(Jewish Group) How the last Jews of Bila Tserkva escaped Putin's army

Milla Kirishun had plenty of opportunities to leave Ukraine before last week, she tells me by way of introduction: “This is not how I planned on doing this.” Kirishun is a small, delicate woman with oversized brown glasses and a tuft of grey hair. For nearly 80 years she watched the Jewish community of Bila Tserkva, her hometown, trickle away. The small city, 80km south of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, is notorious for its bloody history. When the second world war broke out a fifth of the population was Jewish – most of them were killed in 1941 by Nazi ss troops supported by Ukrainian soldiers. Soon after the initial massacre, some 90 Jewish children were slaughtered too.

During the Soviet era, the Jews of Bila Tserkva were subject to pedestrian anti-Semitism. “Ukrainian boys might not lend you their bikes if they found out you were Jewish,” Kirishun recalls. Most Jews departed in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed. More left later in the 1990s, as recession and hyperinflation made it hard to earn a living. When Kirishun worked as a typist in a local ceramics factory, she was paid in pairs of socks in lieu of cash, rather improbably.

By 2000, virtually all of Kirishun’s old neighbours and childhood friends had gone to Israel to start “their new life”. Kirishun stayed. A decade later, she was one of just 150 Jews in a town home to 15,000 only a generation before. “At an early age I saw that there was a stigma against being Jewish,” she says. “Some of my friends tried to hide their identity. But I went the other way. I embraced it. ‘Yes, I’m Jewish!’ I would tell anyone who asked.”

After the Maidan Revolution of 2014, when the overthrow of the pro-Russian government resulted in a simmering war with Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, two of Kirishun’s daughters emigrated – one to work in Warsaw, another to study in Tel Aviv. But she didn’t want to leave. Her stalwart presence in Bila Tserkva was the stuff of local legend. “Milla Kirishun! You’re still here?” young townsfolk would ask, half-joking, when they saw her.

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