San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Ukraine’s only female rabbi is part of exodus
WARSAW, Poland — On her first Shabbat away from the fighting in Ukraine, Rabbi Julia Gris twice led services to welcome the Jewish holy day.
A week earlier, Ukraine's only female rabbi had been fleeing the war that scattered her Odesa congregation from Moldova to Romania to Israel. Some stayed behind, braving the Russian shelling.
She first led an online service for those congregants scattered abroad. Then she officiated one in person for a small group in Poland, taken in by a Christian couple near Warsaw.
Gris lit sabbath candles she had carried from Ukraine, while her 19-yearold daughter Izolda played the guitar and sang, just as she had during services back home in her Reform community, Shirat ha-Yam.
“There were so many stories, so much crying and so much pain,” Gris said. “For those who are here, and even more so for those still in Ukraine.”
Gris and her daughter found safety after a 20-mile walk lugging suitcases and their two cats, reaching the border with Poland, where they negotiated a 40-hour wait without food, water or toilets.
The mother and daughter are part of the exodus from Ukraine that has become the fastest-growing humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II.
With some 200,000 Jews in Ukraine, it is inevitable that many Jewish people are among those fleeing.
International Jewish organizations have mobilized to help, working with local Jewish communities in Poland, Romania, Moldova and elsewhere to organize food, shelter, medical care and other assistance.
The reality that so many Jews have joined the mass civilian exit from Ukraine exposes the deceitfulness of Russian claims that it's there to “denazify”
Ukraine. That nation has steadily grown into a pluralistic society, led by its Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Why is a Russian regime that claims to be
“denazifying” Ukraine brutalizing a country led by a democratically elected and proud Jew?” said David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, who visited Poland last week to assess the needs of refugees. “Why is Moscow adopting Nazi-like tactics of the 1930s — fake history, phony grievances, blitzkrieg, attacks on civilians
and civilian institutions, and murder of children?”
Gris said she always felt very much at home in Ukraine, a Russian-born Jew who had never felt discrimination.
Now Russia's invasion has plunged the country into an acute humanitarian crisis affecting Jews and non-Jews alike. Jewish organizations say they are
there to help all refugees irrespective of faith. But for some Jews, the organizations' involvement is essential to helping them emigrate to Israel or stay true to their faith's observances, for instance by getting kosher food.
Aside from the AJC, there are others helping. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a
New York-based humanitarian organization, has so far evacuated thousands of Jews to Moldova and helped several thousand more after they reached Poland and other countries.
Gris is awaiting a sponsorship letter in hopes of going to the United Kingdom. She was ordained a rabbi at the Leo Baeck College in London and has friends and colleagues there who are supporting her.
Gris said she never experienced antisemitism in her 22 years in Ukraine.
It was the fact that she was Russian that made her nervous after Russian troops attacked Ukraine on Feb. 24. Friends advised her that she would be better off leaving. Ukrainian authorities froze her bank account — a step taken against Russian and Belarusian citizens. At the border, she said Ukrainian guards asked, “How do we know you're not a spy?”
Gris said she could understand that reaction from a nation under attack, but it still hurt because “my heart and soul is with Ukraine.”