nation / world
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



from the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman
of Bratslav, an 18th-century luminary
and the founder of the Breslov Chasidic
movement. Each year around Rosh
Hashanah, about 30,000 Jews gather at
the gravesite. Over the years, hundreds
of Breslov followers, mostly from Israel,
settled in Uman, which today has a year-
round Jewish population of about 200.

Dozens of them, including some
women and children, have left since the
invasion, and a video posted to Instagram
showed a bus full of Orthodox Jews
being transported within the city.

But others are staying put, said Chaim
Chazin, a Jewish resident who moved to
Uman from Israel. His wife and daugh-
ters have been in Israel for several weeks.

“The situation is complicated right
now,” he said. “All of us, everyone in
Ukraine, need to literally keep our
heads down until this passes.”
Elisha Shlomi, another Israel-born res-
ident of Uman, said that the remnant
community intends to stay but will move
to another country if fighting approaches
or erupts in Uman.

As tensions between Ukraine and
Russia began escalating in November,
some Israeli officials said they were pre-
paring for a wave of mass immigration
from Ukraine, where at least 200,000
are eligible to immigrate to Israel under
its Law of Return for Jews and their
relatives, according to a 2020 demo-
graphic study of European Jewry.

So far, the wave has not material-
ized on the scale that officials said
they expected. But the Israeli embassy,
which relocated, along with other for-
eign embassies, from Kyiv to Lviv in
the country’s west, this month has
registered appeals from about 3,000
Ukrainians who are not already citi-
zens of Israel to immigrate to it.

Another 5,000-odd appeals connected
to reaching Israel came from people in
Ukraine who are already citizens, the
embassy said, according to Ynet. Most
of the non-citizens who contacted the
embassy are married to citizens.

On Feb. 25, Yair Lapid, Israel’s min-
ister of foreign affairs, tweeted exit
routes from Ukraine that he said were
still viable for Israelis living in the
country — into Poland, Romania and
Hungary, all of which are absorbing an
influx of refugees.

In recent days, tens of thousands of
people have poured over the border from
Ukraine into Moldova, a landlocked
country between Romania and Ukraine
often described as Europe’s poorest.

Among them are hundreds of Jews from
the vicinity of Odessa, whose residents
normally enjoy one the highest stan-
dards of living anywhere in Ukraine.

The Jews who crossed over to Moldova
had more help than the non-Jewish
new arrivals, who mostly have come
from southern Ukraine, thanks to the
mobilization of some Moldovan Jews
for their Ukrainian coreligionists.

“The refugees and their children are
being housed in motels, and provided
with hot food and essential supplies” by
the local community, partly thanks to
funding of the Nacht Family Foundation,
a charity set up by the Israeli entrepre-
neur Marius Nacht and his wife Inbar,
Moldova’s Chief Rabbi Pinchas Salzman
said in a statement on Feb. 25. Salzman
said he expected hundreds more Jewish
refugees to arrive in the coming days.

They will encounter a rapidly grow-
ing infrastructure to accommodate
people displaced by the war in Ukraine.

IsraAID, an Israeli nonprofit human-
itarian aid organization, is sending a
team to the region to assist refugees. So
is United Hatzalah, the Israeli emer-
gency service that frequently assists
in disasters internationally. And the
Chabad house in Chisinau is prepar-
ing for a first Shabbat with an influx
of Jewish refugees, though without
the supply of kosher food normally
imported from Odessa.

“With more people you have to be
ready with food,” Rabbi Zushe Abelsky
told the Los Angeles Times from the
United States, where he is currently.

“Our rabbis over there are also in
distress.” JE
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