In the past two weeks I’ve been to shuls in and around Ukraine which have been transformed overnight into refugee centres, feeding and giving shelter to Jews and non-Jews of all ages caught up in the Russian invasion. You don’t quite grasp the idea of a holy sanctuary until you’ve seen exhausted people having their first meal in days on trestle tables by the aron hakodesh.
In Kyiv’s Brodsky Synagogue, I spoke to an elderly couple who had fled from Chernihiv, on the invasion path in northern Ukraine. Waiting for an ambulance because he had a fractured hip and couldn’t travel on the bus with the rest of the refugees, they were hoping to be reunited soon with their three children living in Israel.
They had also lived there for three years, back in the late 1990s, “but the weather was just too hot for us,” the woman told me. “Our children grew up as Israelis but we preferred to go back and live out our retirement in our hometown where we were both born and grew up. Until the Russians came.” Now they are resigned to living in Israel, whatever the weather, for the rest of their days.
The rescue work has become much more streamlined this week. The anxious security personnel outside another Kyiv shul got used to seeing me turn up just after another bus of refugees had left for the border. Last Thursday morning, in the magnificent grand synagogue of Odessa, only 14 Jews gathered to hear the Megillah being read. Half of them would shortly be on on their way out of the country. On the Bimah reading the Megillah was a man whose missions to the frontlines over the past month may only be told when this war is over, if then. Somehow, he had got hold of a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of bunny-ears to get his listeners into the Purim atmosphere. As he read the Megillah out loud, he cast an eye over a pram parked next to the Bimah. Inside was a two week-old boy who would be taken out of Ukraine in a few hours.
As they were crossing the border to Moldova, I was arriving in Uman, the small town exactly halfway between Odessa and Kyiv. There, at the most famous of all shuls in Ukraine, no-one was helping refugees. In the synagogue built over Rabbi Nachman of Breslav’s tomb, where every Rosh Hashana 50,000 Jews come on pilgrimage, there were a dozen men, blind drunk, dancing to Hassidic trance music. Most of the community of a few hundred Jews who live there all year round had been evacuated already, but these lost souls, who live off charity and have nothing to lose, had chosen to stay behind. A fight had broken out. There was broken glass and pool of blood at the door.
Followers of Rabbi Nachman at the tomb are famously welcoming to all Jews, whatever their sins, but not on this Purim afternoon.
“We actually had a bus, with people rescued from one of the towns under fire, which stopped in Uman for a few hours to rest,” said a member of an organisation working to rescue Jews from battlefields. “I made sure they kept as far away as possible from the tomb. The people who stayed there despite the war were the dregs of the dregs. Poor, deluded and dangerous. And the irony is that we may yet have to rescue them as well before this is all over.”
Last of a holy generation
Not all strictly Orthodox Jews are big fans of pilgrimages. Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, who passed away on Friday at the age of 94, was once asked whether it was more important to go on the (much shorter) pilgrimage of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai on Mount Meron, or study Torah. His answer was clear: “to study Torah, which is a clear commandment.”
Rabbi Kanievsky was recognised as “spiritual leader” of the Haredi Lithuanian community for only four years, after Rabbi Aron Steinman died in late 2017. He had never been in a leadership ,or rabbinical position before. He owed his elevation to his lifelong dedication to Torah study. He was one of the last rabbis born in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe, in what is now Belarus, just over the border north of Kyiv. As young man inIsrael, as other rabbis tried to rebuild yeshivot destroyed by the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, he served as an example of what a yeshiva student should look like.
With nearly all of that generation gone, his moment came. On Sunday, most of central Israel came to a standstill as hundreds of thousands flocked to his funeral in Bnei Berak. His successor as the leader of the most ideological of the strictly Orthodox streams is 98-year-old Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, the very last of that generation.
The reliance of the community on these venerable nonagenarians is a tribute to entire lifetimes spent in study and devotion to that incredible project of resurrection. It also places a question-mark over the future of the Haredi community. Can it make the transition to a new generation of leaders more aware of the new challenges facing their young followers?
Bennett the birthday boy
This has been a solemn week, with a major war still raging, a senior rabbi dying, and a terror attack in Beer Sheva with the highest number of casualties this year. What’s more, if we thought the pandemic was over, infection rates spiked once again. But from Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s perspective, it was still a good week, though it would be unseemly to rejoice in public. He might do some private rejoicing on Friday when he turns 50.
It didn’t begin so well. On Sunday evening, when Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky addressed the Knesset, there were some discordant tones. Unlike his speech to the House of Commons and the other parliaments he’s been addressing, the appearance before the Knesset wasn’t made to a packed plenum.
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Demonstrators gather to watch Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's speech to the Israeli parliament as it broadcasted at Habima Square on March 20, 2022 in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images)
The Knesset began its Pesach recess last week and is undergoing some renovations. Was that the real reason? Or was it to avoid angering Russian President Vladimir Putin? Either way, Israel’s parliamentarians listened separately, from their homes or private offices. Mr Bennett didn’t look very happy when President Zelensky appealed to Israel to offer more support to Ukraine, including asking them to supply the Iron Dome missile defence system. Worse was in store when he seemed to be mocking the idea that the Israeli prime minister could mediate between him and Mr Putin. “You can mediate between countries, not between good and evil,” he said.
But the displeasure was short-lived. Ukrainian diplomats rushed to explain that the criticism had been of the Russians, not of the Israeli efforts. Mr Zelensky himself was quick to change his tone that very evening, when in his daily address to the Ukrainian people, he said that “the prime minister of Israel, Mr Bennett, is trying to find a way of holding talks. And we are grateful for this. We are grateful for his efforts, so that sooner or later we will begin to have talks with Russia, possibly in Jerusalem. That’s the right place to find peace. If possible.”
It’s not that Mr Zelensky wasn’t grateful to his Israeli colleague for trying. “We’re very happy with anyone who tries,” explained a senior Ukrainian official on the next day. “But the problem is with Putin, who is using the talks to try to manipulate us.”
Israeli diplomats also stressed that the mediation was still on and that it was up to both the Ukrainian and Russian leaders to make the necessary concessions. Meanwhile, in an attempt to help them, Mr Bennett is planning a possible trip to bombarded Kyiv, to finally talk to Zelensky face-to-face.
His Shin Bet security detail has already begun working out secure routes into the the beleaguered city and out again.
Meanwhile, there was other diplomacy afoot. On Monday afternoon, we suddenly discovered that Mr Bennett was in Egypt, meeting President Abdelfattah a-Sisi. And not just him; Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zaid, the de-facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, was there as well. Such a summit, between two of the most powerful Arab leaders in the region and the Israeli prime minister, would have been unthinkable not long ago.
The reasons for them meeting so publicly stemmed both from the Iranian nuclear talks in Vienna, and the fact that all three countries are western allies who are nonetheless wary of joining the anti-Russia camp.
It may be a bit premature to speak of an Egypt-Israel-UAE alliance. But the coordination between them, and the open signaling, especially towards US President Joe Biden, is unprecedented.
Heady days for Mr Bennett, who won office on the promise that only he could prevent a fifth consecutive election in less than three years. At least that promise he fulfilled.
This week was a year since the March 2021 election, 365 days and counting, without an election. Not only has Bennett delivered on that, but this week he proved that his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was not the indispensable statesman he wanted everyone to think he was. Other Israeli prime ministers can do it as well.
Who knows, perhaps Mr Bennett will mark his 50th birthday in Kyiv.
