While on the world news channels we are updated on a possible invasion of Russia, where in Ukraine the fear is already felt in the air. Isaac from the Jewish community in Odessa tells us.
The feeling in the air is the foul smell of a war in which the Russians are planning something more terrible than ever, Putin’s plans are to occupy even the capital Kiev, we are witnessing embassies and international organizations fleeing all their workers from the capital as a result.
For the Jews, the situation is all the more difficult because apart from those who have to abandon all their businesses, shops and factories and lose almost all their property and livelihood and flee into the unknown, there are those who also have no ability to do so.
There are over 200,000 Jews in Ukraine, many of them elderly people, Holocaust survivors, and orphans who are in nursing homes and orphanages in Kiev and Odesa. They have no ability to leave.
Rabbi Avraham Wolf, rabbi of the Jewish community in Odessa, tells us about the preparations for each possible scenario:
The institutions of the Jewish community in every city in Ukraine are well secured throughout the year which costs us a fortune, but in times of war we must increase security around the institutions for fear of looting and acts of vandalism of many instigated anti-Semites as unfortunately happened in the Crimean War in 2014.
In addition, the community must rent shelters and hiding places so that there will be tens of thousands of Jews scattered in the suburbs around where to stay in order to escape the horrors of war, and even there it is necessary to pay a large fortune for guarding these places.
We must purchase tens of thousands of sleeping bags, blankets and mattresses for all the refugees who will flee to us so that we have a place to receive them and give them an answer.
In addition, we ordered dozens of tons of basic products flour, buckwheat, rice, and more … but it is still not enough …
All expenses so far have cost us over $ 300,000 from loans we have taken from local banks with very high-interest rates and we must stock up on dozens of tons of matzah, meat, and wine and the needs of Purim and Passover, we do not know how long the war will last.
For that, we need at least another 200 thousand dollars and we are really facing a broken trough. We have no way to finance all this and nowhere to take more loans, the maximum we could have already taken without knowing where we will return because there is simply no choice it is an emergency.
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