Razgovor:Arsenij Jacenjuk

Jacenjuk potječe iz ukrajinske obitelji i nema židovskih korijena

Yatsenyuk was born on May 22, 1974, in the Ukrainian SSR's Chernivtsi. His father, historian Petro Ivanovich Yatsenuk, was a professor at the Faculty of History at Chernivtsi National University and has since become deputy dean of its history faculty. Arseny's mother, Maria Grigoriievna Yatsenyuk (née Bakaj), has long been a French teacher at area high schools and now teaches in the French Department of Foreign Languages at Chernivtsi University. Yatsenyuk primarily speaks Ukrainian and also speaks Russian and English as well as having some knowledge of Romanian.

According to Yatsenyuk, he comes from a family of ethnic Ukrainians, and is a member of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. He is of partly Romanian ancestry; one of his ancestors was a citizen of Greater Romania from the region around Chernivtsi. Some have suggested that he is of Jewish-Ukrainian origin, and that he has "played down" his ancestry to avoid anti-semitism. However, Yaakov Bleich, a chief rabbi of Ukraine, responding to slurs such as "impudent Jew" and "thieving Jew" made against Yatsenyuk during the latter's 2010 presidential election campaign, stated, "Arseniy Yatsenyuk is not Jewish." Furthermore, Anna Rudnitskaya writing on the same presidential election in The Jewish Week said, "[Yatsenyuk's] hypothetical Jewishness was never established."