When war broke out in eastern Ukraine following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Israel sent aid to the thousands of Jews who were displaced from the region. In the wake of that conflict, Ukraine’s small but vibrant Jewish community has been under severe stress. Officials from Israel’s defense and foreign ministries recently gathered to evaluate the potential wartime needs of Ukraine’s Jewish communities should Russia attack again. Last Friday, as Steven Hendrix, Shira Rubin, and David L. Stern note, an Israeli advisory urged citizens to leave the country immediately and said that it would begin to evacuate the family members of embassy staff.
The history of Judaism in Ukraine, going back more than a millennium, is both rich and tragic. Ḥasidism traces its roots to Ukrainian Jews, and the communities here have flourished in different periods of history. But they have suffered inconceivably brutal pogroms and mass killings at other times, including during the tsarist era, Communist revolutions, and the Holocaust.
More recently, Ukraine’s ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine has split a vibrant Jewish community of at least 30,000 people centered around the city of Donetsk, according to Pinchas Vishedski, who was the chief rabbi of the city until the war caused him to flee to Kyiv with many others.
Some members opted to stay in the east, Vishedski said, particularly older residents who felt it was too difficult to disrupt their lives. Many of them feel comfortable living in the Russian-dominated area. . . . But most of his former Jewish community members fled the fighting, with some heading immediately to Israel and others resettling elsewhere in Ukraine, mostly in and around Kyiv. Jewish relief agencies converted a youth summer camp near the capital into a refugee center for families that often arrived with little more than a suitcase, Branovsky said.
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