A Purim nightmare unfolds in my beloved Odessa - The Jewish Chronicle

Jewish history, from ancient to modern times, holds strikingly recurrent patterns of tragedy and defiance. On Purim, which falls this week, we celebrate our deliverance from a planned genocide in the ancient Persian Empire. But more recently in another empire, the Russian one, many of our ancestors also faced unbelievable traumas.

Only five years ago, my husband David and I made a family pilgrimage to Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. We went over the Purim holiday to see where David’s father was born and to visit the miraculously flourishing Jewish communities there.

Seeing horrific images of Ukraine under attack now, and Odessa bracing itself for an onslaught, feels like a terrifying but familiar nightmare.

Sometimes, if you look at the light, you see just how deep the shadows are. No city was more emblematic of the vibrant Jewish life in Eastern Europe than Odessa. Despite constant persecution under the Russian tsars, it was a centre of Jewish life and culture, boasting prestigious Hebrew and Yiddish presses.

Like Sholem Aleichem’s mythical Kyiv or the rural haym of Tevye the Milkman, it was immortalised in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories. Brimming with trading houses and theatres, rabbis and atheist radicals, Jewish Odessa had a flavour for everyone.

Odessa is named after the Greek hero Odysseus. That didn’t stop many other groups — Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Greeks, Poles, Tatars, Armenians — contributing to its rich tapestry. By the end of the 19th century, Yiddish was the first language of 35 per cent of residents, and many who wound up in Odessa came after their own odysseys from small shtetlach — Jewish villages — or other cities in the Pale of Settlement where the Jews fared worse.

Even after the devastation of the Holocaust and the suppression of Jewish identity during Soviet rule, Odessa’s Jewish community numbered 45,000 before Putin’s invasion. It still manages to thrive after so much hardship, operating schools, synagogues, an orphanage and a museum. Watching the destruction and the exodus from the country, I wonder what the future of Odessa’s brave and resilient Jewish community will be.

David’s grandfather, Alexander, came from a village called Ukelnik. His son Yehudah, David’s father, was born in a building in Odessa that still stands as it was, though today it faces the spectre of Russian bombing. Then and now, many Jews fled to safety, including to the land of Israel.

David’s family, the Klausners, were prominent Zionists who helped revive the Hebrew language and restore a national identity amid the pogroms and persecution of the time. Today, Israel again prepares to receive large waves of olim, immigrants, from Ukraine and Russia as their situation becomes unliveable.

As Jews, our memory is shaped by yearning and by absences that are keenly felt. When David’s father left for Palestine with his family, Jewish life in the Soviet Union was already being shut down. Later, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered one million Jews in Ukraine alone, including David’s aunt Malka, his uncle David and his cousin Daniel.

Refugees from this terrible war, all refugees, deserve our empathy and practical support. The people leaving Ukraine now are not Jews being persecuted, but Ukrainians under assault whether they’re Jewish or not. A tolerant and pluralistic society, officially denied to Jews for swathes of history and yet enacted in the rich cultures they developed, is what Putin seems to despise.

Taking in refugees has saved Jewish lives in the past. If we are able help directly, make donations or lobby to create places of safety for Ukrainians, then this is a true mitzvah — complete obligation.

Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner is an inclusion and development coach

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Ukraine