Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin my story … - The Jewish Chronicle

One of the three rabbis at our recent wedding was Rabbi Yonatan Markowitz and his wife Inna. They had flown over specially from the war zone that is Kyiv, just for our day.

My husband David and South Hampstead shul have raised a good deal of money, both for their Jewish community, their soup kitchen and their kindergarten, the only one in the country for autistic children in Ukraine. They are struggling to survive with the ongoing Russian war. Last week they were 19 hours without electricity or water, and heavy bombings are the continual backdrop to their life. They are funny, devoted people and we have become good friends. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin..

Both of their families were religious refuseniks who made aliyah to Israel. Inna’s family were from St Petersburg and they left when she was four. They lived a new neighbourhood for new immigrants in Kiryat Gat where Inna’s father was chief engineer of the main sugar factory in Israel. Two years earlier Yonatan had come with his family – his father was also an engineer – from Ungvar in Ukraine (where his grandfather was the chief rabbi). Yonatan and Inna went to the same school although Inna was two years younger. They spent hours together playing with a family of frogs, which they named, herded, cared for and watched over.

One day Inna went to her mother and announced her impending marriage to Yonatan. Her mother said: “I’m happy, but no one will marry you till you are 17.” She asked: “Do you know what it means to get married?’’ Inna answered: “Of course it means that Yonatan can ride my bike and we can take care of the frogs together.’’

Her mother nodded; “Oh, I see… well … that’s OK then.”

Inna’s family left Kiryat Gat when she was seven – so several years before the banns could be read out – and naturally, the children lost touch with one another.

Many years later, at a bar mitzvah, when Inna was 19 and a student in Jerusalem studying English literature and Jewish philosophy, Inna was introduced to Yonatan. She didn’t recognise him. He asked her how the frogs were and she thought he was either crazy or heavily into Aristophanes and she prepared to move away. Smiling gently, he reminded her of the names of the frog family they tended and of their promised intentions.

If I were to say. “Reader, she married him,” it would be true because indeed they were married and today they have seven children and grandchildren all over the world. The story diverges here, because as Inna told it to me originally, my clear memory was that she got off a bus and encountered a young soldier to whom, when he started the frog conversation she gave the Israeli version of short shrift. With a little prodding she realised that “caring for our frogs” was not a euphemism and after one date they both realised with joy that their puppy, or perhaps amphibious love, was still there.

The story doesn’t end there of course, otherwise it would be a short story, and theirs is a novella. One day Yonatan, who was by then her husband, flew a group of rabbis and Jewish leaders into the Ukraine to visit the Jewish communities in Ukraine where he visited the shul of his late grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor.

On his return to Israel, Yonatan told her, to her astonishment, they ought to go to the Ukraine to re-build the Jewish community there. He wanted to continue his grandfather’s work. He had qualified as a rabbi, and gave up his position in Israel.

Inna’s family were appalled at the thought that their daughter and family should be returning voluntarily to the place they had fought so hard to escape from. By then there were five children and another on the way and they wanted their grandchildren around them (not to mention the poor frog-foster children). The last thing their families envisaged was their beloved children going back to the same old, same old…

Yonatan tempted Inna by telling her that she could open a brand-new school there and within a few years and, with the help of money raised in Israel and the diaspora, the Kyiv community was established and they had additionally built a Jewish school (with 173 pupils) and the only pre-school for autistic children in Ukraine.

During the Soviet control of Ukraine, Jews were not able to openly practise and since then, the couple and their family have steadily rebuilt the community. They now lead the Kyiv Jewish community with more than 3,000 people who they need to feed and support through the hardship that regular bombing by Russia creates on a daily basis.

We donated our wedding present list to the community – we simply have everything we need and not a single wall space or a single unfilled drawer in the house. I have 33 framed West End posters, at least 40 other framed paintings, photograph albums – the saucepans from my first wedding – as does he. There are three drawers of kitchen utensils, a tagine the size of a pram, a garden full of terracotta pots, enough desks and chairs to furnish not just Inna’s school but St Paul’s and the Montessori circuit thrown in and a flat not selling that I still love. And yes, I do have a link to their charity….

Remember when I first mentioned on this page that Putin and Iran had dreamed up the pogrom of October 7 to avert the Russian war of expansionism headlines in the West. Well, from the KGB POV it worked out well. Meanwhile, Christian societies all over the world are failing to protest about the anti-Christian genocides, the Druze in Lebanon, the Alawites in Syria, the slaughter in the Sudan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria … I could go on, and I do, but hey, LSE, where are the placards? The single focus of all the pain and suffering in the world is the Palestinians. I can’t think why.

Frogs are often biparental. Males will guard the eggs and females carry pouches on their backs for their tadpoles. Kermit was the peacemaker. Maybe Yonaton and Inna got it right.

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Maureen Lipman