Russia’s war has turned Hasidic pilgrimage site into safe haven

The Jewish community is serving hot meals to the needy in Uman. Photo: Maria Tymoshchuk

Despite initial panic caused by deadly missile strikes at the beginning of the war, Uman is relatively calm now. The famous Sofiyivka Park, the city’s landmark created by a Polish magnate in the late 18th century, is closed. However, the city centre is filled with people.

This is also true in the Jewish quarter, which appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Families with children stroll along streets covered with Hebrew language advertisements for kosher restaurants and tourist agencies. Every year, tens of thousands of Jews visit Uman for the Rosh Hashanah celebrations. Now, most of the cars parked between the area’s huge hotels and synagogues have licence plates from the Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions. 

Finding shelter

One of the hotels currently sheltering displaced people is managed by Vitaliy and Mikhail. “While the first days of the war were like an unending nightmare, the following seem to be one never-ending day,” Vitaliy says, as he welcomes us. After the outbreak of war, the young man helped in the construction of fortifications in his hometown of Kryvyi Rih. Later, he switched to flying a drone over Russian units in the south of the country. Finally, he ended up here in Uman to support displaced people.

He met Mikhail, who is a generation older, a few weeks ago through their common acquaintance, Rabbi Leron Ederi from Kryvyi Rih. Mikhail or Moshe – “whatever you prefer”, as he insists – is experiencing war for the second time. In 2014, he fled from his native Donetsk, like most Jews there, because he did not want to live in the so-called “Russian world”. Eight years later, he knew what to do when the war started. After the darkest days of shelling in Kyiv, where he lived, he evacuated his family and came to help in Uman. 

Mikhail asks, “You want to know what Ukrainian Jews think about denazification?” “Babi Yar, that’s all,” he says, referring to the Russian shelling of the site where over 100,00 people, mostly Jews, were executed en masse during the Second World War. “It is all happening again,” he says. “Everyone must understand that an attack on the smallest Ukrainian city is as unacceptable as an attack on Warsaw, Berlin or Jerusalem.”

Despite the tragic circumstances, Vitaliy and Mikhail remain cheerful and engage in never-ending political discussions. They believe Ukraine is going to win the war because it is united as never before. For now, they are doing what they can. They help those in need alongside a number of other volunteers. These are people who left their pre-war lives behind and took on the roles of managers, receptionists, cooks and psychologists.

Kolya worked on construction sites before the war. Now he takes care of people who have fled from the frontline towns and villages. As he explains children who are coming from the shelling are afraid of loud noises and don’t want to play and that’s why he encourages them to make drawings, so that “they can somehow pull themselves together.”

He smiles and looks at the wall in the hotel’s hall covered with drawings, which say:

“Russian warship, go fuck yourself!” 

“Glory to Ukraine! Kiril, three years old. Mykolaiv!”

“Orcs, your death awaits here!”

One of the pictures on the wall was drawn by Vera’s older daughter. The family arrived in Uman after shelling intensified in Mykolaiv, a city in southern Ukraine close to Russian-occupied Kherson.

“My older daughter does nothing but keeps drawing and drawing,” says Vera. “We were under fire for a month and decided to leave when rockets fell not far from our house. My younger daughter still has panic attacks when she sees car headlights at night, as they resemble the flash of falling missiles.”

A new home?

Most of the people who found shelter in Uman had never planned to move from their hometowns and decided to leave at the last minute when the situation became too dangerous. Alina came with her husband, sister and new-born child from Kostiantynivka, an industrial city in Donbas. She recalls that only a week before, she was out walking with her baby in a pram in a city park and counting the rockets fired by the Russians. “We decided to leave only when we heard about the murders, rapes and tortures in Bucha,” she says. “My sister is 16 years old, they would not spare her.” 

Many of those ending up in Uman do so by accident. Bogdana had not heard of the city at all before. Three days ago, she and her husband, mother, child, dog and cat left Ukrainsk, a mining town near Donetsk.

They decided to travel in an old bus that had not been used for years, because of their 90-year-old grandfather. He can only stay in a lying position as he suffers from lung problems after decades of work in a mine. When they were fleeing, their vehicle simply broke down on the road near Uman. “If it wasn’t for this place, I don’t know where we would live,” Bogdana says with tears in her eyes.

The new residents of the Jewish quarter are both surprised and grateful to receive free shelter. Most of them want to believe that they will be able to go back home. But the reality may be different. Overall, the situation facing internally displaced people in Ukraine appears to resemble a ticking time bomb.

According to the mayor of Uman, Iryna Pletniova, several thousand people were passing through the city each day during the first weeks of the war. She recalls that for days officials would stay up all night to help these people. “We fell asleep in a peaceful country and woke up at war,” she says as spring sunlight streams into her office through windows partially covered with sandbags.

The mayor says that the inflow of people fleeing the war through Uman has declined over time and the situation is now more stable. “But at the same time, there are people who have nowhere to go and nowhere to return,” she adds. At the moment, more than 10,000 people have decided to stay in the city of 80,000 inhabitants. 

Unspoken tension

As we walk through central Pushkin Street, where the Breslover community organisation is giving out hot meals to the needy, we wonder if Uman will stay as peaceful as it is now. On a calm sunny day, one could forget about the war, if not for the sirens and mobile notifications regularly reminding you about a possible missile attack.

At the end of March, the Russian defence ministry published photos showing men in uniform standing outside Uman’s main synagogue. The post announced that the “Kyiv nationalist regime” was using the temple for military purposes.

“Unfortunately, there are people working for Russia in Uman,” says Zvi Arieli, a Latvian Jew who helped to organise the city’s territorial defence in the early days of the war. In his opinion, the information about soldiers in the synagogue was devoid of any basis but could be used as a justification for further attacks.

Zvi came to Ukraine in 2014 and since then has used his experience in the Israeli army to help train Ukrainian police, border guards and soldiers. Dressed in a khaki jacket with a kippah on his head and an energetic, focused look, he seems like a walking confirmation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent statement that future Ukraine will be rather like a besieged “big Israel” than a peaceful liberal country of its citizens’ dreams.

Zvi says that whilst he is not an isolated case, Israel treats its citizens serving in the Ukrainian military with ambivalence. “The Israeli government could take a more active position,” he argues. He believes that Zelenskyy’s presidential victory had a huge psychological impact on Israeli society, which understood that there was no widespread antisemitism in Ukraine and sided with it almost unequivocally after the war broke out.

This does not mean, however, that relations between the small Breslover community permanently residing in Uman, the thousands of pilgrims from all over the world coming here every year, and the rest of the city’s inhabitants, had always been perfect.

“When the coronavirus pandemic broke out two years ago, the former mayor tried to make political capital out of antisemitism by exploiting fears that religious tourists would bring the plague with them,” says Iryna, a lawyer for the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov Charitable Foundation. This group now coordinates the aid activities of the Breslover community. “There have been other controversial episodes over the past 30 years, but things are slowly getting better, and the current sense of solidarity may speed up this process,” she adds.

Forgive and forget?

The mutual historic injustices affecting the area have very deep roots. In 1768, thousands of Poles and Jews lost their lives in Uman during the so-called Koliivshchyna – an uprising of Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants against the Polish nobility and Jewish population. The Jews of Uman then fell victim to pogroms during the Ukrainian-Soviet War. During the Second World War, in turn, the Nazis murdered 10,000 Jews living in the city.

 “Can all this be forgotten? Can it be forgiven?” asks Baruch Bavil, a Ukrainian Jew who became a follower of Breslov Hasidism after reading the texts of Tzaddik Nachman. “This land is soaked with the blood of Ukrainians, who fought for their freedom for centuries, and of Jews who were persecuted for their faith. That is why we must fight for this land now,” he says standing next to the grave of Tzaddik Nachman of Breslov.

How will the next wave of destructive violence in Ukraine end? Baruch, who experienced antisemitic repressions during his youth in the Soviet Union and came a long way from a home where Yiddish was gradually forgotten to his newly found faith, has few doubts. “One just needs to look at Putin’s face to understand the future,” he says. “There is anger and aggression in his eyes, he is a man of deep complexes and problems. He is a relic of the past.” 

Baruch says everyone in Uman believes that the war will end and Ukraine will emerge from it victorious. “The greatest tzaddiks were able to unite even what seemed to be in absolute opposition, to find peace where it seemed impossible. It is obvious that Rabbi Nachman protects the city,” he says.

Aleksander Palikot is a journalist covering politics, history and culture in Central and Eastern Europe.

Maria Tymoshchuk is a facilitator for the NGO Insha Osvita and a former correspondent with Radio Svoboda and Hromadske in Odesa.

Jewish community, Ukraine, Uman, War