For the leader of the Jewish community in one city in southern Ukraine, the new normal is Russian tanks in the street and Russian soldiers on the sidewalk that he passes, without incident, when he walks around, carrying food packages, during the day.
“You see them. They’re doing their job — they don’t bother you,” said Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Wolff, the Chabad emissary in Kherson and de facto leader of the city’s 8,000-member Jewish community. In other words, the occupation troops don’t hassle Ukrainian citizens — including the rabbi, easily identifiable as a chasidic Jew — who don’t appear to be flouting the Russians’ martial law.
Kherson was the first major city in the country to fall to the Russian Army.
It has put an extra burden on Rabbi Wolff’s time, which he spends from early morning to late night in service to his community. Many of the other 200 Chabad rabbis in Ukraine, most of whom have left for safer venues out of the country, have called him in recent weeks for advice about doing their work in a war zone; and journalists continue to seek him out on a regular basis. “The whole world is calling me,” he said.
The decision of Rabbi Wolff and his wife Chaya to remain at their posts — not leaving when it was still possible — makes them distinctive among Ukraine’s emissaries, who have largely assumed responsibility for Jewish life in the country since communism fell three decades ago. The others left Ukraine at the advice of security officials when their situations became increasingly perilous.
The rabbi, in a brief telephone interview as the war in Ukraine entered its third week, did not comment on the actions of his colleagues. He simply explained why he and his wife, who came to Kherson in 1993, stayed: They saw no choice.
The rabbi said he sees evidence of military occupation whenever he steps out of his house or synagogue. The city, he said, “is crawling with hundreds of tanks and Russian soldiers.”
The army, he said, posted notices that forbid “movement of more than two people together in a car, and demanding that people raise their arms when approaching checkpoints.”
“It is normal — a new reality, a new situation,” he told the Intermountain Jewish News. “It’s pretty quiet — no fighting, no bombs. Thank G-d.”
“It’s safe, thank G-d,” he added, calling the city “now one of the safest places in Ukraine.”
For the residents of Kherson, there is “no way in or out,” Chabad.org reported last week.
Mayor Igor Kolykhaev said Russian troops, after heavy fighting with Ukrainian soldiers, forced their way into the city council building and imposed a curfew on residents, and allowed only cars carrying food, medicine and other supplies to enter the city, driving at minimum speed.
Rabbi Wolff, a native of Israel who studied in the early 1990s in a yeshiva in Brooklyn, said he has adjusted to the presence of enemy soldiers. “You should be careful.” No going out after dark. “During the day, you go out.”
Rabbi Wolff’s psychological adjustment to the imposed circumstances gives the expression “street smart” a new meaning.
He has advised members of the Jewish community to stay home “under any circumstances” — don’t take any chances with encounters with armed Russian soldiers, he tells them.
But he doesn’t take his own advice. “I leave home to deliver bread,” he said. “Because of the siege, people have no food.”
So he brings it — and other life-saving items — to them.
No frightened Jews have flocked to his synagogue, the rabbi said; in many other bombed-out cities in Ukraine, synagogues have become de facto fallout shelters.
The Kherson shul, a two-story, stone, art nouveau building at 27 Gorkova St., and the Wolffs’ nearby home, have suffered no damage from Russian attacks, he said.
Water and electricity? “We still have both, thank G-d.”
How is the rabbi bearing up? “I’m OK, I’m fine,” he said. “We are alive, we are healthy, we are breathing.”
“We’re doing everything we can to make sure they [the Jews of Kherson] stay safe and unharmed,” Rabbi Wolff said. “We’re working desperately to save lives.”
Rabbi Wolff said he spends “all day in the synagogue,” leading worship services and trying to calm the nerves of the city’s Jewish community — that’s when he’s not outside, making food deliveries, by foot and by car, to Kherson’s scattered Jews, many of them elderly and isolated, most of them unable to get out to shop at the mostly empty shelves of the grocery stores.
Sometimes he is fortunate, finding some “golden produce,” like beets and potatoes.
“That’s what I’m doing all day — we give them food,” he said. Sometimes volunteers, at his direction, assist in the food deliveries. Sometimes he hands food to the people, non-Jews included, who come to the shul for a handout.
That’s why he stayed there, “to take care of the Jews, to see that no one dies of starving.”
He told of a call he received from a friend who declared, “I have a present for you: three kilograms [almost seven pounds] of cucumbers,” from an old woman’s private garden.”
“Wolff has managed to procure basic food staples, even if at an exorbitant cost,” according to Chabad.org.
Rabbi Wolff did not say how he finds, or raises, the funds for the food.
For days before the anticipated Russian invasion last month, he and supporters in the city stockpiled “many tons of rice, flour, sugar, eggs, buckwheat and bread,” and distributed the supplies to local families.
As elsewhere in the country, stores are out of food; pharmacies, of medicine.
The situation is unlikely to change in the near future.
The provincial capital on the banks of the Dnieper River, where it flows into the Black Sea, is militarily important because it could allow Russia to create a base for the military there as it seeks to push deeper into the country.
The city of 290,000, 100 miles east of Ukraine’s annexed-by-Russia-in-2014 Crimean Peninsula, was a natural target for the invading Russian army, becoming the first major city to fall, because it is home to the region’s fresh water supply, which the Russians can use to restore water supplies to Crimea.
The Kherson region, which has had identified Jewish residents since the late 18th century, has a rich heritage for followers of the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement. The second Lubavitcher rebbe (the Mittler Rebbe) established Jewish agricultural colonies there in the early 19th century, and a branch of the movement’s flagship Yeshivah Tomchei Temimim was established there in 1917.
A Jewish hospital was established in the city in 1827; in 1905, pogroms.
Kherson was also an active center of the early Zionist movement.
The city’s Chabad synagogue, constructed in 1855 on the site of an old shul, was burned, with nine Jews inside, by the German army in 1942; 8,000 Jews were killed in an Einsatzkommando operation in Kherson in September, 1941, the day after Rosh Hashanah.
The synagogue building was restored in 1947, after WW II; it was subsequently used as a clinic for recovering alcoholics, and was returned to Jewish hands in 1990, undergoing major renovations in 1999.
Rabbi Wolff has added to Kherson’s Jewish history.
He was named as the region’s fifth most influential person in a 2011 poll conducted by a Kherson newspaper.
He and his wife have established a day school, summer camp, kosher food store, soup kitchen and mikveh there.
He had earlier in the war said that he would consider leaving only if “a humanitarian corridor” to a country of refuge is established for him and other Kherson Jews. “Without it, we will not take any risk.
“In the meantime,” he said, “we are here.”
For now, he said, he’s staying in Kherson, and making sure that the Jews there have enough to eat.
“That’s my mission.”
Copyright © 2022 by the Intermountain Jewish News
