Friday, February 25, 2022
Ukraine’s Jews seek refuge in synagogues as Russia invades
Several hours after Odessa awoke to explosions Thursday morning, Avraham Wolff, the city's chief rabbi, got a call from a nearly 90-year-old Holocaust survivor. The man was so distressed he could barely speak.
"He cried and cried, and I just listened to him," Wolff said. "I told him that everything is OK, the Russians are not coming to kill us, these are not Nazis."
For weeks, the rabbi had prepared for the possibility that Russia could invade Ukraine. He bought several tons of sugar, macaroni, rice, flour and water, hired 20 security guards and reserved buses to evacuate thousands of Jews to neighboring Moldova.
But the bus drivers, like so many others, have fled the city, with some lines to cross the border stretching more than a mile. Wolff's job now is to calm and feed congregants, many of whom are elderly and too scared to leave their home.
The invasion has thrown all of Ukraine into crisis, and the panic is acute in the Jewish community, where Holocaust survivors and their descendants carry a long history of trauma. Synagogues have turned into shelters, while some Jews try to flee to Israel.
And when people don't know what to do, they call their rabbi.
"I got hundreds of phone calls from people with fear," said Wolff. "People are worried and they call us all day, from morning until night."
Ukraine was once home to the largest population of Jews in Europe after Poland. The vibrant community, which included Jewish schools and theaters, started to wane after waves of anti-Jewish riots under Russian czars in the late 1800s and the following decades spurred massive migration to the United States.
During the Holocaust, an estimated 1.2 million to 1.4 million Jews in Ukraine were killed, according to Wendy Lower, a historian at Claremont McKenna College. Hundreds of thousands died in gas chambers or in mass shootings. Others died from malnourishment in ghettos.
No longer welcome in rural towns where Nazi sympathizers had lived, many survivors of the war moved to big cities. In the decades that followed, antisemitism sent Jews fleeing, often to Israel.
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