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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