cleveland Jewish News columnist, wrote last month, “We stand with Ukraine as its people huddle in subway stations. . . . We stand with the old man standing outside his shattered home. . . . We stand with the Ukrainian soldiers trying to defend David against Goliath.”

We...

John Demjanjuk leaves court in Munich, May 12, 2011.

Photo: christof stache/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania. They’re all the same to many American Jews. I’ve never heard an American Jew boast about his Ukrainian heritage. (One of my grandfathers was from Ukraine, and I’m not bragging.)

Regina Brett, a Cleveland Jewish News columnist, wrote last month, “We stand with Ukraine as its people huddle in subway stations. . . . We stand with the old man standing outside his shattered home. . . . We stand with the Ukrainian soldiers trying to defend David against Goliath.”

We are all Ukrainians now. I was ambivalent about that until last week.

The pogroms, Nazi collaborators, Bohdan Khmelnytsky—a 17th-century Ukrainian hero, who was also responsible for killing thousands of Jews. That’s history.

This might be the first time Jews and Ukrainians are on the same page. In the 1980s, I became interested in John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker in suburban Cleveland who was accused of killing Jews at a Nazi extermination camp. When I wrote to Demjanjuk’s daughter for her side of the story, she sent me a pamphlet, which said her father, the alleged Ukrainian SS man, had been framed by the editor of a small pro-Soviet, anti-Ukrainian newspaper in New York in 1975.

I went to Demjanjuk’s trial in Cleveland. I wanted to see a Nazi collaborator. I had seen many Holocaust survivors but never a Nazi accomplice. Demjanjuk’s citizenship was revoked, and he was eventually shipped off to Israel for a second trial. I happened to be at a Cleveland police station that day. (I was a police reporter.) One police officer had a TV under his desk, which he watched all day. He said, “There’s that guy—what-you-call-him—getting off the plane in Israel.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t take a suicide pill,” I said.

”For what? He didn’t do it.”

“There are five witnesses,” I said.

“So what? It’s the past. Let it die. But the Jews keep bringing it up. He didn’t do it. He was told to, or else.”

A lieutenant said, “What would you do if somebody put a gun to your head and said, ‘Do it or else’?”

“He didn’t have to do it,” I said.

“The present changes the past.” My rabbi,

Joshua Skoff, said that at Shabbat services. Two of Rabbi Skoff’s grandparents were from Ukraine. In his sermon he said, “My grandparents wouldn’t believe it—a Jewish president in Ukraine!”

Rabbi Skoff pointed out that before Jews read the Torah portion, we chant a prayer that begins, “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the universe.” Rabbi Skoff said, “It doesn’t say ‘King of the Jews.’ It says ‘King of the universe.’ ”

This is a major “kumbaya” moment in Jewish-Ukrainian relations. Add that to the strangeness of this month.

Mr. Stratton is author of the blog Klezmer Guy: Real Music & Real Estate.

In 2013, it took three months for one million refugees to leave Syria. In ten days nearly 1.5 million refugees fled Ukraine, and the U.N. estimates the number could reach four million. Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition