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Jews from Ukraine arrive at a Jewish community center in Chisinau, Moldova on Feb. 25.

Courtesy of Rabbi Pinchas Salzman via JTA.org
Ukrainian Jews Find Themselves
Refugees Again
A CNAAN LIPHSHIZ | JTA.ORG
cross Ukraine, Jews are
engaging in a historically
Jewish experience: becoming
refugees. And hundreds of them from Odessa
have headed to an unlikely destination,
the impoverished nation of Moldova
whose capital, Chisinau, was the site of
a major pogrom that became a symbol
of Jewish fl ight out of Eastern Europe
in the early 20th century.

As Russian troops pour into Ukraine
and bomb its cities, many Ukrainians
are on the move both internally and
in an attempt to leave for other coun-
12 tries. Border crossings in the country’s
west and south are attracting thou-
sands of prospective exiles, according
to the Guardian. Th ere are also at least
100,000 internally displaced persons.

Some of the Jews who live in Ukraine
— who number at least 43,000 and
potentially many more — are part of
that unfortunate migration.

“We just put many mattresses in the
strongest part of the sturdiest building. It
will have to do for now,” Moshe Azman,
one of several men bearing the title of
chief rabbi in Ukraine, said about what is
happening at the residential compound
near Kyiv that Azman and his commu-
nity fi rst set up in 2014 to aid Jewish
MARCH 3, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
refugees fl eeing the last Russian invasion.

Named Anatevka — a reference to
the fi ctional hometown of Tevye the
Dairyman from the famed Broadway
musical “Fiddler on the Roof” and the
iconic Sholom Aleichem short stories on
which it was based — the compound has
seen dozens of families arrive from more
densely populated areas, Azman said.

Many of the internally displaced are
from cities, some of which have been
hit by Russian armaments over the past
24 hours, and are leaving for places
seen as less likely to draw fi re and to
avoid being in crumbling Soviet-era
apartment buildings during bombings,
Azman explained.

Anatevka, built at a time of a more
limited Russian incursion, has no
bomb shelters.

More than 100 people have died in
bombings and hostilities so far in the
war, which has not included signifi -
cant urban fi ghting. In one case, one
person died and fi ve were wounded
when an explosive device detonated
near the center of Uman, a city of about
80,000 halfway between Odessa and
Kyiv. Some parts of the city — which
in peacetime is a destination for Jewish
pilgrims from abroad — were evacu-
ated following the incident, according
to some reports.

Th e explosion happened about a mile