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(JTA) — As we mark the grim second anniversary of the Ukraine battle this Shabbat, I’m reminded of a haunting melody I heard within the metropolis of Poltava final month.
I used to be standing earlier than Sonia Bunina, a plucky 17-year-old, when she opened her mouth to sing when an air raid siren rang out.
I flinched. Not Sonia — she didn’t miss a beat.
“Kol haolam kulo gesher t’zar meod, veha’ikar lo lifached okay’lal,” she belted out earlier than searching for shelter. “The entire world is a really slender bridge, and crucial factor is to haven’t any concern in any respect.”
Sonia, like so many Jews I do know in Ukraine, is many issues — decided, grieving, centered — however she’s actually not cowering.
As she sang these phrases by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov — the Ukrainian Jewish sage whose followers proceed to come back by the tens of hundreds to his grave in Uman yearly — she embodied the prayer’s indomitable spirit.
Sonia and I met outdoors Poltava’s Hesed, a part of the community of Jewish humanitarian hubs based by my group — the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC — greater than three a long time in the past. Right this moment they’re a lifeline to tens of hundreds of Jews dealing with loss and strife. Since she was a toddler, Sonia has been attending actions at Hesed — her mom coordinates cultural applications for the aged, and she or he connects teen volunteers like herself with remoted seniors, a essential supply of consolation these final two years.
Nowadays, touring to Ukraine seems like a pilgrimage — there’s a pull in my soul to go to household close to Lviv, to bear witness to Ukrainian Jewish resilience, and to be impressed by the readability of objective that’s so palpable there. Since my first journey in 2011, I’ve been eight instances. Final yr, I wrote about how a yr of disaster had remodeled the unusual into the sacred in Ukraine. Now, visiting feels much more important with the worsening humanitarian scenario.
Ukrainian Jews aren’t blasé about these challenges — removed from it. Simply take the fragile ballet of feelings on their faces when checking their telephones throughout an air alert — contacting family members, scrolling by way of images of devastation, and analyzing Telegram chats speculating on a given rocket’s make and trajectory.
However life goes on — there’s work to do — and although they’ve misplaced a lot, they refuse to offer any extra away.
Displaying up for one another, no matter it takes, is now baked into their very essence as Jews, and in Ukraine, there are tens of hundreds to serve — hungry previous ladies and displaced younger households, disabled Holocaust survivors and surprised middle-aged professionals, shocked to now need assistance after they have been as soon as donors and volunteers.
They act fearlessly to make sure their communities make it by way of this disaster, physique and soul intact. Can we count on something lower than boundless creativity from the individuals who birthed Sholem Aleichem and the Baal Shem Tov?
“These bombings, all these items which can be killing folks, destroying homes, leaving kids homeless … it’s very scary,” Galina Limarenko, an 82-year-old retired nurse, instructed me in her small bed room in Berezivka, being attentive to the nice and cozy blanket, firewood, and different winter provides my colleagues offered. “Thank God for the Jewish neighborhood, which by no means provides up and at all times shares even their final piece of bread.”
Teen Sonia Bunina, proper, works with aged Jews in Poltava, Ukraine, instructing them the best way to use particular smartphones designed for seniors distributed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee as a part of its aid effort. (Arik Shraga)
I noticed that irrepressible spirit once more at our Beit Dan JCC in battered Kharkiv — a shapeshifting wellspring of power just some dozen kilometers from the japanese border. Shortly after Feb. 24, 2022, the middle turned a staging floor for truckloads of emergency support — a part of the 800 tons of humanitarian help we’ve delivered thus far.
A number of blocks from missile strikes, it now hosts kids’s camps and soulful Shabbat companies and operates a “youngsters hub,” providing educational enrichment to kids who haven’t had in-person faculty for years — robbed of regular childhood by the pandemic and now the continuing disaster.
And amidst blizzards and blackouts, Beit Dan has additionally grow to be a “heat hub,” a protected place for beleaguered Jewish Kharkivites to cost their units and acquire a sizzling drink and heat meal.
“In case you share in our ache, and supply help the place it’s wanted, I’m without end grateful,” stated Nika Simonova, Beit Dan’s program director. “The power to stay human is the primary factor. Achieved proper, I imagine that may save the world.”
That’s why we at JDC, aided by a coalition of companions together with the Jewish Federations, Claims Convention, and Worldwide Fellowship of Christians and Jews, deployed a historic response to this battle and stay dedicated to the Jewish future right here.
We’re centered on ongoing humanitarian help for greater than 41,000 Ukrainian Jews, increasing trauma aid, closing kids’s academic gaps, and getting unemployed Jewish neighborhood members, amongst thousands and thousands of Ukrainians plunged into poverty, again to work.
Tamara Vasilenko (far left) — an aged Jew in Sumy, Ukraine — celebrates Shabbat in her residence with volunteers from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the director of the native Hesed, Elizaveta Sherstuk. (Arik Shraga)
There is no such thing as a doubt that the Jewish world is now responding to crises on a number of fronts, together with this one, however we’ve been right here so many instances earlier than. We should draw power from our historical past and from the positive information that that is what we’re constructed for. Our compassion and dedication, when leveraged with that timeless sense of mutual Jewish duty, means we will deal with the challenges we face — and are available out on the opposite aspect even stronger.
As I walked by way of Lviv on my final day in Ukraine, I requested my cousin Anna Saprun, a 25-year-old enterprise analyst, how this era has modified her.
“I hate what’s introduced me right here, however I like who I’ve grow to be,” she stated with a fierce and feisty smile. “Nothing scares me anymore. I really feel highly effective.”
Two years after the battle started, Ukraine’s Jews are impressed anew every day, resolute within the positive information that they know precisely who they’re working for — one another.
is a former journalist and the JDC’s senior video and digital content material producer.
The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the creator and don’t essentially mirror the views of JTA or its guardian firm, 70 Faces Media.
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