opinion
My Jewish Family Fled Kyiv
in 1989. My Heart Breaks
for the City Today
Abrams Continued from Page 15
I did not learn the value of pluralism and
diversity of thought as an undergraduate; it
was in the unique environment of my Akiba
experience two decades ago. Regrettably, the
kinds of formative experiences that I had
in high school are hard to come by amid
the proliferation of speech policing and the
decline of civics education across the country.

Sadly, survey data have found that a majority
of high school students (52%) now believe it
would be acceptable to disinvite speakers if
some students might perceive the speaker’s
message as offensive or biased. Almost two-
thirds (64%) support instituting codes of con-
duct that restrict potentially offensive or biased
speech on their respective high school cam-
puses. And 86% support “safe spaces,” or areas
of campus designed to be free from allegedly
threatening actions, ideas or conversations.

The idea of shutting down and limiting
speech that could be “hurtful” to some is
unacceptable in a learning environment and
antithetical to education itself.

High school students need to be taught
the value of debate, free speech and civil
discourse; they are clearly not. When asked
about the acceptability for students to pro-
test and shout down a speaker, 31% of high
school students recently reported that shout-
ing down a speaker is permissible always
or some of the time. Another 46% believe
shouting down a speaker is rarely acceptable
but can be acceptable nonetheless. Over
three-quarters of students today (78%) sup-
port trying to silence disagreement, while
just 22% say it is never acceptable.

While my education was messy and tumul-
tuous, it made me a more thoughtful and well-
rounded person. I had an unusual experience
that should be the norm, and those of us in
the education profession need to confront our
students with the fact that they will and should
occasionally feel upset, uncomfortable and
unsettled by new information and perspectives.

That is how learning happens: through
shattering norms and bursting echo cham-
bers so that ideas may flow freely. A good
scholastic program should have something
in it to upset and challenge everyone, and
high school is where we must do this. JE
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah
Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow
at the American Enterprise Institute.

16 MARCH 3, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
M BY MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN
y Jewish family fled Kyiv in 1989. My heart
breaks for the city today. I was born in Kyiv.

I shy away from calling myself Ukrainian
because at the time it was the USSR. And as Jews who
eventually fled as refugees, my family didn’t have any
ethnonational attachments to the place. Still, it’s where I
learned to sort of smile.

It’s where my favorite photo of my mom and me
was taken, just three years before cancer killed her. I
remember the large city park by our apartment and its
train for tots in the summer. I remember begging my
sister to pull me on a sled in winter despite there being
little snow.

That I had been born there at all was a function of
knowing when to leave — and when to come back. My
babushka, my grandmother, fled Kyiv the day before the
Nazis came in 1941. Her own grandparents stayed. They
were murdered at Babyn Yar.

After the war, the antisemitism in Ukraine under the
Soviets was intense and repugnant. My father remem-
bers seeing KGB officers snapping photos of men lined
up by the synagogue to purchase matzah for Passover
— a crime of Jewish expression.

Men identified in those photos would be fired from
their jobs or worse, my dad and his close relatives
would recall years later as we sat in our new home in
the United States around a dining room table spread
with homemade gefilte fish, salat olivier and chopped
herring salad.

A mention of a pogrom, the killing of Jewish doctors
or total Soviet amnesia that Jews were specifically tar-
geted by the millions in Germany’s invasion of the USSR
— all of these would get a knowing and exhausted nod.

And so we left again.

I still have all the papers that tell our departure story,
familiar to so many Jews who left in the 1980s. Our exit
visa to Israel. Our United States refugee papers. Our
refugee ID numbers.

Leaving for Israel, with an official exit visa, was the only
way for Jews to get out of the USSR. But because Israel and
Moscow had no diplomatic ties, all Jews first flew to Vienna.

While other families bound for Israel pivoted straight to
their flights to Tel Aviv, we remained in Vienna waiting for
our permission to enter the U.S. Our tri-national spread
of exit and entry visas are stamped by the Dutch (Israel’s
representatives in Moscow), the Austrians and the Soviets.

After several months in Vienna, the Hebrew International
Aid Society secured our flight to New York City.

We arrived in the United States as refugees on Feb.

7, 1989. My mom died of an aggressive breast cancer
months after our arrival in New York. My family long
suspected her cancer was fueled by our proximity to
Chernobyl when its nuclear reactor blew. That assump-
tion is scientifically unfounded but played a huge role in
my family’s story.

Because I was a child in Kyiv when Chernobyl’s core
melted and spewed radioactive waste into the sky, my
dad feared I was contaminated, too. For my entire
childhood, he’d limit my play outside to when the sun
was setting and have me in long sleeves and a hat if we
were out in the day — so strong was his fear that the sun
could trigger something in me unknown to doctors that
Chernobyl left behind. I’d like to think that’s why I’m so
pale today.

We first lived in Midtown Manhattan for a few weeks,
in what I believe was a halfway home for recovering
addicts (The last time I checked, in the 2000s, it was a
hotel). My dad recalls speaking to doctors in a hallway
payphone about my mom’s worsening state, his broken
English competing for clarity over the commotion in the
public space.

Once in Brooklyn, I attended a Jewish camp with my
older sister — experiences organized for us by a rabbi
my dad befriended, in part to distract us from our
mom’s demise. Months later, we’d move to Los Angeles,
where I remained for most of my life and now live again.

According to my dad and a photo I once took on a return
visit, our old neighborhood was festooned with placards
that read “patrolled by private police” — an alleged refer-
ence to the organized crime figures who kept watch.

Despite the trauma of this journey, I regard Kyiv with
fondness. My heart breaks for the other children at
risk of displacement, the families who may have to flee
because of Moscow’s misdeeds.

I didn’t think Putin would commit to a full-scale
invasion, that he’d instead try to destabilize Ukrainian
democracy with less force. I had also assumed that, con-
sidering both lands are united by the horror of Hitler’s
invasion, a Russian blitzkrieg of Ukraine would be
beyond the pale. Alas.

I quiver that a city that has endured genocidal occu-
pation, nuclear fallout and civil unrest all in the past 80
years must now endure this.

It’s not my place to offer solutions. It is my place to
say a city’s tragedy 6,000 miles away feels very present
and raw. JE
Mikhail Zinshteyn is an education reporter for CalMatters. He
has a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London
School of Economics.