Yana is in a hotel room in Warsaw waiting for a phone call. A call that will trigger a mad dash to the airport and complete her family’s dizzying, discombobulating exodus from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.
“I’m really, really tired of staying in hotel rooms,” Yana tells me over a video call, with her teenage son pounding away at a computer game in the background, headphones clamped over his ears.
But she’s also “feeling joyful and sad”.
An understandable amalgam of emotions considering that just 47 days earlier, Yana had been working as translator in Kyiv, living with her husband and three children in a leafy suburb near a lake.
Then the rockets began, Russian tanks rolled into town, and the family took to sleeping on mattresses in the hallway of their apartment.
“It still felt to me like a dream and I was telling the children ‘victory will be soon, we have just to wait and do what we have to do today’,” Yana says.
The veneer of normality became harder to project after seeing a tank trundle past her window – and when her sister in Mariupol dropped out of contact.
When the sister resurfaced, having fled the besieged city, Yana and her family decided it was time to leave Ukraine. For Israel.
“The origins of my family are Russian and Jewish. For me Israel was the only choice.
“My mother lives there, my father lives there, my grandfather used to live there and I want to be with my family. I want to be with my mum.”
And so, carrying just one backpack each, Yana’s family crossed overland to the Polish border. The Jewish Agency housed them in a hotel in Warsaw, alongside scores of other Ukrainians en route to Israel. Each waiting for that call to come to the airport.
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A man carries a bag of his possessions past a destroyed car in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine (Photo: Getty Images)
HISTORY ON REPEAT
Yana and her family will be joining an estimated 30,000 Ukrainians who have entered Israel since the war began – of which a third are reported to be Jewish (given that the data straddles several Israeli government departments, getting precise figures is somewhat optimistic). Officials think tens of thousands more could make aliyah.
This exodus – an unexpected, tragically modern twist in the age-old story of Jews fleeing for their lives from Eastern Europe – is a journey I’ve been capturing for a BBC World Service documentary, From Ukraine To Israel. It’s one with personal resonance too.
In the late 19th century, when violent pogroms broke out against Jews in the Russian empire – a vast territory that included what would be modern-day Ukraine – more than two million left in the three decades before the First World War. My paternal great-grandfather, Samuel Zelavinski, was among them. He fled a town south of Kyiv and ended up in England. His surname ended up as Samuels, thanks to an immigration officer who didn’t fancy a mouthful of Ukrainian consonants. So many of us are products of persecution.
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Ukrainians after landing in Tel Aviv (Photo: Getty Images)
BEACHFRONT BUREAUCRACY
Refugee. It’s a term that makes sense when you see bedraggled families wearily boarding buses bound for humanitarian corridors. It fits the sight of woolly-hatted families, clutching their worldly belongings, listlessly queuing at border crossings.
Where refugee feels harder to reconcile is in the surroundings of a faded four-star hotel in Tel Aviv. The Dan Panorama – one of those classic 1980s hotels bestriding the beachfront, where breakfast buffets are a sharp-elbowed balagan – is devoid of its touristy buzz.
It’s eerily quiet. A scattering of families shuffle in and out of the revolving doors. Some amble towards the beach, others smoke. The odd dog gets walked around the parking lot. The hotel has been turned over to house and process refugees.
In a grand function room, tables are laid out to process the new arrivals. The hum is of hastily set up bureaucracy: ID cards, bank accounts, provincial cities enticing new arrivals to move to their areas.
By a nearby lift, a young mother flops on a couch, eyes filmy with tears. Her two young kids stretch in the restless boredom of “are we nearly there yet?” She video-chats to her husband, a doctor who’s still in Ukraine. They don’t know when they’ll next meet.
Inside what was once a lounge area, a few quietly talk into their laptops on calls – next to a pool table, without its cues or balls. There’s a heaviness in the air. A numb bewilderment.
“It just blows my mind,” says a biomedical professor, after hanging up on a Zoom call.
He’d been on a road trip around the US when Russia invaded. Now he finds himself in the Dan Panorama remotely assessing a student’s paper having arrived in Tel Aviv just the day before.
The Ukrainians aren’t the only refugees in the hotel. Dozens of Russians are here too, part of an estimated 10,000 to arrive in Israel since February.
“We don’t agree with our government or with our president. It’s hard being Russian. It’s become harder and harder,” a mother says alongside her husband and four-year-old daughter.
Behind them, a room has been turned into a makeshift ulpan teaching the new arrivals Ivrit.
Despite the liberal-leaning tendencies of the Russian émigrés, there’s a noticeable tension between the two groups of arrivals.
“Some came to Israel because in Russia they close Netflix and some brands and they don’t like this,” says one Ukrainian woman. Have the Russians been friendly to her? “Some yes, some no.”
This background animus towards the Russian emigrants is reflected in parts of the Israeli media – which reported (without context) that a third of the Russians had already taken their passports and shekels and left.
The Soviet Union’s most famous Israeli son, Natan Sharansky – the refusenik who became deputy prime minister – told me he thinks up to a 100,000 Jews will eventually make aliyah due to this conflict, of whom two-thirds will come from Russia. “This country really wants them,” Sharansky says.
Tim Samuels great-grandfather
Tim Samuels’ great-grandfather, Samuel Zelavinski (Photo: Flash90)
‘IT WILL MAKE US STRONGER’
Yana’s call came in the middle of the night.
Her family rushed to the airport and boarded a flight to Tel Aviv. I caught up with her in Kiryat Yam, a coastal city just north of Haifa where her parents live.
As the wind whipped around us in a beachfront cafe, Yana revealed she initially felt a sense of shame over leaving Ukraine.
“I was thinking I’m a traitor. I left my place that needed me. But now, I’m feeling another way.
“I’ve told myself I’m doing this for my children.”
They’re now looking for a place to move to, schools for the children and work for her and her husband.
To make sense of this sudden relocation – 1,000 miles from Ukraine – Yana has been making up bedtime stories for their kids, that weave in the journey they’ve been on.
“After all, every story is a conflict. It’s a journey, a victory and a happy ending,” says Yana.
“So it will be for Ukrainian people too. It will be a journey with a victory in the end. It will be a journey with a scary part, which will make us stronger.”
Tim Samuels’ documentary ‘From Ukraine To Israel: An Exodus for Our Times’ (made by Creators Inc) is available on the BBC iPlayer
