Kyiv, March 7. Ukrainian Jews celebrate the holiday of Purim, which commemorates their people’s salvation from annihilation at the hands of Persian King Ahasuerus, with their traditional costumed dance, amid a war that led to the emigration of a large part of a radically radical community transformed by the Russian invasion.
“The war has brought huge demographic changes,” Irina Gritsevskaya, a Conservative rabbi – who, unlike more traditional Orthodox Judaism, ordains women as rabbis – told EFE, who traveled to Kyiv from Israel. to be with his family. this party.
At her small synagogue in the capital’s Podil district, Gritsevskaya reads the biblical passage that Jews commemorate from sunset Monday through Tuesday, to an audience reflecting on the impact of war on the community.
A WESTWARD MOVE
Forced to flee their homes by Russian advances and bombardments, tens of thousands of Jews in eastern and southern Ukraine have left the country or sought refuge in areas less affected by the war, such as the capital, Kiev, or the city of Chernivtsi, in the southwest.
The Russian missile threat has also partially drained Kiev, which has however seen some of the community that left the capital replaced by an influx of refugees from the east who are reinvigorating Jewish life in the city.
“A lot of people have left, but we are trying to rebuild the community with people who come from elsewhere,” Anastasia Shapiro, a young ballet dancer who has lived in Kyiv for ten years, told EFE.
Shapiro is from Kharkiv, a metropolis in the northeast of the country that last year came under constant bombardment by the Russian military. “My parents came to kyiv in June because they couldn’t live there anymore,” says the young woman.
THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY
“Many people from the war zones have come to Kyiv and we are trying to offer them support and whatever they need,” says Dmytro Kryplyuk, a young lawyer who is also visiting the Conservative Movement Synagogue in Kyiv to celebrate. Purim.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews – whose population exceeded 100,000 in the 2001 census, the last conducted in Ukraine – have emigrated to Western Europe and Israel or are refugees in their own country.
Despite the population decline, Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya insists on the need to offer those who remained the possibility of continuing to practice their religion and live in community.
“It’s more important than ever for those who arrive in a new city and don’t know anyone; coming to the community is the best way to overcome problems and traumas,” the rabbi says.
A RENAISSANCE COMMUNITY
The population movements caused by the war came as a shock to the Jewish community of Chernivtsi, a former center of Jewish culture and life where some congregations have doubled their numbers thanks to refugees arriving from the east.
The warmth offered by community life can be felt at the conservative movement’s Purim festival in Kiev, where Jews of all ages who have friends and family at the front or who have emigrated and are struggling financially due to the war forget their problems and become They dress according to their tradition.
THE SPIRIT OF PURIM
When the rabbi has finished reading the Megillah, the passage from the Bible in which Queen Esther manages to convince King Ahasuerus not to kill all the Jews as his minister Haman had demanded, who ends up being executed, the teenagers of the community act out the story on stage.
Esther’s games of seduction, represented by an older woman, with the king, embodied on stage by the young president of the community, make the audience burst into laughter, who will later pray for peace in Ukraine and toast with the traditional “Amman ears”, a delicacy dedicated to the mockery of the anti-Semitic minister.
“The spirit of Purim is to celebrate and be joyful despite life’s difficulties, and that’s what we see here tonight,” says Rabbi Gritsevskaya dressed as a geisha, snapping photos with a blonde woman with a hairdo of a rasta hat.
Marcel Gascon