On the evening of Oct. 6, 2023, as the globe blissfully rotated, an 8,000-lb. Iskander missile tore through the Kharkiv skyline and slammed into the city centre, devastating everything within its range. The explosion shattered the windows in nearly every building within a three block radius, including those of Chabad-Lubavitch of Kharkiv’s soaring Choral Synagogue.
The following day, Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian terrorists from Gaza stormed into Israel, unleashing a multi-hour killing, raping, torturing and kidnapping spree which they filmed and proudly broadcast to the world in all its vivid, horrific detail. People of good conscience were shocked by the event, none more so than the global Jewish community. After the Palestinians launched the war, Israel immediately mobilised, and weeks later entered Gaza. War had come to the Holy Land. For the Jews of Ukraine, the war in Israel was at once startling and frightening, but also wearily familiar.
When Israel was attacked on Oct. 7, the Jewish community of Ukraine, notwithstanding its own circumstances, turned their concern and prayers outward, toward the Holy Land. On the morning of Simchat Torah, when the Jews gathered in the synagogue which had just had its windows blown out from a Russian ballistic missile the day before, the thoughts of everyone in the room were not the chaos burning outside, but the fate of their brothers and sisters in Israel.
“Everyone’s worry was with what was happening in Israel,” Miriam Moskovitz says. “We had almost been hit the day before, but Israel was all we could think about.”
Despite their own war, the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian Jews are with Israel.
