There's No anti-Semitism Here
‘There is no antisemitism here.
Ukrainian Jews are outraged by claims of fascism in their country,
· The Times
· 28 Feb 2022
· writes Anthony Loyd in Dnipro. Pictures by Jack Hill
The Holocaust survivor poured himself a cup of Chivas Regal, toasted life, friendship and peace, then knocked it back in one.
“It’s part of my recipe for longevity,” said Igor Davidovich, 90, with a smile. “Another one perhaps?” Then the air raid sirens began.
The last time Davidovich’s city was attacked was in 1941, when the Nazis bombed and captured Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. He was nine years old.
Later, he and his mother and younger brother fled to the Urals aboard a train as the Einsatzgruppe D death squad reduced the population of Jews who had not escaped the city from 30,000 to 702 in a four-day murder spree. His father, a Polish Jew and Communist Party member, was already dead, murdered in 1937 on trumped-up spying charges as part of Stalin’s purge.
“I last heard those sirens a long, long time ago,” Davidovich said. “I could never in my life have imagined that I would hear them again. It grieves me to hear that sound repeated in my ears now.”
This time, he is not for leaving. The war is quite different and President Putin is no antisemite. Yet as carnage is visited across Ukraine and air raid sirens sound over European cities, forcing thousands of terrified civilians to run for cover in underground shelters, Holocaust survivors and the newer generation of the country’s thriving Jewish population alike are outraged that the Kremlin is using allegations of neo-Nazism to justify the attack on a country whose president is himself of Jewish origin.
“It feels so wrong for war to come again. Why should Putin do this to us? We are outraged!” Davidovich said. A sprightly widower whose physique is that of a far younger man, he still works as administrator of Dnipro’s Golden Rose synagogue, where we met.
“There is no antisemitism or neoNazism here. It is just Putin’s point of view, something he claims, as there is no other justification he can come up with,” he said.
Jews have lived in Ukraine for more than a thousand years, and the country has a Jewish population of well over 400,000, the fifth-largest community in Europe. They are no strangers to pogroms and persecution by Cossacks, Tartars, Russians and Ukrainians over the centuries. During the Holocaust the Germans, with the help of Ukrainian collaborators, killed more than a million Ukrainian Jews.
Those who survived were heavily restricted from practising their faith after the war, until the Gorbachev era of the late 1980s, when synagogues began to reopen, along with community organisations and press clubs.
Since then the country’s Jewish community has experienced a strong revival. Ukraine does have a far-right movement, but it has never managed to gain the same political toehold or public support base as its counterparts in western Europe.
The 2019 elections ended in humiliation for far-right parties, which attracted less than 2 per cent of the vote.
The same year, epitomising Ukraine’s embrace of its Jews, Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidency in a landslide victory with more than 70 per cent of the vote.
Not only is Zelensky Jewish, but his grandfather fought against the Nazis as a Soviet soldier in the Second World War, and many of his family members died in the Holocaust. That did not stop Putin justifying his unprovoked attack upon Ukraine by announcing that he wished to achieve its “demilitarisation and de-Nazification”.
The unprovoked invasion has spurred many of Dnipro’s younger generation to volunteer to join the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Force (TDF), taking up arms to defend their kin and nation against the Russian soldiers. They mock Putin’s claims to be targeting a fascist enemy.
Some, displaced from their homes by the annexation of Crimea in 2014, have already had experience fighting proRussian separatists.
“There isn’t antisemitism in Ukraine,” said Asher Joseph Cherkaskyi, 52, a heavily bearded lieutenant in Dnipro’s TDF, speaking at a base on the city’s left bank as dozens of volunteers gathered to collect weapons and hunt for pro-Russian saboteurs. An orthodox Jewish fighter who saw action in the Donbas region eight years ago, Cherkaskyi wore his tzitzit ritual tassel from his belt by his bayonet. Around him men filled magazines, tying coloured bands to their arms to distinguish themselves from the enemy.
He added: “How could it be if this government were neo-Nazi, that one of the biggest Jewish populations in Europe would live here in Ukraine. I am supposed to be a Nazi Jew?”
His son David, 20, was also in uniform, a new volunteer. “I’m here to defend my country and my community,” he said angrily, standing beside newly placed sandbags and tank obstacles. “To suggest that Ukraine is somehow neo-Nazi is just total bullshit. Russia needs to understand that if it comes here and attacks us in this way then we are ready to fight back, as soldiers who are both Ukrainian, proud of their country, and Jewish too.”
For Davidovich, however, the sound of the sirens heralds only sadness and pain. “The worst tragedy this time around is that the war is being
fought between Ukraine and Russia, nations that shared so much and are so close in blood and history, “
he said. “I will not leave Dnipro again. I will stay in the city no matter what happens, along with my cat, my daughter, and my friends. This time we have nowhere
else to go.”
Women and children join petrol bomb production line
Anthony Loyd meets determined residents as they prepare to defend Dnipro against the Russian invaders
· The Times
· 28 Feb 2022
·
Asher Joseph Cherkaskyi and his son David are ready to take the fight to Putin, as Ukrainians and as Jews. Elsewhere in Dnipro residents are mass-producing petrol bombs, even emptying bottles of beer in the search for suitable containers
The bespectacled psychologist was swift in her analysis.
“Putin is a narcissist with a Napoleon complex,” she announced after only a moment’s pause, a finger, immaculately varnished in red, raised to emphasise her diagnosis. “He feels a lack of alternatives and suffers illusions of world power. He’s mentally ill.”
Her treatment plan to alleviate the Russian president’s complex symptoms was less conventional than anything suggested by Freud. “I’m ready to throw [petrol bombs] at Putin’s tanks,” she said, bending down to load a crate of empty bottles being readied for petrol bombs. “I’m furious.”
One of scores of Ukrainian women volunteers on the improvised petrol bomb production line beside the former Space Museum in Dnipro, 46year-old Lyudmila’s entire family — her husband, brother and adult children — had joined the psychologist to help to weaponise the streets for war. Here, beneath the looming outdoor rockets placed around the museum from Dnipro’s heyday as a Soviet-era space programme centre, chains of volunteers sorted thousands of bottles, assessing their quality for optimum smash and splatter capability against Russian armour and personnel.
“We learnt how to do this on Google,” explained Daria, 31, a mother of two children, further along the line as she separated beer and wine bottles from whisky and vodka. “Two thirds petrol,
one third oil and a handful of crushed polystyrene. Add a rag for wick, light it and throw. Boom! Russia you want some? Let’s go.”
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine and assaulted Kyiv, Dnipro has galvanised itself for war and responded with a mass civil mobilisation as it prepares to defend itself. Queues of volunteer fighters stretched around the blocks of reporting posts. On Saturday 3,500 men signed up to fight in only 12 hours. The number was even greater yesterday, and queues at blood banks showed a similar increase, even as air raid sirens echoed across the streets.
The anger of the eastern city’s population and their readiness to fight undermines any notion that a swift decapitation operation on Kyiv by Russian units, already bogged down in heavy fighting, could quickly end the war.
Men and women from every sector of society, even those with strong past links to the Soviet military, expressed fury and grief over the Russian invasion.
At a Territorial Defence Force base on the city’s left bank, a 52-year-old Ukrainian Spetsnaz veteran of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan put on his Afghan pakol cap and collected an assault rifle in readiness to fight again.
Like most of those spoken to by The Times, Viktor preferred to use only his first name. “I want any Russian Afghan veterans to know that they will be fighting a former brother in arms if they come my way.” He paused in reflection. “The invasion has made me regret everything I did in Afghanistan. All those Afghans I fought and killed ... Now I see they were defending their country against us just as we defend ours against the Russians. The brotherhood of Ukrainian and Russian Spetsnaz is dead.”
Nowhere else in Dnipro better symbolises the civilian determination better than the petrol bomb preparation taking place beside the Space Museum. Piles of polystyrene were ground down to powder by rows of women to one side; on the other volunteers sifted through crates of bottles. On Saturday barrels of petrol and oil were at the site and the petrol bombs were constructed on location, before being carried away with wicks in place ready for use.
Yesterday, the mixing of petrol, oil and polystyrene, which helps the flaming liquid to stick to its target, had been moved to a secret location, for fear that an accident or attack could destroy the site in a fireball. Children ground up polystyrene beside their parents and some of the city’s homeless had been co-opted to wander the streets gathering empty bottles. In a park beside the site one group of women sat emptying full beer bottles into the soil so they could be quicker readied for petrol.
“Beer and cheap wine bottles are best,” Vadim, 42, said. “Anything more classy is useless. A champagne bottle looks like it could take out a tank, but the glass is too thick. It would just bounce off or fracture. You need a full smash on impact for best effect.”