Now it has eight, up from just one in the Soviet era, and Jews account for around 5 percent of the population in a city with nearly a million residents.
The city’s Jewish population, despite continuing emigration to Israel and Europe, is growing again, said Mr. Shchupak. And people who once hid their faith are now embracing Judaism — a clear sign that old stigmas have faded.
Still, the new Jewish community center, like Mr. Zelensky’s run for the presidency, initially stirred unease among local Jews fearful of attracting too much attention. “They thought that if it is too big it will just cause anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Kaminezki said.
Mr. Zelensky made no effort during the election campaign to hide his background, though he did not play it up either. “The fact that I am a Jew is about the 20th question among my characteristics,” he said.
When a populist nationalist politician questioned Mr. Zelensky’s patriotism — he has sometimes mocked Ukrainian culture in his comedy routines — the comedian threatened to sic his Jewish mother on his accuser.
Until the collapse of the tsarist Russian empire in World War I, Dnipro and other towns in the region — like Kryvyi Rih, where Mr. Zelensky grew up — were part of what was known as the Pale of Settlement, an area of the empire where Jews were allowed to live and work, in contrast to many other parts of Russia’s territory.
The pale was scarred by frequent explosions of anti-Semitic violence by local Christians, many of them Cossacks, who had a reputation for being particularly brutal.
Communist rule after the 1917 revolution brought an end to anti-Semitism as state policy, but Jews, like many other Soviet citizens, still suffered terribly. Among those arrested by Stalin’s secret police in Dnipro was the father of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Ukrainian-born leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who died in New York in 1994.
Mr. Shchupak, the historian, said anti-Semitism, while not officially promoted by the Soviet authorities, was so rife that his own parents “were ashamed they were Jews.” He found out only when classmates in school saw records that gave his “nationality” as Jewish.
Archbishop Yevlohiy, a conservative priest who preaches in Dnipro, said, “We would of course have been happier if the president had been Orthodox.” But he is far more upset by fellow Orthodox believers who want to break the church’s traditional ties to Moscow and support a new church based in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
Jews, the archbishop said, think of themselves as “God’s chosen people, and think they should be in charge.” But they pose far less danger than “schismatics,” he said, who are “breaking the unity of the Slavic world.”
Worshipers outside his church in the center of Dnipro said they did not care about Mr. Zelensky’s religious background. They were far more concerned about whether he will lower the price of natural gas and do something to help ordinary people’s economic prospects.
State-controlled media outlets in Russia have hammered away relentlessly on the theme that Ukraine is in the grip of neo-Nazis steeped in anti-Semitism. At the same time, Russian state television itself has embraced anti-Semitism, asserting that Mr. Poroshenko, a churchgoing Orthodox Christian, is secretly a Jew called Weizman who is deviously trying to undermine Slavic fraternity.
Mr. Shchupak said he was struck by how many of his foreign friends had been infected by Russian propaganda, which has presented Ukraine as a hotbed of fascism since the 2014 ouster of the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.
“Everybody in Ukraine knows that Zelensky is a Jew,” Mr. Shchupak said. “He is a typical product of a secular intellectual Jewish family. How can this happen in a country that Russia says is run by fascists?”
Nevertheless, Rabbi Kaminezki said a big part of his job was getting local Jews to overcome what he called their “very high anxiety level” in a community still traumatized by pogroms and the Holocaust. “The Jews left Egypt, but Egypt has not left the Jews,” he said.
Rabbi Kaminezki said he had told his fretful congregation in Dnipro’s main synagogue that they should welcome, not reject, a Jew running for the presidency.
Multicultural Meanderings 