Before immigrating, Ukrainian Jews have ‘Passover meal’

Dozens of Ukrainian Jews who plan to move to Israel in the coming days held a simulated Passover festive meal on Sunday at a Jewish Agency for Israel refugee center in the city of Dnepropetrovsk.

The participants, who had fled the ongoing fighting in the eastern part of the country, got a first taste of what life would be like living in the Jewish state.

“The Jews who are living at The Jewish Agency’s refugee center in Dnepropetrovsk left their entire lives behind in order to give their children a better future in Israel,” said Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky. “Their decision to immigrate to Israel on the eve of Passover is deeply significant.”

The traditional meal, called a seder, recalls the story of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land and is held on the first night of Passover, which this year falls Friday night.

Among those who attended the event in Ukraine were seven children between the ages of two and 10, who were learning about the Jewish festival of liberation for the first time.

Continued fighting between separatists and government forces in the eastern Ukraine has driven many local Jews to take flight to Israel for safety. Several attempts at reaching a negotiated ceasefire between rebels and government forces have failed in recent months.

According to the Jewish Agency, 5,840 Ukrainians immigrated to Israel in 2014, over twice as many as in 2013, in which only 2,020 immigrated. Already 1,400 have moved to Israel thus far in 2015.

The Jewish Agency has responded to the crisis in Ukraine by helping local Jews immigrate as well as assisting local Jewish organizations improve their security infrastructure, the agency said in a statement. The refugee center set up outside Dnepropetrovsk has provided shelter and food for Jews escaping the war-torn regions as well as preparing them for immigration. Hundreds have already passed through on their way to Israel.

Margarita and Robert Artyunyan, who fled the embattled city of Donetsk with their four-year old son, Vadim, also sought safety in the refugee center.

“We tried to avoid going outside unless it was absolutely necessary and we kept our son home from kindergarten,” Robert recalled.

“The city was divided between neighborhoods that were relatively quiet and others that were like hell,” Margarita added. “Gunfire was fairly rare in our neighborhood, but we already knew how to tell where the shells would fall before they exploded. Thank God, we are immigrating to Israel this week. We hope life will be much better there.”

They plan to join their 15-year-old daughter Karina who already began studying in Israel several months ago.

There are some 200,000 people in Ukraine who are eligible to make aliyah — to immigrate to Israel — the agency estimates. In addition to facilitating immigration to Israel the agency, which is supported by the Israeli government, also provides education programs for Ukrainian Jews to strengthen the community’s Jewish identity.

Ukrainian Jews have become increasingly ill at ease with an increase in anti-Semitic vandalism in Ukraine and Russia, where anti-Jewish rhetoric has proliferated amid the armed conflict.

Last week a Jewish physician from Ukraine was severely beaten in what he said was an anti-Semitic assault. Oleksanr Dukhovskoi, a chief pediatric neurosurgeon in the east Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, told the television station 9 TV that he believed the assault was ordered by competitors. He did not name a suspect.

On March 22, vandals drew a swastika and the initials of the Nazi party on a monument for Holocaust victims in the southern Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv, the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress reported. It is the fifth time the monument has been defaced since it was built in 2011.

Separately, unidentified individuals wrote “death to the Jewish rule” near the offices of the Hessed Jewish charity in the central Ukrainian city of Cherkassy, the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism reported on March 18.

JTA contributed to this report.