To mark the first anniversary of Russia’s dramatic expansion of its nine-year war against Ukraine, Dovid Margolin observes the conflict’s effects on the latter country’s Jews through a series of searing vignettes:
Once a quiet industrial port city marked by smokestacks and seagulls, Mariupol was turned into a place of death and horror. Just ask Yevgeny (Avraham) Chernousov. Chernousov left Mariupol towards the end of Passover, on April 21, 2022, after two months of apocalyptic war. “I remember turning to my wife and telling her this was the first time in years that I wouldn’t have matzah and wine on Passover,” he says from the relative safety of Kiev.
Over those two months in Mariupol, Chernousov helped hastily bury more than one of the myriad dead, including his father-in-law, who’d been killed by a projectile. “It was all pieces,” he says matter-of-factly. “When we got there the neighbors were collecting him by the colors of the suit he’d been wearing.” Later, they were able to rebury him near his mother-in-law in an actual cemetery, an outcome thousands of Mariupolites were denied.
Read more on Chabad.org: https://www.chabad.org/news/article_cdo/aid/5834606/jewish/The-Jews-of-Ukraine-Mark-One-Year-of-War-and-Resolve.htm