As the war in Ukraine marches on, the images are searing, harrowing. The train stations. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians, like sardines, covering the Kharkiv train station, not an inch of spare space to be seen amid the body-to-body of endless crowds, pressed together as far as the eye can see. You can practically smell and feel the exquisitely painful desperation leaching from this static photo of refugees.
Another train station, this time in Poland. It’s lined with prams. Polish mothers put them there, one by one, for the Ukrainian mothers to find, who bolted Ukraine fleeing for their lives, their babies by their bosoms.
And another train station. Outside Lviv, 24 hours a day in the freezing cold, an enormous hot stew station set up outdoors by Ivan, a Ukrainian car dealer, who wanted to help in this difficult time, and just showed up. He set up this huge cauldron in order to help, feed and comfort fellow Ukrainians, as they try to figure out their next desperate steps.
This kind of stirring humanity in the face of this humanitarian crisis, truly it’s inspiring. If only it weren’t precipitated by suffering.
And yet.
While I support the innocent Ukrainian lives whose ordinary reality was invaded by this unprovoked war, the memory of Jewish history stubbornly persists for many, carrying the feeling that chickens have come home to roost, not for the people, but for the country.
Ukraine’s vicious and brutal Jewish history is unforgettable. A few weeks ago I invoked Babi Yar. But way before the Holocaust, already in the 17th century, hundreds of years of meaningful Jewish life were cruelly upended by the Chmielnicki Uprising, known as Tach v’Tat; murderous rampages by Cossacks which some historians say erased possibly up to a quarter of a million Jewish lives — such unspeakable cruelties as cutting open a person’s stomach, putting in a live cat and then sewing the person back up. In the 18th century, the bloody Haidamak rampages visited more wanton murder on the Jews of Ukraine. The 19th century saw the pogroms that left Ukraine littered with more dead bodies and more Jewish blood-soaked soil. This was all prior to the 20th century, with Ukraine’s willing Nazi collaborators and Babi Yar’s accursed ravine.
Chmielnicki is a Ukrainian hero. His statue graces Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. The Haidamaks are perceived Ukrainian heroes within their history.
If only history were linear and exacting in meting out justice: if the perpetrators of these atrocities were the ones being punished now.
That is not how the world works, though. The shifts of history create not just new borders, but also new realities.
So many famous Jewish towns whose names are woven within the lore of past Jewish life and are so familiar to us still today — Rovno, Odessa, Uman, Munkatch, Zhytomer, Kiev, and so many others: depending on the years and shifting borders, these Jewish Ukrainian towns may have belonged to Poland, or perhaps Russia, back when these atrocities were executed.
And yet.
The truth of history refuses to remain quiet. Witnesses with memory of Ukrainian barbarity live amongst us.
This past week a dear friend of mine, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, shared the following chilling stories with me.
She was maybe seven years old. She shared a bedroom with her two older brothers. One evening there was a knock at the door, a woman from the community came whispering something to her mama who had answered the knock. The next thing she knows, that night she and her brothers were taken elsewhere in their house to sleep, because, her mother says, “we have a guest.” Soon the guest arrives, a frightened looking woman, clutching a frightened looking chicken in her arms — she was fleeing a murderous rampage in Ukraine, with nothing to her name but her chicken.
Her second story:
Her mother’s brother had family in Ukraine. Each summer they and their children would travel from Ukraine to visit Romania. These children were her summer playmates who she looked forward to spending her lazy long summer days with. One year, summer arrived. Her friends did not. She asked her mother, how come they didn’t come? Her mother’s sharp and fast protective reply to her little daughter, “probably they don’t have vacation this year.”
Only when she was older did her mother confide the horror to her. One night, neighbors of her summer friends back in Ukraine encircled their home with gasoline, lighting it, sending their home up in flames, burning her childhood friends alive. “Their blood in Ukraine is boiling,” she says.
Certainly, certainly; it’s not as if Russian Jewish history is not littered with spilled Jewish blood. The Pale of Settlement, whose entire concept was created to keep Jews separate, outside of society, was replete with pogroms, with life in fear of the tsars’ irrational, erratic evil decrees against the Jews. The Pale was a large swath of land dotted with strings of Jewish villages, shtetls; almost like a ghetto district on a monumental scale, before there were ghettos.
Accessing unambiguous compassion or empathy for Ukraine can be complex with this kind of vicious and savage past.
And yet.
Who are today’s Ukrainians? Yes, many may be descendants of these ancestors, but many may not be. And even those who are descendants are not the perpetrators. We cannot know the justice calculus of the past. That is for G-d. Our moral obligation in context of this particular phase of the conflict right now is human to human, offering whatever support we can to alleviate the excruciating humanitarian refugee crisis of the present. I weep for those innocent Ukrainians left behind, unable to flee, their lives hanging in the balance.
Witnessing these shattering images and stories; certainly, certainly it’s haunting. Not that long ago, it was my ancestors who, if only! If only they could have even been refugees with other countries caring about their survival. If only the indifference to their fate did not come to be, and they would not have been annihilated, choked to death in gas chambers.
I see heartbreaking wave upon wave of humans, of refugees, being helped, and I realize, it’s at our expense — the Jewish People — that humanity, that Europe, learned its lesson. Maybe, before WW II, the political or diplomatic situation was not able to prevent a war on European soil, or maybe mistakes were made, I don’t know. To that I cannot speak. But I can speak to the humanity then and the humanity now. So different! Look at one of Europe’s poorest countries, Moldova, how despite its size and paltry resources, has said: come.
The Jews too could have become refugees — how? In a word, Israel. It is the creation of the State of Israel that has change everything. Thankfully, today, Jews under attack have a secure place to go that will take care of them, that will bring them to shores of safety. It is at moments like these, when our generation who was born into the reality of an Israel, realizes how deeply we can never ever take Israel for granted.
The Jewish Agency of Israel, the “Joint,” Hatzalah — and many other incredible Jewish organizations — have been breathtaking in their seemingly instantaneous rise to this historic call.
And yet.
Beyond a single organization, no matter how consequential, there is a movement, another story that has transpired here before our very eyes within this Jewish refugee crisis. Chabad. We’ve all always known of Chabad’s deep dedication and sense of mission in caring for any Jew and any human (Chabad in Ukraine helped an Arab doctor and his family, residents of Jenin, escape along with their community), anywhere, no matter the situation. But to witness these Chabad angels carry out their sacred mission on a scale so enormous they probably never dreamed they would be called to, and within the pressure of a national emergency, in a war-torn Ukraine, under fire, has been mind boggling — if that’s even the word. I don’t know the word.
It is beyond the devotion. We have witnessed a worldwide Chabad structure so sophisticated, able to mobilize in a way that is simply remarkable. Instantaneously these Chabad “shluchim,” men and women alike, have transformed into consulates, diplomats, soldiers, rescue units and parents to children who have none.
There are also the images of these Chabad emissaries’ own painful departures from places they have not only called home for decades, but built with their own hands, sweat and tears. The rabbis coming to pay a final farewell to their shuls before locking them, not knowing when — or whether — there will be a next time to pray in these halls hallowed by their efforts.
The Chabad rabbi of Chernivits went to bid farewell to his synagogue, his snowsuit-clad and pom-pom hatted toddler held in his arms. His toddler reached with his tiny fingers for a final kiss of the mezuzzah, before they fled, joining the masses of other Ukrainian refugees, but this time blessed to be on their way to Israel, a new mezuzzah awaiting them, awaiting its kiss.
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
