The light-haired customs official in Kiev inspected my American passport. As I quickly presented myself as a Russian-speaker, he looked up and asked where my Russian came from.
“My parents are from Moscow,” I replied, realizing as I said it that my father’s birthplace was now the capital of Ukraine’s enemy.
“Why are you speaking Russian here?” the agent retorted. “This is Ukraine.”
My father was born in Moscow and my mother in Leningrad, but my grandparents are mostly from Ukraine; my grandfather was born and raised in Uman, western Ukraine. As war rages in eastern Ukraine, creating the greatest Jewish refugee crisis since the end of World War II, and as the Ukrainian economy continues to falter, drying up desperately needed sources of income for Jewish communities that have thrived since the breakup of the Soviet Union, I wanted to see for myself how its Jews were faring.
For the last months I’ve been covering Ukrainian Jewry for Chabad.org, the website of the worldwide hasidic movement. Since the fall of Communism, Chabad-Lubavitch has devoted substantial resources to bringing its message to the Jews of the former Soviet Union and establishing Jewish institutions there. Unlike in the U.S., where Chabad operates alongside mainstream denominations, in Ukraine it frequently occupies the center of organized Jewish life. Often a Chabad emissary is a city’s only rabbi. Thus, many Jews active in communal life have some affiliation with Chabad, even if they themselves are not members of the movement.
Since February, when 100 protesters were killed at Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, Russia has invaded and annexed Crimea, violence has rocked major Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv and Odessa, and Russian-backed separatists have taken control of a large swath of eastern Ukraine, leading to war. Meanwhile, pro-Russian separatists—or Russian soldiers—used a surface-to-air missile to shoot down an airliner, killing 300.
In short, instead of getting better, as everyone had expected, the situation in Ukraine has gotten worse. My task as a journalist went from writing about the Jewish community during a time of general unrest to reporting on the deaths of a young Jewish woman and her mother in Luhansk, felled by a mortar round as they went out to buy some groceries, leaving behind a four-year-old boy.
Back in April, I had spoken with Rabbi Pinhas Vishedski, the Chabad emissary in embattled Donetsk, just after masked men handed out fliers in the synagogue demanding that Jews register at a central office. At the time, he was optimistic, denouncing the pamphlets and stating that the Jewish community would remain until the situation calmed down. (It turned out that the fliers were the work of an anti-Russian group aiming to make the separatists look bad.) But when I arrived in mid-September, his outlook had changed. The Vishedskis and their community were now refugees in Kiev, planning a Rosh Hashanah-in-exile with the help of 40 pounds of gefilte fish that I’d brought at the request of the rabbi’s wife.
According to the UN, the war in eastern Ukraine has displaced at least one million people, with Ukraine absorbing about 300,000, of whom 18,000 are thought to be Jews. (Overall Ukrainian Jewish population figures are difficult to pin down, with estimates ranging from 70,000 to more than a quarter-million.) These numbers do not include the untold thousands who have not registered as internally displaced persons. Refugees from Donetsk and Luhansk with whom I spoke told me they saw little purpose in registering.
“I can go fill out government forms that we’re refugees, but what’s that going to help?” asked Galia from Donetsk, thirty-four, as we sat together with her older sister Marina in their tiny apartment on Kiev’s left bank. Eight people live in the apartment’s two rooms, and children ran in and out of the sun-filled kitchen. “It’s a lot of effort for basically nothing in return.”
Galia’s son attends a Jewish school, but otherwise she and her sister receive no support from government or civic organizations. In fact, none of the refugees I met with has received any government help. With landlords suspicious of penniless exiles from the east, many try to hide their status. When refugees flooded the southern port city of Mariupol, rents tripled overnight.
I met Shaul Melamed, thirty-six, in the small basement café of Kiev’s Brodsky synagogue. A programmer from Donetsk who works for an American company, Melamed led his family out of Donetsk in mid-June, thinking, like many of his neighbors, that they would return before summer was over. Now he plans to stay in Kiev indefinitely, but he still hopes he won’t have to abandon his home—an apartment he had just purchased in the center of Donetsk—for good.
“If a government of bandits stays, then we won’t return,” Melamed told me, referring to the self-proclaimed, pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). “I need to work, and I need to live in a place with a normal government and working banks, I can’t live behind an iron curtain. I never gave assistance to Ukrainian forces, but I didn’t hide my views in support of Ukraine, either. If I returned they could easily arrest me.”
Melamed does not fear Ukrainian anti-Semitism, despite the presence of far-right political parties in the central government. Instead, he told me stories of anti-Semitism among the leaders of today’s DPR. In 2004, when they first appeared on the scene as opponents of the Orange Revolution, “they had all sorts of anti-Semitic slogans. When this is done, I’m sure they’ll all come back.”
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