The War in Ukraine: Jewish News #46
In This Issue: In the Shadow of a Missile attack: The Jewish Community of Kryvyi Rih.
In the Shadow of a Missile Attack:
The Jewish Community in Kryvyi Rih
Kryvyi Rih’s claim to fame was until recently as President Volodymyr Zelensky’s native city, where he grew up and went to university. Last week, it acquired another sad distinction – as the site of one of the deadliest attacks on Ukrainian civilians since the beginning of the Russian invasion. 20 people, including nine children, were killed in a Russian missile attack on Friday night (April 4), that hit a busy restaurant and its adjacent playground. The event shook Ukraine, which observed a national day of mourning in its aftermath, and called an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
According to the 2001 census, Kryvyi Rih (in Russian: Krivoi Rog), a city of 600,000 people, had 1,833 Jews. But that number needs to be adjusted. Since the census was based on personal declaration, and many Jews were uncomfortable declaring their Jewish ethnicity on an official government form, the number of Jews in the city was probably twice as much. One should add to that the people with one Jewish parent or grandparent who have since then rediscovered their Jewish roots, and are now comfortable with embracing them, thanks in no small part to their presidential Jewish native son. (“If he can be Jewish, so can I.”) I would guess that the city’s expanded Jewish population is approximately 5,000.
I spoke this week by Zoom with Rabbi Linor Edri of Kryvyi Rih, who has stayed in the city throughout the war. (There used to be three other Chabad families that assisted him, but they left at the outset of hostilities.) I was stunned to learn that despite the fact that Kryvyi Rih is only 70 milometers from the eastern front line and is shelled regularly, its Jewish community has not scattered and has in fact consolidated during wartime.
Rabbi Edri has an unusual biography: He is a native Israeli whose father was born in Morocco and his mother’s family is of Hungarian descent. Linor was raised secular, and his family became religious and embraced Chabad when he was ten years old. Edri’s father was a biologist, then an attorney, and is now pursuing a PhD. Edri himself received his rabbinic ordination from the Tomchei Temimim Yeshiva in Crown Heights, and served in the Israeli army for three years. He came to Ukraine as a Chabad emissary in 2001, and became rabbi of Kryvyi Rih in 2002.
Our conversation is translated from Hebrew and has been edited for brevity.
Q: Are you the first rabbi of Kryvi Rih? Was there anyone before you arrived?
A: Before me, there was a rabbi named Alexander-Sender Yudaisin who was arrested in 1934. He was arrested by the local head of the NKVD, a Jew named Nemirovsky. This NKVD agent’s grandson is now the president of my community. He was my first major donor for building our synagogue building. Rabbi Yudaisin was eventually released, made aliyah, and was a rabbi in Tel Aviv.
Q: And you have stayed there continuously since 2001?
A: Yes. At the beginning of the war, most of the emissaries left the country. Only four of us stayed without interruption: Rabbi Kaminetsky in Dnipro; Rabbi Meir Stambler [head of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine] also in Dnipro; Rabbi Moshe Asman in Kyiv; and myself. Later, all the other emissaries returned to their communities.
Q: I must ask you if you know or knew President Zelensky’s father.
A: I know him well. But he hasn’t answered my calls in the last half year. The security services have instructed him to minimize contact with people. During most of the war he has been in Kryvyi Rih, and most of the time, he has given his usual lectures of cybernetics at the university. He’s a very interesting man.
Q; How many Jews are there in Kryvyi Rih today?
A: Our community distributes a lot of humanitarian aid. I believe we have a list of 2,500 local Jews who are in need. Besides that, there is a periphery of others with Jewish roots to a lesser degree. Our community has remained more or less intact thanks to the fact that men could not and cannot leave the country. Women and children left at the outset of the war, but about a year later, they started returning to their husbands.
Q: What is the security situation, and how does it affect your community?
A: There are cities that the Russians have abused on almost a daily basis – Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhia. But Kryvyi Rih is different. Let me explain.
The Russians use two types of artillery. In our region they mainly use inexpensive artillery for Katyusha rockets etc., that can shoot for distances of 30-40 kilometers. This kind of artillery, similar to the kind that Hamas and Hezbollah shoot on Israel, falls almost constantly in those cities - Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhia. It sows fear, destruction, death. But we in Kryvyi Rih are lucky.
Kryvyi Rih is an enormous city in terms of territory. The city is 100 kilometers long and its width in some places is 40 kilometers. The Russians simply cannot shell such a large city, and many of their artillery shells fall in the middle of nowhere. The situation is much worse in Mykolaiv where the Russians have seriously damaged the city. There are Jewish communities that have suffered more and communities that have suffered less. Communities that have suffered more have almost fallen apart; people have fled Westward, in every imaginable direction.
In Kryvyi Rih, the community hasn’t fled, it has consolidated. On the first Purim of the war, there was no room in the synagogue, there were more than 500 people. On the first Pesach of the war, I didn’t know where to put people. And until this day my synagogue is filled with 150-200 people on a daily basis. Our school now has 300 children. People want to gather; being together encourages them. I must say that whenever I leave the city for a longer trip, the community is more tense and stressed. They want me to return, talk to them, that we should gather, have shabbat and meals together. This is very important for them.
Unfortunately, two or three times a week our city gets hit by the other type of rockets - longer distance, high precision missiles. That’s very serious, and that’s what hit us on Friday. One of my community members helped organize a gathering of the association of small businessmen in the restaurant that was hit. Luckily, they left fifteen minutes before the attack. If they had stayed, there would have been four times as many fatalities. It was simply a miracle.
Those attacks are always happening, but they are very targeted and specific. And they don’t sow terror. It’s very different when you are constantly being rained upon by rockets [as in Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia]. The psychological effect is entirely different.
Nonetheless, people here – including myself – are full of trauma. I went to New York for the conference of Chabad emissaries [in November]. Whenever a tire blew, I jumped from my seat as if hysterical. There’s endless noise in New York. I was terrified by every noise. It’s inside you and it’s very hard.
Q: Has the war effected your community in more direct ways?
A: We have a number of people who serve in the military, and a number of people, my students, were killed in combat. I have a community member who comes to shabbat dinner every Friday night. He served in the armed forces until recently, when he reached age 60 and was required to retire. He has a son who returned here from Canada, where he was studying, and the son has been serving in the military for the entire duration of the war.
There have been several hits, and it’s a miracle that none of us has been killed. Our bookkeeper survived in an indescribable miracle. A rocket hit her building, which is opposite the synagogue. The building collapsed and she survived somehow. The building of another woman in the community was hit by a rocket that shaved off the facade of the building. She was in bed, and the bed stayed hanging in the air.
Q; What do you do if there is a rocket attack during prayers? What is your policy?
A: The reaction is very individual. I inherited the practice of my grandmother, of blessed memory. I don’t go to any shelter. My Hungarian grandmother was in Auschwitz. When Katyushas started falling on Nahariya in 1980, the family pleaded with her to go to a shelter. She refused and said: “Hitler didn’t kill me; they won’t kill me either”. Like her, I don’t go anywhere. In general, people have stopped going to protective spaces. People get worried, tighten up, and wait.
Q: So your community functions normally?
A: Yes, we function. “Normal” is a relative term. Things are very hard from an economic perspective for people. The entire city of Kryvyi Rih lives off of metal, iron. To export metal, you need a port. There is no port, so there are no sales. With no sales, there are no active factories. People don’t have work, and the municipality can’t collect taxes.
There are no healthy men in town, and there is no one to employ. There is no one to do municipal work – to clean the sewage system, to supervise the train system, to maintain electricity.
As far as I can tell, I am the single largest provider for Jews in this city. I introduced a new system once the war broke out: Every Jew who comes to a class to learn Torah, I pay him money. The idea was to give people money not as charity, but in exchange for something. If you study in the classes, you get $100 at the end of the month; if you come to services, you’ll get $50 at the end of the month. The synagogue offers breakfast and lunch. On Shabbat, we provide a large meal, and close to 200 people attend. And twice a month, I send food packages to people. We pay for medicines. There’s no other choice. This is what we must do.
Q; What are your sources of funding, if I may ask?
A: The Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine gives what it can. A number of other organizations give what they can. It’s very hard. There is no money in this city. I used to raise most of my funds locally. Now there is no money in the city.
Q: Is the “Joint” in Kryvyi Rih? Is there a Khesed?
A: Yes, but the “Joint” here is itself impoverished. I proposed to them that we work together, but they want to remain separate.
Q: So they have their support network, and you have yours.
A: Yes.
[I contacted the director of the JDC’s “Khesed” in Kryvyi Rih, Olga Litvinova, to request an interview, but did not receive a reply – DEF]
Q: What other activities do you engage in?
A: We have a school, a full-day school, grades 1 to 9. And two kindergarten classes. We have several buildings near each other – for the school, for the kindergarten, for the synagogue, and for the mikveh.
Q: What are your plans for Passover?
A: At home, I’ll have seders for members of the community - 50-60 people the first night, and 50-60 people the second night. And there will be seders at the synagogue for anyone who wants to come. Our seders are limited in time, because people need to get home by 11 pm, which is the police curfew in Kryvyi Rih.
