(Jewish Group) War Deals a Double Blow to Jewish Life in Ukraine and Russia

This Passover, tens of thousands of Jews from Ukraine and Russia held Seders away from their homes, some in refugee camps in Poland, Moldova, or Budapest, others in Israel, where they had only just arrived as new olim, escaping the brutal war in Ukraine or the suffocating atmosphere of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Just a few months ago, few Ukrainian Jews imagined that they would be forced to run for their lives and that their hometowns would lay in ruins. In Moscow, it is now impossible to schedule a meeting with an Israeli council to get an oleh visa for the next few months, while the evacuation buses keep bringing Ukrainian Jews to the borders of Poland, Moldova, Hungary, and Slovakia.

The war in Ukraine has entered its third month. Only a few expected that Ukrainian forces could last that long. Almost no one believed that by April 2022, cities like Mariupol and Chernihiv would be reduced to rubble and remind the world of Aleppo and Homs. The war has changed both Ukraine and Russia, and the impact on Jewish communities on both sides has been colossal. Some Ukrainian Jewish communities have ceased to exist.

Despite the influx in aliyah from Russia, most Russian Jews are still in waiting mode. Many still don’t comprehend that Russia post-February 2022 is not the same country that it had been for the previous 30 years. As the ring of sanctions and political pressure at home becomes tighter, many more might leave. Some fear that the antisemitism which has always existed in Russia will become more and more visible as conditions become more dire. Others worry that their children might be drafted into the army and sent to the front, recalling the same fear of Jews living in the Russian Empire a century ago.

While there might be some temptation to compare the current exodus of Russian and Ukrainian Jews to the massive aliyah from the former USSR in the 1990s, the difference between these waves of immigration is quite significant. Those who wanted to leave the crumbling Soviet Union at any cost came to Israel immediately after the Iron Curtain fell, in a mass wave of migration eventually numbering well over a million individuals. Most Soviet emigrants knew comparatively little about Jewish history or religious practices, as access to those subjects was strictly policed by the communist state.

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