The world was horrified by the images of pregnant women and women with babies fleeing from a maternity hospital in Mariupol bombed by Russia, in an attack that killed three people, including a child, and wounded 17 people, including women waiting to give birth. The situation in the rest of the city is also harrowing, with Ukrainian authorities burying the dead in mass graves.
Rav Menachem Mendel Cohen, the Chabad shliach in Mariupol who currently is on the Moldovan-Romanian border but is in touch with Jews in Mariupol, spoke to Israel’s Radio 103FM on Thursday morning.
“The city is under siege for a long time,” he said. “People have no electricity, they’re without water and very basic things, but there’s a place in the city where you can go to get cellphone reception. People are risking their lives in order to go out and call their children to tell them they’re alive.”
“We’re deep in a humanitarian crisis. It’s on the level that people go out to the street to gather snow and then melt it in order to brush their teeth, wash their faces and drink something. This is the eighth day without electricity and water – there’s no way to leave the city for already two weeks. There’s nothing to eat. The stores are closed, the pharmacies are empty.”
Regarding the bombing of the maternity hospital, he said: “It’s horrifying. They’re engaging in psychological warfare on the cruel level possible. They say there’s humanitarian corridors and then they shoot. Anyone who decides to leave is taking a risk. We tried to evacuate people under fire on Shabbos. We waited for a green light and we received a real-time update that they bombed the parking lot while 20 buses were parked there, destroying them. They’re trying to break the spirits of the city residents.”
In response to how many Jews are left in the city, Rav Cohen said: “We received over 300 direct inquiries from families who want to leave and we have a list of about 3,000 residents of the city and the surrounding towns who are eligible to immigrate to Israel.”
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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One Response
We can do the same thing that we did many years ago.
First comes Taanis Esther, which means fasting and doing Teshuva (to better our ways), to become a better person and to regret the silly things that we have done in the past.
The next thing is that when we wake up in the morning, we are going to hear the great news, that the new hitler was hung like haman.