Nothing in Kyiv is quite as it seems.
When I knocked on the big red front door of the Grand Synagogue in the Podil suburb, there was no answer. For two reasons, it emerged.
One was that the main shul was in darkness due to power rationing necessitated by the continuing Russian missile and drone attacks on the country’s power stations, so the congregation were davening in a much smaller beit midrash next door.
Grand Synagogue in Podil, Kyiv
The Grand Synagogue in Podil, Kyiv
Second, the shul’s main front door was just a façade. Immediately behind it was the Ark. The outside of the shul, when built in 1896, had to look as if it was a grand residence, as this area was zoned for residential use only, a congregant explained.
I had come to see the shul’s famous rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, but he was in New York. Nevertheless, I was warmly welcomed as a rare foreign visitor. One of the stand-in rabbis told me, after the service, that he had spent years in Manchester, so he spoke English (of a sort).
It had been somewhat eerie and spiritual without lights, but they suddenly shone brightly as the service ended, allowing me to peer inside the main shul. It had been beautifully restored — including its repainted green central symbol, a Tree of Life. A plaque in three languages, Ukrainian, Hebrew and English, noted that the Communists had closed the shul from 1929 until after World War Two.
Yaakov, a friendly congregant, suggested I might like the equivalent of a shul crawl; in this once heavily Jewish area of the city there are at least three synagogues that are still active.
We passed an elegant four-storey building that displayed a large bust of Alexander Pushkin. “The Jewish woman who built and owned it was a big fan of Pushkin,” said Yaakov. “Many Jews came back to this area after World War Two and the end of the Nazis. Even in 2019 there was a huge outdoor sukkah here.”
A short walk more, and up some stairs, we joined Jews eating a Shabbat meal at a shul populated entirely by exiled inhabitants of Donetsk, the eastern Ukrainian city seized by Russian militants in 2014 and declared annexed to Russia less than two months ago. The congregation’s rabbi, Pinchas Vishedski, was in Vienna for a happy occasion — he had been conducting the wedding of two of his former congregants.
Donetsk, capital city of the Donbass region, was once home to 15,000 Jews, all Russian-speaking, of whom fewer than 3,000 remain, mainly elderly, though there is apparently still one class of children at the cheder.
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An image of Boris Johnson, who remains a highly popular figure in Kyiv
A prominent community member, George Zilberbord, was killed in 2014 by armed pro-Russian militants who were looting neighbouring houses.“Most of our people are now either in Israel or elsewhere in Europe,” the rabbi’s cousin told me at the lunch. “What you see here is almost every Donetsk Jew in Kyiv.”
He said there was still some communication with friends or relatives back in Donetsk, but there was no way physically these days to cross the front line.
On occasional calls by Telegram or WhatsApp, people were very guarded in what they said. Politics was never discussed -- for obvious reasons.
Walking back to the centre, I passed a hamburger and hot dog stall, which featured a painting of Boris Johnson, eating one of their products, and saying: “Oh my Dog!” in English.
Because of his unstinting military support for Ukraine, Mr Johnson remains the most popular foreign leader here, even though, to the regret of most Ukrainians, he is no longer PM.
Towards Kyiv’s city centre there were other external signs of the city’s Jewish past, including a statue of the author Shalom Aleichem, which is only yards away from another very active shul, the Brodsky. Near the station, a Jewish-owned building lay in ruins, struck by a Russian missile. attack last month.
