They are “about five thousand to leave the country”, according to Josef Zissels, the President of the Association of Ukraine Jewish Organizations and Communities. “Every generation has experienced exile,” says Albina Voronko.
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Behind the bus windows, at this decisive moment of departure in exile, there are sad faces, tears, pain. Many others display, on the other hand, at the time of the jump, faces with empty eyes. As if the violence of the decision they have just taken to leave their home, their city, their country, was not yet intelligible. As if the situation – the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 – was so absurd that the decision of exile itself was astounding, unacceptable.
The Jews of Kiev leave. It is one of the terrible paradoxes of a war that Moscow claims to have declared in the name of a “denazification” of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, accuses the Ukrainian President, Volodyymr Zelensky, Jewish himself – an identity that he never mentioned in his political speeches – to be a neonazi who would lead a “genocide” of the Russians. Ukraine. Faced with such a degree of reversal of reality and intellectual dishonesty, Ukrainians are petrified.
In front of the Brodsky synagogue, four buses chartered by the Jewish community are getting ready to take the road. Albina Voronko helps coordinate the humanitarian operation. Jewish Russian, she is called “speechless” against the accusations of Mr. Putin. It’s been thirty years old that she came from Russia to study and, after being married and had a son in Kiev, she has “never had any problem, nor as Russian nor as Jejie” . “I have never even learned to speak Ukrainian,” she laughs, and no one has ever criticized it. “
” The memory of past sufferings “
Albina is collapsed. The departure of the Jews of Kiev is “unsundable pain”, which echoes “the memory of past sufferings”. “Every generation of Jews has experienced exile, does it notify. My grandmother had to flee the terror of Stalin to survive. My mother, child, had to flee the terror of Hitler to survive.” For his it remains in Kiev.
Oleg Voronko, Albina’s husband, directs the evacuation operation, Wednesday, March 2, at the request of the rabbi of the Brodsky synagogue. Elected in the Ukrainian Parliament and, for a few days, engaged in the Territorial Defense, which brings together volunteers and supports the army in time of war, it gives its orders, automatic shoulder rifle, to the drivers of the four buses and those 35 cars that will take the route of Moldova.
A policeman, Evgueny, accompanies his wife, his daughter and his son from Tel Aviv. At the moment of playing goodbye to the kitten who patient in the car, his daughter lets sink a tear. “They will come back within a month, wants to convince Evgueny. We do not want to emigrate to Israel, we want to live in Ukraine. The defeat, I refuse to think about it. We will win this war.”
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