The Jewish community in the historic Ukrainian city of Uman — site of the kever of Rav Nachman of Breslov — is actively providing medical and logistical assistance to Ukraine’s armed forces in the face of the ongoing Russian military invasion.
“We love Ukraine and we will defend it,” Haim Hazin, a representative of the community, told the Ukrainian news outlet Telegraf.
The community has already provided practical assistance to the Ukrainian armed forces. “At the beginning of hostilities, we handed over 12 bags with Israeli first aid kits to the army,” Hazin said, while partner organizations in Israel “also sent specialists who conducted a tactical medicine course, sharing Israeli technologies on how to stop a wound from bleeding.”
Hazin announced that the community was donating an ambulance that would be deployed with Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region. “It’s equipped with modern Israeli medical equipment and bags with Israeli medicines,” he said. “We donate all this in full for first aid.”
Hazin added that Jews in Uman, which is located in central Ukraine, were “determined to help in any way we can.”
He continued: “It hurts us, we fear for Ukraine, this is sacred land for us here in Uman, where Rav Nachman is buried.”
Uman was once home to a thriving Jewish community that was decimated during the Nazi Holocaust. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, several Orthodox families have moved to the city, mainly concentrated around the kever, which attracts thousands of people from Israel, the US and other countries for Rosh Hashanah.
In Israel, meanwhile, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine expressed support for the country of their birth on social media after an impassioned message from a Ukrainian citizen to the Israeli people went viral.
“Citizens of Israel! Please support us! We, unlike Russia, do not welcome Hamas delegations,” Sasha Marynich wrote in a message to readers of Vesty, a Russian-language newspaper in Israel.
A resident of the Podil neighborhood in the capital Kyiv, Marynich said that a section of the Jewish community lived nearby. “Never, never have we had any conflicts or misunderstandings,” he wrote. “Every morning we greet the Jewish children with a smile as they board their school buses.” Tuesday, however, “was a hard day, no one in town had a smile or a greeting.”
Several Israeli readers reacted warmly to Marynich’s plea. “Israel is for an independent and free Ukraine! Israel and the entire civilized world are for you!” wrote reader Alexander Linsky, while Berta Pinhasov declared, “Hold on, Israel is with you!”
Another reader, Irina Tsybulya, said she would visit the Kosel and place a note in its cracks praying for Ukraine’s welfare.
“God, take care of Ukraine,” she wrote.
(c) The Algemeiner Journal
This article contains a rather disturbing line – “this is sacred land for us here in Uman”.
Really? Sacred land, in Ukraine of all places?
Careful. The yidden felt comfortable and trusted their long time Ukrainian neighbors in 1939 as well. The cruel Ukrainians murdered their Jewish neighbors with their bare hands the first chance they got.
I thought Jews were smart.
Yidden have no place getting involved in a milchama tzuvishin goyim! Haven’t Yidden learned their lesson over this long and bitter galus??? Getting involved in the yadayim shel eisav?!