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This article explores the associational life of late imperial Kiev to gauge the extent of Jewish participation in the city's civil society and the nature of interethnic relations in the voluntary sphere. Natan Meir demonstrates that, despite political and societal circumstances that often discouraged positive interactions between Jews and their Russian and Ukrainian neighbors, the voluntary association made possible opportunities for constructive interethnic encounters. These opportunities included a range of experiences from full Jewish integration to a segregation of Jewish interests within the sphere of activity of a particular association. While taking into account the central role of intergroup tensions and hostility in Kiev, Meir notes that the frequency of contacts between Jews and non-Jews was higher than most scholars have assumed. By placing the case of Kiev against the larger framework of the Russian empire as well as other European states, Meir contributes to our understanding of the development of late imperial civil society and of the modern Jewish experience in the late Russian empire and across urban Europe.

Until recently, studies of Jewish religious practices in Imperial Russia have focused on major movements such as Hasidism and mitnagdism as well as the challenges that Haskalah presented to traditional Judaism. Few scholars have scrutinized transformations in everyday religious practices such as the observance of Sabbath and other holidays, synagogue attendance, and liturgical practices. However, new political, social, and economic realities had generated subtle changes in religious practices even in earlier periods and it comes as no surprise, therefore, that religious practices among Jews during the tsarist period, especially in Kiev, were neither monolithic nor static. This article provides a new perspective on this topic by analyzing patterns of religious practice among Jews in one city – examining personal observance, communal practice, synagogue rites and attendance, and religious education – while providing a broader context of reform in Russia. In large urban centers like Kiev, the pressures and temptations of modern life, big-city anonymity, and the vitality and diversity of Jewish community often led to a transformation of prior belief and behavior among new arrivals. The author concludes that despite the absence of a movement for religious reform in the Russian Empire, we can nonetheless observe innovations and changes in religious life emerging out of the attempt to make observance compatible with modern urban life and a nascent Russian-Jewish identity.

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