Ukraine Is Cold And Dark These Days. But Chanukah Candles Are On Their Way
A glimpse into a Jewish community fueled by memories of Maccabee miracles and hope for a brighter future.
Dear Reader,
As Chanukah approaches, we turn our thoughts to the courageous citizens of Ukraine, holding fast against the vicious assault of Putin’s armies while enduring freezing cold and dark nights, often without heat or electricity.
It is a privilege to present this Guest Essay by my longtime former colleague at The Jewish Week, Steve Lipman, whose description here of life in the Jewish community of Czernivtsi is both heartbreaking and inspiring.
May the Festival of Lights bring brighter times for all who live in fear.
I welcome your feedback and invite anyone interested in submitting a Guest Essay to contact me at rosenblattgary25@gmail.com
Gary Rosenblatt
Faith in the night: Lev Kleinman, leader of the Conservative Jewish community of Czernivtsi, with ark built by grateful refugees. Photo courtesy of Masorti Olami
By Steve Lipman
After Russia invaded and occupied the Crimea area of Ukraine in 2014, and heavily damaged the region’s electrical power system, there were reports that members of the local Jewish community used up their supply of Chanukah candles — before Chanukah — because they needed a source of light.
In the days before the Festival of Lights this month, a few men and women from two Conservative institutions in Israel will travel to the small Jewish community in Czernivtsi, Ukraine — the country again a victim of a Russian military attack — with a supply of needed items: blankets, sweatshirts, menorahs and kippot.
And 300 boxes of Chanukah candles.
Although electrical power in Czernivtsi is on-and-off — more off than on these days — the candles will be saved to be used for the holiday (which begins on Dec.18), according to Lev Kleiman, the leader of the city’s Conservative community.
“One-hundred percent, yes. This year it’s really important” to have Chanukah candles in Chernowitz, Kleiman said in a Zoom interview one recent afternoon. (He referred to the city by its old name, still used by many residents.)
They will be delivered by Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, the Russian-born/Jerusalem-based “circuit rabbi” of the Conservative movement’s Schechter Institutes and executive director of its Midreshet Schechter Ukraine.
Among a few “couriers” bringing needed items to Jewish communities in Ukraine, Rabbi Gritsevskaya has made several trips there in the last 10 months, at a not inconsiderable risk to herself. At the start of the war, she urged Jews in other cities to make their way to Czernivtsi, a city of 250,000. A cultural center and railroad hub, it is now a melting pot of native Jews and those from other parts of Ukraine.
“I can’t say I am not scared,” the rabbi wrote in a Facebook post at Purim time, when she returned to Ukraine to spend the holiday in Czernivtsi. “When I think about many, many people whom I know and I talked to in the last two weeks who are real heroes, my own fears seem so insignificant.”
Once, And Still, A City Of Refuge
Czernivtsi has served as a city of refuge before. During World War II, it was home to thousands of displaced people from elsewhere in parts of the USSR threatened by the Nazi army. It is currently attracting refugees from throughout the country, especially the east, where the Russian attacks are more severe and living conditions are more difficult.
Earlier in the current war, Kleiman turned his synagogue into a refugee center for some of the millions of Ukrainians fleeing their homeland. The city was the gathering site for worldwide faith leaders who denounced violence and expressed solidarity with the embattled Ukrainians.
Located on the Prut River, Czernivtsi (known at one time as “Jerusalem upon the Prut” for its strong Jewish community) is 25 miles north of the Romanian border in southwest Ukraine, home of one of the country’s most active Conservative Jewish communities. The city’s Jewish population before the war began 10 months ago was estimated at 2,000, including many Holocaust survivors.
And today, following widespread post-invasion migration?
“No one knows,” Kleiman said; “many left, but many came.” No one is counting. While, as in other Ukrainian cities, many Jews — especially women and senior citizens and children, everyone except draft-age males — have migrated, others have come to a venue of relative safety, either renting apartments or staying in ones under the auspices of the Jewish community.
Most of the Jews in Czernivtsi now are those exempt from military service, Kleiman said, Others stayed to be with their husbands-fathers who joined the Ukrainian army after the war began, or to care for their aged parents.
Despite signs of war — rifle-carrying soldiers and policemen on the streets, empty shelves in stores because of shortages, people hurrying to safety when they hear sirens — Jewish life there has continued, according to Kleiman. The most active organizations in the city are Chabad, the JDC-supported Hesed Shoshana Welfare Center and Kleiman’s Kehillat Aviv Synagogue (his official title is coordinator), which sponsors daily Jewish activities.
The synagogue is located near the Chabad center, with which it cooperates on relief activities, and is housed in a small, two-story building that contains an office, a kitchen and a large multi-function hall.
Kleiman said Chanukah will be more important this year in Czernivtsi than in past years. The holiday is a natural time to come together, and to assert Jewish survival.
Electricity in Czernivtsi flows only a few hours each day; at night, no streetlights. That’s due to incessant Russian bombing of Ukraine’s infrastructure, and to government-imposed restrictions designed to conserve the little available resources. On the Festival of Lights, much of the country will be without lights, heat, electrical power or water. But the theme of the holiday – a celebration of the Maccabees’ military victory over the Greek-Syrian Hellenists against massive odds — will resonate with the community.
Some will come to the synagogue for a communal candle-lighting, Kleiman said. Others will light their candles at home, in their windows.
“With God's help we will soon have a generator,” Kleinman said, bringing lights and heat to the synagogue. Until then, he and the other residents of Czernivtsi will shiver. The temperature in the city was 29 degrees Fahrenheit during our interview; a light snow was falling.
A History Of Survival
Though no Russian missiles have fallen inside Czernivtsi itself, some have reached the outskirts, causing damage to the area’s infrastructure and utilities. Other parts of the country have not escaped the Russian onslaught; two months ago more than 4,000 Ukrainian towns, villages and cities had experienced outages, and 40 percent of the country’s grid was crippled.
The saturation-bombing of power stations is a major part of Vladimir Putin’s plan, while losing on the battlefield, to weaponize Ukraine’s weather to bully the country into submission as winter sets in.In this battle, Ukraine’s civilians are the targets, the victims, the front-line casualties.
Some of the items being donated for Chanukah to Czernivtsi by Masorti Olami, the International Movement for Conservative Judaism, include blankets, sweatshirts, menorahs and kippot.
The war has been a test of the people’s mettle, a spur to their growing national unity. As a form of solidarity, many have switched the language of their conversations from Russian — the lingua franca during the Soviet days — to Ukrainian.
Nobody in Czernivtsi’s Jewish community is starving, Kleinman said. Kosher food is available at the synagogue, and volunteers bring supplies to people unable to travel. Some people are experiencing depression, in part from the lack of activity in the cold.
But the Jews are living on hope — that the war will end eventually, and they will be able to return to their homes, a lesson that Jewish history has taught. Where there is no physical light, Kleiman said, “we make our own (spiritual) light.”
Ukraine, until 1991 part of the Russia-dominated Soviet Union, has a poignant precedent within the country’s historical memory — the nearly-900-day-long siege of Leningrad (now known as Saint Petersburg) by the German Army and Finnish troops in 1941-44, which cost an estimated million Russian lives, civilian and military. Everyone in the former Soviet Union knows the story of suffering and sacrifice; it was a staple of the USSR’s history lessons, a morale-boosting lesson of coping with overwhelming, often-fatal odds.
The besieged Russians were resilient, as the Ukrainians today are proving to be.
Though estimates about the size of Ukrainian Jewry vary widely, most say there were at least 200,000 before the current war began, making the size of the country’s Jewish community among the largest ones in the world. Tens of thousands have subsequently made aliyah, and moved to Germany and Poland and other points west..
“The vast majority of Jews are still there and they probably are not going to leave,” according to Rabbi Motto Seligson, Chabad’s director of media relations.
On the eve of World War II, some 45,000 Jews lived in the city, about a third of the total population. The collaborationist Romanian authorities, who ruled the area, established a ghetto in Czernowitz where 32,000 Jews, including many from the surrounding region, were interned. From there, they were shipped to concentration camps in the nearby Transnistria area, where 60 percent died.
A third of the city’s Jews survived the war.
The population grew to about 17,000 when widespread migration from the USSR began in the late 1980s. Like many cities in the former Soviet Union, Czernivtsi has experienced a modest Jewish revival since Communism fell and open expression of Judaism was allowed. The revival was spurred largely by the arrival of Chabad shluchim couples, and programs sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Though Chabad, an Orthodox movement, is the prime Jewish mover in Ukraine, there is also a growing non-Orthodox presence there.
The Israeli branch of the Conservative movement sent its first full time representatives to Ukraine a decade ago. The movement’s Jerusalem-based Masorti Olami organization sponsors a network of synagogues, schools, camps, youth groups and kashrut certification across Ukraine. A few decades ago Kleiman attended the Midreshet Yerushalayim day school in Czernivtsi and Camp Ramah Ukraine.
In addition, the Reform movement’s World Union for Progressive Judaism has established 10 congregations in the country; the movement estimates that 14,000 Ukrainian Jews identify as members.
In the boxes of materials that Rabbi Gritsevskaya is to bring to Czernivtsi from Israel are some dreidels. Israeli-style dreidels, whose Hebrew letters stand for the words Nes gadol haya po — “A great miracle happened here.” On dreidels used in the diaspora, the last word usually is sham, “there.”
The linguistic symbolism in a land under siege is clear, said Kleiman, who plans to explain the message to the members of the community taking home a dreidel.
“I understand — they will understand too,” he said. “I hope the miracle will also happen in Ukraine.”
Steve Lipman is a former veteran staff writer for The Jewish Week. This piece first appeared in the Texas Jewish Post.