#15, February 2, 2024

Notes on a trip to Kyiv

On the night I arrived in Kyiv (Tuesday January 23), the film Golda, dubbed in Ukrainian, premiered in the city’s main conference center near Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). The by-invitation-only screening was organized by the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, and the theatre was packed, with over 400 people. The organizers were relieved. That morning, twelve hours earlier, the Russians carried out an extended drone and rocket attack on Kyiv that wounded 20 people. Inna Ioffe, Executive Director of the Jewish Confederation, was worried that the invitees would stay home and the theatre would be empty. Instead, there was a packed house and a successful premier.

The Kyiv premier of “Golda”

The screening was successful in another respect. There were no air alarm sirens during the course of the two-hour film. Sirens are frequent in Kyiv, because they sound whenever a Russian military airplane takes off, even if it is a training or transport flight within Russia. The plane could carry hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, which can reach Kyiv from Russia in less than five minutes. Public gatherings must stop whenever a siren sounds. Opera singers cut off in the middle of an aria, the crowd disperses, and their tickets are honored on the next night. The viewers of Golda were fortunate enough to see the movie without interruption.

Such is life in Kyiv. The city looks normal. There are morning traffic jams, people go to work, restaurants and cafes are open, schools and universities conduct most of their classes in person. But it can all change at a moment’s notice. I was lucky. During the five days I was in Kyiv there were lots of sirens, but no real attacks on the city. Everybody has an App on their phone to tell them where the Russian missiles and drones are headed. Most of the time they are going to Dnipro, Kharkiv, Zaporizhiia, or Odessa, not to Kyiv. Nonetheless, the stress beneath the surface is palpable.

The rocket alert App was my closest companion on the trip to Kyiv. I kept my phone on even on shabbes just in case a rocket notification would appear.

I went to Kyiv on behalf of a research project I direct, the Jewish Archival Survey in Ukraine, which publishes guides to Jewish documents in Ukrainian archives. I met with the head of the State Archival Service, Anatolyi Khromov, a young, sophisticated, English-speaking official. The Archival Service is involved in a number of Jewish projects, with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and the Babi Yar Memorial Center. Khromov invited me to attend the opening of an exhibit on Babi Yar at the Museum of the History of Kyiv, to mark international Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27). It was an impressive event, and the director of the museum drew attention to the fact that the exhibit was taking place in the shadow of more recent massacres in the Kyiv area - in Bucha and Irpin.

Opening of Babi Yar Exhibit, by Anatolyi Khromov, Head of the Archival Administration

During the course of our official meeting, Khromov made one request: Could the Jewish Theological Seminary or some other institution invite Ukrainian archivists to the US for a week-long seminar or workshop? When I asked what the purpose of such a seminar/workshop would be, he talked at first about professional development. But then he added: My staff needs to travel for their mental health. I want them to get out of here for a week for their psychological well-being.

When you pass by a long line on the street on a cold January day, it is one of two things: either a funeral for a fallen soldier, or a crowd of elderly and displaced people waiting to receive humanitarian aid (=food).

The Jewish community experiences everything that Ukrainian society at large does. Fortunately, it has institutions that support them. I visited the Hesed (Jewish Center) in Lviv before going to Kyiv, and talked to the staff. The Jewish elderly are likewise in need of humanitarian aid. And the hesed has a program to provide food and medicine to the home-bound, so they don’t have to wait outdoors on-line in the cold. Jews need psychotherapy to deal with the traumas of war. The hesed has a psychological department that provides individual and group therapy to children, adolescents, and adults. And Jews fight, die, and mourn in this war. While in Kyiv, I made inquiries about the Jewish Azov-fighter Alexander Goldman (about whom I wrote in newsletter #10), who is reportedly a POW in Russian captivity. The office of the Jewish military chaplain of the Ukrainian armed forces investigated the case, and got back to me: According to the information they collected from fellow fighters, Goldman was killed in combat.

While the overall mood is dour (see Masha Gessen’s article in the New Yorker), there are still many sparks of defiance and determination, including in the Jewish community.

I visited the historic Brodsky Synagogue in downtown Kyiv to meet an Orthodox fighter in the armed forces named Tamir Elboim. Tamir is a ba’al teshuvah, who was circumcised as a young adult. Now he is a military instructor on the battlefield. His military nickname is “Hasid”. As you might imagine, after two years of fighting, he’s a rather gruff and hardened man. He explained to me why he’s fighting in Ukraine: “First, because my grandmother and her entire family were nearly executed by the fascists in Zhitomir during World War II. They survived miraculously. I don’t want fascists to invade this country again, eighty years later. And second, this land is important to me, because so many Hasidic Tzadikim are buried here. There are many holy sites here. We must protect this land.” When I asked Tamir what American Jews should do, he answered: “Send money. We need more drones.”

Tamir Elboim, “Hasid”, and his combat insignia

Another portrait in defiance is Josef Zissels, the head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities in Ukraine. He boasted to me that at age 77, he is a member of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense and serves on patrols. And as a prominent public intellectual, he is fighting against those voices in Ukraine who are tired, and want to strike a compromise with the Russians, such as former presidential advisor Oleksii Arestovych. “This war must go on, and I expect that I won’t live to see its end”, said Zissels.

Josef Zissels

Zissels is by nature a fighter. He was a dissident against Soviet rule back in the 1960s and 1970s, and was a prisoner in the gulag for several years. For him, this war is a continuation of the battles he waged as a young man.

Tamir Elboim is refighting the war against the Nazis. Josef Zissels is refighting the war against the Soviets.

Then there are the heroes of spiritual resistance. Tetiana Batanova, head of the Judaica Department of the Ukrainian National Library, is doing everything humanly possible to protect the Library’s collection of Jewish books and manuscripts from Russian attack. (She’d like to have stronger bookshelves, to withstand the tremors generated by missiles that fall on Kyiv.) Elena Zaslavskaya runs a Jewish studies certificate program for adults via Zoom, with courses and guest lectures on an array of Jewish topics. An academic institute offered her to hold the courses and lectures in person, in a building “with an excellent bomb shelter”, but she declined. It’s too risky. Listeners find the classes therapeutic. “What are we going to do at night when the drones and missiles come? Just sit around and worry?”

* * *

I stayed in a hotel in the Podil section of Kyiv, which is the old, historically Jewish part of the city, the equivalent of the Lower East Side. Today, it has the air of Soho – lots of young people, four-story apartment buildings, cafes.

Podil is the most “Jewish” neighborhood in Kyiv today, because it has five synagogues – the Choral Synagogue on Shchekavytska Street (the only synagogue that functioned in Kyiv in Soviet times), which is haredi-orthodox, a Conservative congregation, a Reform congregation, and two Chabads. Several Jewish organizations, such as Zissels’ Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities, also have their offices in Podil.

I visited three synagogues on shabbat – Conservative on Friday night, with 30 people in attendance, the Choral Synagogue on shabbat morning – about 40 people in attendance; and the displaced Donetsk Chabad community, on shabbat late morning /early afternoon – with 40 people in attendance.

Attendance is down, because most members of these communities left Kyiv during the early months of the war.

The Conservative “Masoret” community fled the bombing in 2022 to Berlin, where its members settled, and are affiliated with the Masorti community of Rabbi Gesa Ederberg of the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue. The Berliners have provided them with aid, housing, and their children attend the synagogue’s day-school. The Kyiv Conservative rabbi, Reuven Stamov, moved back to Israel with his family, and “Masoret” was assumed to be dead.

The community was basically resuscitated from scratch, after things calmed down (relatively speaking). That work was done by its part-time administrative director, Maksim Mel’nikov, who stayed in Kyiv. Half of “Masoret’s” current congregants are newcomers, people who have fled the war-zone in Eastern Ukraine to the capital. (Mel’nikov himself fled Donetsk back in 2015, when it was seized by the Russians.) The community’s unofficial religious and ritual leader is now Yuri Radchenko, a 36 year old Holocaust historian who fled from Kharkiv at the outset of the full-fledged war. Radchenko isn’t a rabbi but he is fluent in Hebrew and has extensive Jewish knowledge.

The rebirth of the Masoret community is a sign of something larger. There is a strong need for community among Ukrainian Jews in these difficult times. Many of the internally displaced Jews from the East never went to synagogue, or to a Hesed or JCC, back in their original places of residence. But they have found friends, spouses, and fellowship in Jewish institutions such as Masoret. I saw the same phenomenon when I visited Chernivtsi a year ago. In a time of pain and suffering, people have found strength and support in Jewish community. That will have an enduring impact on their lives.

Masoret was the one synagogue I visited where there was singing at the community meal, mainly of Israeli songs. The songs were led by Hazanit Helena Karpenko, a professional singer.

The situation at the Shchekavytska Street Choral Synagogue is less upbeat. The synagogue has been led for more than thirty years by Rabbi Yaakov Bleich of Brooklyn, who along with Chabad Rabbi Moshe Reuven Asman claims the title of Chief Rabbi of Ukraine. Before the war, the Choral Synagogue was a thriving center for Haredi and Orthodox Jews of various non-Chabad stripes. There was a yeshiva and a large Haredi heder, with sounds of Hebrew and Yiddish. You felt like you had entered the Ge’ulah section of Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh.

The synagogue is now a shadow of its former self. I went to Ma’ariv on Wednesday night, and the gabbai was overjoyed to see me, because I was the tenth man. The place used to be packed with Hasidim and bokhurim. (The gabbai asked me if I was Jewish, something that rarely happens to a visitor who wanders into a synagogue on a Wednesday night, especially to one with my face.)

On shabbes, the services were conducted in the beis medresh, not in the synagogue. The various types of Hasidim who used to live in the surrounding neighborhood have scattered, most to Israel, some to Europe. Rabbi Bleich is in Brooklyn, and visits Shchekavytska on rare occasions. He is represented at the synagogue by his son Avromi.

Only a few of the foreigners have returned, now that the situation there is “under control”. One is Reb Pinchas Dickstein of Antwerp, a businessman and President of Zaka-Europe. Zaka is a well-known Israeli rescue and interment organization. Dickstein recognized me from previous pre-war visits to Kyiv, and we struck up a conversation. “This place is dead” he complained. But still, he decided to return to Kyiv, and has arranged for Ukrainian soldiers to be sent Israel for medical treatment and rehabilitation, under the auspices of Zaka-Europe.

The most promising feature of Shchekavytska is that there are a dozen local teenagers from the yeshiva and girls’ school who continue to live in its on-site dormitories, and who attend the davening. Some of them were eager to practice their English with me. (They don’t get a lot of American visitors these days.) One of them, named Daniel, lives at the yeshiva dormitory because his father wants him to be in an intensely religious environment. His father, with a medium length black beard, was also in shul.

Podil Synagogue, with the yeshiva building to the left.

Ma’ariv at the Podil Synagogue on a Wednesday night.

I don’t have much to report on the Chabad of Podil shul, named “Kedem”. As one of my more cynical interlocutors said, Chabad is like McDonalds: the franchises are very similar to each other. One noteworthy feature: this is originally a displaced community. Rabbi Pinchas Vishedsky and several of his congregants fled Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine 2015, and reestablished their synagogue in Kyiv. (“Kedem” means among other things “East”.) Rabbi Vishedsky still carries the title of chief rabbi of the Donetsk region.

* * *

The biggest worry in Ukraine today is mobilization. The current commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhnyi, has called for the induction of 500,000 men to fight the Russians, an enormous figure. A mobilization law is making its way through the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament). Which categories of men will be exempt from the draft is literally a life and death question.

While in Lviv, I participated in a book launch for Jewish Documentary Sources in Lviv Archives: A Guide, the latest publication of the Jewish Archival Survey. A team of ten local researchers worked on that project for five years, and we invited all of them to the book-launch to receive a personal copy of the volume to which they had contributed. At the event, I learned that none of the men on the team would be able to attend. They were all in the military. The graduate student of history is in the artillery, the museum curator is in the infantry, and the archivist is in transport/military provisions.

Graduate Student Mykola Haievoi, before the war and now.

The Jewish Archival Survey is now active in the city of Chernivtsi, near the Romanian border; a city famed for Hasidic Rebbe Hayyim Chernovitser, poet Paul Celan and the Czernowiz Conference for the Yiddish Language. Our research team has four male researchers, all of whom are university instructors. Currently, university faculty are exempt from military service, but that may change under the new mobilization law. The Chernivtsi research team visited me in Lviv for the book launch and for meetings. At every encounter, the thought crossed my mind – I may not see them the next time I visit Ukraine. They could easily be at the front.

To leave the country, I took the train from Kyiv to Przemysl – a 10 hour trip. (There are no functioning civilian airports in Ukraine.) There was a moment on board when I felt the utter strangeness of it all. I realized that I was the only man in the carriage. I was surrounded by women of various ages and children. Men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to leave Ukraine without a special permit. I had known this fact, but now I saw it with my own eyes. There were mothers, but no fathers, in the train to Poland. I was leaving a country at war.

Map of Ukraine with its major cities