On May 3rd, 127 years have passed since the birth of Golda Meir. The most influential woman of the 20th century was born in Kyiv and became one of the founders of the State of Israel.
Meir was one of the most prominent figures in world politics for over 30 years. She became the Prime Minister of Israel during one of the most difficult periods in the country’s history.
Her famous quote: “You cannot negotiate peace with those who have come to kill you”, remains relevant today, both for Israel and Ukraine. Section Jews from Ukraine.
Golda Meir (born Golda Mabovich) was born on April 21, 1898 (May 3, new style) in Kyiv to a Jewish family. Her father, Moshe Mabovich, was a carpenter, and her mother, Bluma Naidich, worked at home. In 1903, when Golda was 8 years old, her family emigrated to the USA, where she finished school and a teacher’s college.
In 1921, Golda moved to Palestine, where she began her Zionist activities. She became one of the closest associates of David Ben-Gurion, playing a key role in the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Golda Meir held several important government positions in Israel:
Minister of Labor and Social Welfare (1949–1956)
Minister of Foreign Affairs (1956–1966)
Minister of the Interior (1970)
Prime Minister of Israel (1969–1974)
Golda Meir passed away on December 8, 1978, in Jerusalem. She left a lasting legacy in Israel, with her memory preserved in street and square names, as well as memorial plaques and statues. A Golda Meir Square was named in her honor in Tel Aviv, along with streets in Jerusalem. Her contribution to the creation of Israel remains invaluable, and her name continues to symbolize strength and determination.
Golda Meir was born on April 21, 1898 (May 3, new style) in Kyiv, on Baseyna Street, to a Jewish family. Her father, Moshe Mabovich, was a carpenter, and her mother, Bluma Naidich, worked at home. The family went through difficult times, and Golda often recalled her childhood as a time of need, when there was not enough food and warmth at home. In her memoirs, she wrote about how her father nailed doors in response to rumors of possible pogroms, which left a deep mark on her consciousness and shaped her views on life.
The family lived in a modest apartment on the ground floor of a two-story house located on Baseyna Street in Kyiv, near Bessarabska Square. Golda later described this place as a “wretched and damp room.” In her memoirs, she emphasized that her father dreamed of escaping poverty and opened a carpentry shop, but his attempts were unsuccessful, and their family continued to live in need.
Family roots and childhood in Kyiv
Golda was named after her great-grandmother on her mother’s side, a woman who lived to be 94 and always added salt to her tea instead of sugar to remember the bitterness of life in the Jewish diaspora. This heritage deeply influenced her character and worldview. The Meir family was from Pinsk (modern-day Belarus), and they moved to Kyiv in search of a better life. Moshe Mabovich, Golda’s father, was a carpenter, and thanks to passing qualification exams, he was able to move with his family to Kyiv, despite the strict restrictions for Jews in the Russian Empire.
Connection to Ukraine in her memoirs
In her autobiography “My Life”, Golda Meir devoted attention to her childhood in Kyiv. She described how, at that time, there was a lack of resources in her family, and life in Russia was unsafe for Jews. Golda remembered that in Kyiv, she realized that “justice does not exist in the world.” This left a strong impression on her and shaped her resilience, which later manifested in her political life.
When she was 8 years old, the family moved to Pinsk, and then emigrated to the United States. These years in Kyiv left a deep mark on Golda, and she always remained attached to her Ukrainian roots. She was proud of belonging to a resilient Jewish family that had survived many hardships. Golda believed that her upbringing in Kyiv, as well as the experience of living in a Jewish ghetto, toughened her and prepared her for life in Israel.
Square and memorials in Kyiv
In Kyiv, in 2024, a Golda Meir Square was named on Borychev Tik Street (17, 19, 21). This square was opened in 2024, marking an important moment in preserving Golda’s memory in her hometown. A memorial plaque on House No. 5-A on Baseyna Street, where she lived until 1903, also serves as a reminder of her connection to Kyiv. The plaque was installed in 1998, and it is another sign of respect and recognition for her contribution to the history of Israel and the Jewish people.
Golda Meir Street in Kyiv was renamed in 2022. It was formerly called Krasnodarska Street and was located in the “Nivki” metro area. The renaming was part of an initiative to honor outstanding personalities and symbolized the recognition of Golda Meir as a native of Kyiv and an important figure in the history of Israel.
Famous quotes by Golda Meir
Golda Meir was not only an outstanding political leader but also a person with a bright, independent character. Her thoughts on war, politics, the role of women, and life’s challenges will forever remain in history as a symbol of strength of spirit and the pursuit of justice. Here are some famous quotes from this remarkable woman that reflect her views on life, politics, and Israel:
On the position of prime minister:
“It was never in my plans to become prime minister. I never thought about positions. I became prime minister — and I did it, just like my milkman became the commander of our outpost on Mount Hermon. Neither he nor I particularly enjoyed the job, but both of us tried to do it as best as we could.”
On Israel:
“Moses led us through the desert for 40 years to bring us to the only place in the Middle East that has no oil.”
On how to govern a small country:
“The world is cruel, selfish, and brutal. The suffering of small nations goes unnoticed. Even the most educated governments and democracies, led by decent people who represent decent people, are not too inclined to think about issues of justice in international relations. We cannot always rely on their advice, and thus we must have the courage to look at things realistically and act as our instinct for self-preservation tells us.”
“ […] We couldn’t believe that such a horrible crime could be committed, or that the world would allow it to happen. No, we were not naive. We simply could not imagine something our imagination had never conceived. But now there are no horrors that I can’t imagine.”
On independence:
“Two dangers face those of us who emerged as a new independent country: the first is the danger of being stuck in the past; the second is the illusion that political independence will immediately solve all our problems.”
On war:
“We could not afford the luxury of pessimism, so we made completely different calculations, based on the fact that we all — all 650,000 of us — had such a strong will to live that it was impossible to understand outside of Israel. If we didn’t want to be thrown into the sea, we had no choice but to win. And so we won.”
On peace:
“It will be a great day when Arab farmers cross the Jordan not on tanks, but on tractors and extend a hand of friendship — farmer to farmer, human to human. Perhaps this is a dream, but I am sure that one day it will come true.”
On life’s challenges:
“I learned a very important lesson: a person can always do a little more than seemed possible yesterday.”
On the position of women:
“The fact that I am a woman has never hindered me. I never felt awkward or inferior, I never thought that men were better than women or that giving birth to a child was a misfortune. Never. And men, on their part, never gave me any special privileges. But, as it seems to me, it’s true that for a woman who wants to lead not only a domestic but also a public life, everything is significantly more difficult than for a man, because she bears a double load.”
From NAnews – “Jews from Ukraine”
Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, became a symbol of resilience, determination, and an unwavering pursuit of independence for the Jewish people. Despite the hardships of her childhood in Kyiv, she became a figure ready to fight for the rights and dignity of the Jewish people. Golda Meir, despite poverty and harsh circumstances, was able to achieve greatness and change the course of history by playing a key role in the founding of the State of Israel.
Her quotes continue to inspire millions of people around the world, and her legacy lives on in commemorative sites in Kyiv and other cities where she was born and raised. Golda Meir remains a symbol of struggle and fearlessness for all Jews, especially those coming from Ukraine, who continue to defend their rights and independence.
NAnews (news about Israel and Ukraine) takes pride in telling the story of great personalities like Golda Meir and emphasizes the importance of her connection to both Ukraine and Israel. We believe that the memory of such individuals helps preserve historical unity between the nations and inspires for the future.
Additional information about Golda Meir and her Ukrainian roots is available in articles on our website:
Article about Golda Meir, her birth on May 3, 1898, in Kyiv, her family, and life before emigration. This article covers key moments of her childhood in Ukraine and her career before she became Prime Minister of Israel.
Article about the events of the Evian Conference in 1938, in the context of the struggle for Jewish rights and the efforts Golda Meir made in international politics to address issues related to the Holocaust.
The “Jews from Ukraine” section on the NAnews website is dedicated to the history and lives of emigrants from Ukraine who became significant figures in Israel and the world. We explore their journey, achievements, and impact on both countries, as well as important moments connected to the Jewish heritage of Ukraine.
Read more about Golda Meir and other important figures whose roots and fates are intertwined with the history of Ukraine and Israel. It is essential for us not only to preserve the memory of such individuals but also to highlight their contributions to the development of society and strengthening ties between the two nations.
Our section continues to tell the stories of notable personalities who have made significant contributions to historical processes and became symbols of the struggle for independence, human rights, and freedom. Golda Meir is a vivid example of how Jews who grew up in Ukraine managed to influence international politics and create an independent state for the Jewish people.
We take pride in being at the center of these stories and continue sharing them with our readers, supporting the unique heritage of Ukrainian Jews in Israel.
On August 29, Ukraine annually celebrates the state Day of Remembrance for Defenders who died for the independence and territorial integrity of the country. For an Israeli reader, this date is easiest to understand through Yom HaZikaron — the day when the state remembers its fallen defenders. The Ukrainian memorial date is primarily associated with the Ilovaisk tragedy of August 2014.
On this day, NANovosti decided to compile a list of Jews and Israelis who died defending Ukraine by name. I, Anton Pshedynsky, author of NANovosti Anton Pshedynsky, reviewed our publications archive over the years, cross-referenced names with the Ukrainian list of Jewish war participants, international memorial databases, materials from Jewish communities, and Ukrainian and Israeli media. For each person, I separately verified the circumstances of death, connection to the Jewish community or Israel, service in Ukrainian units, and possible variations of names or surnames.
And separately — for those who still see the war in Ukraine as something distant from Israel. Among the people mentioned below were Israeli citizens, repatriates, people who lived here for many years, served in Israeli security structures, raised children here, or left families in Israel. For their relatives, this war was never distant.
Reducing everything to a single number is impossible. There is no official statistics from the Ukrainian Armed Forces by nationality and religion, and the concepts of “Jew,” “Israeli citizen,” “IDF veteran,” “repatriate,” and “person who lived in Israel” denote completely different biographies.
Moreover, during verification, it turned out that data from different sources do not always match: dates, surname variations, and even the grounds on which a person is associated with Israel differ. In open lists, alongside the deceased, there are living servicemen, severely wounded, and missing persons.
Therefore, we do not call this collection complete or final. It includes those people whose stories we managed to discover and reliably verify using NANovosti materials — News of Israel and open sources.
I also separately checked the awards. Here it is important not to mix different things: state awards of Ukraine, departmental military insignia, city and regional distinctions, and public awards. If the date of the presidential decree and the actual date of the award presentation to the family are known, I indicate both. If it was not possible to reliably establish the award, its status, or date, I do not substitute a guess.
We also sincerely apologize to the relatives and friends of those who died defending Ukraine, but whose names were not included in this publication. Their feat is not forgotten — at the time of preparing the article, we simply could not find enough data to tell about them accurately and responsibly.
The information is current as of August 29, 2026. All links to primary sources are provided at the bottom of the article.
The article does not claim to be academic or the ultimate truth – what is done is done.
In memory of those who fell in the battle for the defense of the homeland — may their memory be blessed
Why exactly August 29: what happened in Ilovaisk in 2014
August 29 – Day of Remembrance for the Fallen Defenders of Ukraine: we honor and remember all the fallen and tell about the Jews and Israelis who gave their lives for Ukraine
To understand why Ukraine chose August 29 as its Day of Remembrance for Fallen Defenders, one must return to the early months of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
After the Revolution of Dignity and the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Russia occupied Crimea. By spring, armed confrontation had spread to eastern Ukraine.
In April, armed groups seized administrative buildings, police stations, and SBU offices in the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. On April 12, a detachment under the command of Russian officer Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, captured Sloviansk. Following this, armed formations established control over a number of other cities in Donbas and proclaimed the so-called “DPR” and “LPR.”
For the Israeli reader, a clarification is important here. Donbas is a historical-industrial region in eastern Ukraine, primarily Donetsk and Luhansk regions. It was there that the active ground phase of the war began in the spring of 2014.
On April 14, Ukrainian authorities announced an Anti-Terrorist Operation — ATO. This was the official name for the actions of Ukrainian forces against armed formations in the east of the country. The army, National Guard, Ministry of Internal Affairs units, and volunteer battalions created in the first months of the war participated in them.
By summer, the situation began to change in favor of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces regained Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and a number of other settlements and continued the offensive. One of the important targets was Ilovaisk — a small town about 40 kilometers from Donetsk, which had strategic significance due to its railway junction and its position on the supply routes of forces controlling Donetsk.
In August 2014, Ukrainian units and volunteer battalions entered Ilovaisk. Heavy street fighting began.
It was at this moment that the war changed dramatically.
Regular units of the Russian army entered Ukrainian territory. They struck, including at the rear of the Ukrainian grouping. The position of the forces that had recently been advancing on Ilovaisk changed in a matter of days: Ukrainian units found themselves almost surrounded.
Thus, the Ilovaisk tragedy did not begin with a “green corridor.” First, there was an attempt by the Ukrainian army to regain control of the city, then direct intervention by regular Russian troops, encirclement, and only after that negotiations for withdrawal.
When it became clear that holding positions in the encirclement was impossible, negotiations began for the safe withdrawal of Ukrainian servicemen.
The Russian side agreed on a withdrawal route.
On the morning of August 29, 2014, Ukrainian units began moving in two columns.
But a safe corridor did not materialize.
The columns were fired upon with heavy weapons.
According to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, 366 Ukrainian servicemen were killed, 429 were wounded, 158 went missing, and 300 were captured in the Ilovaisk operation. Earlier official materials contain differing figures for individual categories, so here we use the current data from the Institute of National Memory.
And one more detail, without which it is difficult to understand the symbolism of the current Day of Remembrance.
Ukrainian columns exited the encirclement through fields of ripening sunflowers. At the end of August, they are just in bloom and ripening in the south and east of Ukraine. Among these fields, the fallen servicemen remained.
Therefore, the sunflower became the symbol of August 29 — the Day of Remembrance for Defenders of Ukraine.
The agreement did not save them.
In 2019, Ukraine officially established August 29 as the annual Day of Remembrance for Defenders who died in the struggle for the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the country.
For an Israeli reader, this date is easiest to understand through the familiar logic of Yom HaZikaron: on this day, the state remembers by name those who died defending the country. The Ukrainian date grew out of the memory of Ilovaisk, but today it is dedicated to all the fallen defenders of Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014.
What happened in Donbas from 2014 until the full-scale invasion
The war did not end with Ilovaisk.
After the battles of 2014, the Minsk agreements were signed, which were supposed to stop the hostilities. But they did not completely end the war.
In the winter of 2014–2015, heavy fighting continued for Donetsk airport and Debaltseve. It was then that Yevhen Yatsyna died — one of the defenders of Donetsk airport, about whom further details are provided in this article.
After 2015, the front line mostly stabilized. Part of Donetsk and Luhansk regions was controlled by Ukraine, part was under the control of the so-called “DPR” and “LPR,” which relied on Russian support.
Between them appeared a line of contact — essentially a long-standing front line with fortified positions, checkpoints, minefields, and a constant risk of shelling.
The intensity of the war was much lower than in Ilovaisk or Debaltseve, but it did not cease. Snipers operated, artillery and mortar shelling occurred, people died on mines. Both military positions and settlements near the front line came under fire.
Through special checkpoints, this line was crossed by ordinary residents — to see relatives, process documents, receive pensions, or visit a doctor.
Therefore, calling what happened from 2015 to 2021 a complete “freeze” is incorrect. For most of Ukraine, the front might have seemed distant, but for residents of Avdiivka, Maryinka, Stanytsia Luhanska, and other frontline towns, the war remained part of everyday life.
Thousands of servicemen and civilians died over these years.
In 2020, an enhanced ceasefire regime significantly reduced the number of shellings, but did not completely stop hostilities. Already in 2021, the situation began to deteriorate again.
On February 21, 2022, Russia recognized the so-called “DPR” and “LPR.”
And three days later, on February 24, 2022, Russian troops launched a full-scale invasion from several directions.
Thus, between 2014 and 2022, there were not two separate wars with a seven-year pause.
There was one ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, which in February 2022 transitioned into a much more extensive phase.
That is why among the people we talk about further, there are those who fought and died long before February 24, 2022.
And here begins the story for which we raised the NANovosti archive.
Among these fallen were Ukrainian Jews, Israeli citizens, IDF veterans, graduates of Jewish schools, foreign Jewish volunteers, and people whose families now live in Israel.
Some we have already named by name.
But when I tried to compile their stories in one place, it turned out that even existing lists of the fallen cannot be trusted automatically.
I tried to compile existing lists — and found out why this cannot be done
The starting point was the NANovosti archive.
In the material about the Odessa exhibition “Under the Star of David,” 18 fallen defenders of Jewish origin were compiled: Ali Shabay, Maksym Buligin, Vyacheslav Adamenko, Anton Samborsky, David Starover, Yevhen Yatsyna, Oleksandr Dubovyk, Anton Beskonechny, Semyon Jensen, Andriy Glembozky, Yuriy Urshansky, Maksym Shvartsman, Hennadiy Michel, Andriy Reznikov, Tzvi-Hirsh Zvergazda, Leonid Krasnov, Vladyslav Shein, and Rodion Vayner.
But even this own archive had to be rechecked.
For example, in the old version, Vyacheslav Adamenko was mistakenly dated 2022. A separate NANovosti publication and other data give March 4, 2024 and Luhansk region. David Starover turned out to have died not in 2023, but on April 14, 2024. Oleksandr Dubovyk — not in May 2023, but on December 23, 2022. Vladyslav Shein — November 8, 2022, not February of the following year.
The next layer is the current Ukrainian Wikipedia page “List of Jewish warriors — participants in the Russian-Ukrainian war.”
At the time of this check, there are 63 positions.
But this is not 63 fallen.
The page itself warns that it is not verified. The table simultaneously contains the fallen, the living, the severely wounded, the missing, and people whose current status is not established.
Parallel to this, there is the international Memorial of volunteers and the user Fandom registry of fallen foreigners. They help find new names, but there are discrepancies between them.
The problem is even more evident in the statistics of Jewish organizations.
In September 2024, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine reported that it helped organize the funerals of 47 Jewish servicemen who died in the war. Federation Chairman Rabbi Meir Stambler then said that the actual number of fallen Jewish soldiers could be in the hundreds.
In June 2025, The Jerusalem Post already cited the Federation’s estimate of about 200 fallen Jewish fighters. The same publication named three recent losses — Tzvi-Hirsh Zvergazda, Andriy Korovsky, and Maksym Nelipa.
This does not contradict the fact that by name in open sources, it is possible to confidently confirm far fewer people.
These are just different levels of data.
The army does not have a public ethnic registry. Not every Jewish serviceman is connected to an organized community. Not every person publicly spoke about their origin or religion.
From Donetsk airport to the end of 2022: people for whom there is already enough evidence
Yevhen Yatsyna, “Benya,” belongs to the first phase of the war. He was one of the Ukrainian “cyborgs” — as the defenders of Donetsk airport are called in Ukraine, who held it in 2014–2015 despite the almost complete destruction of the terminals. The new verification gave a specific date: Yatsyna died on January 21, 2015 in the new terminal of the airport.
On May 15, 2015, Yevhen Yatsyna was posthumously awarded the Order “For Courage” III degree — decree of the President of Ukraine No. 270/2015. Memorial sources also indicate posthumous awarding with the badge “For the Defense of Donetsk Airport,” but I could not establish the exact date of this distinction.
In March 2022, when the Russian army was already trying to capture Kharkiv, Serafim Sabaran died. He was a member of Kharkiv Hillel — an international Jewish student organization. The Jewish Confederation of Ukraine separately confirms that Sabaran died defending his city. The date in the registry is March 14, 2022.
In the WTO “Order” registry, Sabaran is also listed as posthumously awarded the medal “Unbreakable Heroes of the Russian-Ukrainian War”; the entry is dated September 27, 2023. This is a public, not a state award of Ukraine.
Ali Shabay died on May 23, 2022 near Ternova in Kharkiv region. He was long considered missing; the remains were identified later.
On June 28, 2022, Ali Shabay was posthumously awarded the Order “For Courage” III degree — decree of the President of Ukraine No. 449/2022.
Oleksandr Khalif has a different Israeli line. He was born in Berdychiv, lived with his wife in Israel for several years, then returned to Ukraine. After the full-scale invasion, he voluntarily went to serve and died on July 13, 2022 in Donetsk region. Here I consciously do not elevate the status of the connection with Israel: “lived in Israel” is better confirmed than the presence of Israeli citizenship.
Next, one after another, come biographies where the connection with Israel is already direct.
Andriy Glembozky, “Kapa,” repatriated to Israel in his youth. After the war began, he returned to defend Ukraine and died on August 23, 2022 in Kharkiv region.
Dmytro Fialka was born in Lviv, repatriated as a teenager, received Israeli citizenship, served in the IDF, and participated in the Second Lebanon War. From 2008 to 2013, he coached children at “Maccabi Be’er Sheva.”
After returning to Ukraine, Fialka worked in football again. In 2022, he first found himself among volunteers, then in the Ukrainian army, and became a platoon commander of the International Legion of Territorial Defense. This unit was created for foreign volunteers as part of Ukrainian forces.
Fialka died on September 1, 2022, near Bakhmut.
He was buried in the Jewish section of Yaniv Cemetery in Lviv. At the ceremony, two flags stood — Ukrainian and Israeli.
Posthumously, Lviv awarded Fialka the Honorary Sign of Saint George. The award was presented to his family on November 24, 2024. This is a city distinction of Lviv, not a state order of Ukraine — and it should be designated as such to not attribute to Fialka an award of another person with the same surname.
Benjamin Giorgio Galli was not a citizen of either Ukraine or Israel. He came from a religious Jewish Italian-Dutch family and after the Russian invasion, he himself came to Ukraine. He joined the International Legion on March 3, 2022.
His father later detailed to the Italian Jewish publication Mosaico about his son’s Jewish identity — up to how he tried to observe kashrut in the war and carried a Torah with him.
After a severe injury near Kupiansk, Galli died on September 18, 2022.
On January 13, 2023, Benjamin Galli was posthumously awarded the Order “For Courage” III degree — decree No. 16/2023.
Captain Hennadiy Michel had a future in Israel that did not come. He processed documents for repatriation and was going to move, but after the Russian invasion, he stayed to defend Ukraine. He died on October 28, 2022 near Kupiansk after a vehicle explosion on a mine.
On November 4, he was already buried in Israel, at the cemetery in Nahariya.
On February 2, 2023, Hennadiy Michel was posthumously awarded the Order of Danylo Halytsky — decree of the President of Ukraine No. 55/2023.
Andriy Reznikov, “Pero,” left for Israel at 18, received citizenship, completed mandatory service in the Golani Brigade, studied and worked in Ariel. About ten years later, he returned to Ukraine.
After February 24, 2022, he joined the territorial defense. The TDF — these are the Territorial Defense Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, a military structure created for territorial defense and part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Reznikov died on November 7, 2022 near Yampilivka in Donetsk region.
Posthumously, Andriy Reznikov was awarded the Order “For Courage” III degree. The fact of the award is confirmed, but the number and date of the presidential decree could not be established in the reliable sources available to me.
The next day, November 8, Vladyslav Shein, a young Dnipro athlete and volunteer, died. During the battle, he helped save his comrades. This is one of the dates that had to be corrected after comparing the old exhibition material with a later database.
On March 8, 2023, Vladyslav Shein was posthumously awarded the Order “For Courage” III degree — decree No. 141/2023.
The story of Polish Jew Daniel Peter Stiber — Daniel Sztyber turned out to be even more complicated.
Stieber came to help Ukraine, initially engaged in evacuating people, then joined the Ukrainian forces. His father was associated with the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw.
Polish memorial data, the inscription on the grave, and Polish Radio give the date of death as November 25, 2022.
But a Jewish publication from Michigan later wrote that the 35-year-old Stieber died on December 11 near Bakhmut.
I will not pretend that there is no discrepancy.
In the main chronology, I use November 25 because this date is directly on his grave and is confirmed by several Polish sources. I keep the December version as a data conflict.
Ukraine posthumously awarded Stieber the state medal “For Military Service to Ukraine” — decree No. 55/2023 from February 2, 2023. His family received the award in Poland on December 7, 2023.
Jonathan Jeffrey Shenkin is another person whom our initial selection completely missed. The 45-year-old British Jew from Glasgow previously served in the IDF and worked as a paramedic in the Ukrainian army. He died in December 2022. His family reported that the Ukrainian side honored him with a medal, which in English-language publications is called “Valour in Combat”. The official Ukrainian name of this award, the awarding body, and the date could not be established in open sources, so I do not automatically turn it into the “Order of Courage”.
And finally, Alexander Dubovik, “Partisan”.
The old version of our material attributed his death to May 2023. A new check moves the event to December 23, 2022. He was long considered missing, so the later burial date likely became one of the reasons for the confusion.
February 23, 2024, Alexander Dubovik was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage III degree — decree No. 96/2024.
Here it is already visible how little benefit one figure would give.
Even within several biographies of 2022, it is necessary to distinguish the date of death, the date of body discovery, the date of identification, and the date of burial.
In 2023–2025, the list continued to grow — but the biographies became less and less similar to each other.
Rodion Weiner lived in Karmiel and served in the IDF. When the full-scale invasion began, he was in Ukraine and voluntarily joined the Ukrainian army. He died on March 5, 2023 near Bakhmut.
October 30, 2023, Rodion Weiner was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage III degree — decree No. 715/2023.
Leonid Krasnov came from a Dnipro Jewish family, his father led a Jewish school. He served as a scout and went through difficult front sections. His award history is one of the most notable in this selection: August 5, 2020 — state medal “For Military Service to Ukraine”, decree No. 305/2020; May 22, 2022 — Order of Courage III degree, decree No. 359/2022; then the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine badge “Golden Cross”. After Krasnov’s death, he was also awarded the Order of Courage II degree — decree No. 597/2023 from September 28, 2023. His death in 2023 is confirmed; the old material from NANews attributes it to spring.
Maxim Schwartzman, “Marvel,” continued his front-line story in an unexpected way after death.
He was a journalist, photographer, operator, drew, and wrote prose. The family lived in Israel for some time, using Maxim’s right to repatriation; his son was born here. Then the Schwartzmans returned to Chernivtsi.
Maxim died on July 15, 2023 in the Bakhmut direction.
November 16, 2023, Maxim Schwartzman was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage III degree — decree No. 750/2023. The family received the order on July 18, 2024. Biographical sources also mention the regional distinction “For Services to Bukovina,” the Chernivtsi “For the Glory of Chernivtsi,” and the medal “For the Liberation of the Kharkiv Region,” but the exact dates and status of each of these three distinctions require separate verification.
After his death, his wife Marina collected the remaining stories, an unfinished novel, and front-line letters. In 2026, the book “Not About War” was published. Thus, our database included a piece that is not in any loss table: the voice of the deceased himself, preserved after the war in his texts.
Vyacheslav Adamenko — a citizen of Ukraine and Israel, a person with almost 17 years of service experience in Israeli security structures. On the Ukrainian front, he also had the call sign “Israel.”
He died on March 4, 2024 in Luhansk from severe shrapnel wounds. This date and circumstances are confirmed by a separate material from NANews.
In the spring of 2024, two David stories appear that cannot be mixed.
David Starover, a 23-year-old serviceman of the 59th brigade, died on April 14, 2024, near Netailovo. After the battle, he was considered missing. The body was returned only on December 20.
David Shtraber — David Strauber — another person. He was a graduate of the Vinnytsia Jewish school “Or Avner — Chabad.” The last conversation with his father took place on April 23, 2024. Later, DNA confirmed that Shtraber died in a minefield on occupied territory. He could only be buried according to Jewish rites months later.
Anton Beskonechny from Mykolaiv died in the spring of 2024 near Chasiv Yar. He was buried according to Jewish tradition.
There is also a serviceman whom open publications only call Daniel.
He was a Jew with Ukrainian roots, returned to Ukraine, and served in a special unit. After his death, the command contacted the Chief Rabbi of Kyiv, Yonatan Markovich, to ensure halachic burial — according to the norms of Jewish religious law.
The NANews material was published on June 5, 2024 and states that the death occurred the previous weekend. Therefore, June 5 does not turn into an artificially “exact date of death” here.
Maxim Bulygin, “Wolf,” grew up in Zhytomyr, graduated from the Jewish lyceum “Or Avner,” and was connected with the local community. He died on June 10, 2024 during a combat mission.
November 27, 2024, Maxim Bulygin was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage III degree — decree No. 787/2024. The family received the award in Zhytomyr on April 16, 2025.
Semyon Jensen, “Sem,” studied in Jerusalem, then returned to Ukraine and was among the fighters of “Da Vinci’s Wolves.” He died on July 12, 2024 in the Donetsk region.
Anton Samborsky — Matityahu, the adopted son of the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Asman, was a halachic Jew — that is, a Jew according to the criteria of traditional Jewish law.
He died on July 24, 2024 near Georgiivka in the Donetsk region during a mortar attack.
His funeral in Kyiv became a separate testimony to the scale of Jewish losses: it was after them that the Federation of Jewish Communities reported 47 funerals of Jewish servicemen, in the organization of which it participated.
November 27, 2024, Anton Samborsky was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage III degree — the same decree No. 787/2024. His wife received the order on April 25, 2025. In addition, Samborsky was posthumously noted with the Kyiv medal “Honor. Glory. State”; the memorial materials also mention “Hero’s Cross,” but its status and date I do not mix with the state award.
In February 2025, Oleg Rubin died.
He was born in Dnipropetrovsk in 1991, moved to Israel with his mother as a child, lived in Herzliya and Tiberias, served in the “Kfir” brigade. After Israeli service, he went to defend Ukraine, passed the International Legion and “Da Vinci’s Wolves.”
Rubin died on February 18, 2025.
There is a technical but fundamental problem here: the surname in sources is transmitted as Rubin, Ruben, Ruban, and other variants. This is compounded by the variants Siborunov/Siboronov. If this is not fixed now, one person can easily turn into several “Israelis” in future secondary lists.
Maxim Nelipa was known as a TV presenter and actor before the war. After the invasion, he volunteered to serve, was wounded, recovered, and returned to the front.
He died on May 12, 2025.
He was born in October 1976. His son Artem repatriated to Israel and served in the IDF, in “Golani.”
September 12, 2025, Maxim Nelipa was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit III degree — decree No. 680/2025.
Binyamin Asher, “Nemo,” was a 21-year-old Hungarian Jew. No Ukrainian civil obligation existed before him: he came himself and joined the Ukrainian forces.
Asher died on May 24, 2025 in Kharkiv region. Due to the combat situation, the body could not be evacuated for a long time; Jewish funerals in Kyiv took place only in November.
Posthumously, Binyamin Asher was noted with the departmental badge of the Ministry of Defense “Iron Cross”, and then the Order of Courage III degree. The number and date of the presidential decree on the order I have not reliably established. February 25, 2026 in Toronto, he was also posthumously awarded the medal “For Self-Sacrifice”; this is a separate public recognition, not a state Ukrainian award.
Four days later, on May 28, Andrey Korovsky — in some sources Kurovsky, a 32-year-old teacher of the Zhytomyr school “Or Avner” and a drone operator, died.
He was already wounded, recovered, and returned to the front line.
The cause of death is important: heart attack on the front. The Federation of Jewish Communities reported that this happened during a Russian assault on positions.
In early June, Tsvi-Hirsh — Grigory Zvergazda, “Grinch” died. In the old material from NANews, the surname was transmitted differently — “Zvirgze.”
He grew up in the Jewish environment of Odessa, studied in the “Or Avner — Chabad” system, served in the 34th separate coastal defense brigade. He left behind small children.
The Jerusalem Post reported another human detail: by profession, he was a chef and dreamed of opening a high-level kosher restaurant in Odessa.
September 30, 2025, Tsvi-Hirsh Zvergazda — in the presidential decree, the surname is transmitted as ZVIRGZDE Grigoriy Igorovich — was posthumously awarded the Order of Courage III degree, decree No. 698/2025. Biographical materials also name the “Golden Cross,” the “Shield of the Territorial Defense Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” badge, and the “For Service in Intelligence” medal, but the exact dates of these three distinctions have not yet been established.
And almost on the eve of the current Memorial Day, Yuriy Urshansky, an officer associated with the Jewish community of Uzhgorod, died. He commanded self-propelled artillery and died on August 26, 2025 in the Zaporizhzhia region after an attack by a Russian FPV drone.
There are the deceased whom I name — but refuse to turn doubt into an established fact.
This is the most uncomfortable part of the list.
And that is precisely why it is necessary.
Denis, whose surname is not reliably established, appears in one of the registers as an Israeli volunteer who died on February 14, 2023, near Soledar. The version “Denis Savchenko” is encountered, but I have not yet been able to connect it with this person with a reliable independent source.
Therefore, the article remains Denis — without an invented surname.
Andrey Yurchenko is listed in international memorial lists in the Israel section. The Ukrainian register indicates death on March 31, 2024, but directly acknowledges the problem: one of the links no longer works, and the place of death and burial is not established.
I name Yurchenko because he exists in several registers.
But I do not name him as a confirmed citizen of Israel.
David Chichkan, a well-known Ukrainian artist and serviceman, was seriously wounded on August 9, 2025 while repelling a Russian assault in the Zaporizhzhia direction and died the next day. The fact of his death is independently confirmed.
The problem is different.
He was included in the Jewish list, and Rabbi Moshe Asman also saw him off on his last journey. But the participation of a rabbi in the funeral does not in itself prove the person’s origin.
I have not yet found an independent source directly establishing Chichkan’s Jewish origin.
Therefore, the status here is exactly this: a deceased serviceman included in the Jewish register; the basis for inclusion requires additional confirmation.
A very similar situation with Konstantin Guzenko.
The 28-year-old photographer and media producer volunteered to serve, became a staff sergeant of the 35th separate marine brigade, and died on November 1, 2025 during a Russian attack in eastern Ukraine. This is confirmed by Ukraïner and Ukrainian state sources.
But the current Jewish register itself writes that his belonging to Judaism “is being established.” Among the grounds is information about a brother associated with a synagogue.
The Jewishness of a relative does not automatically establish the origin of Guzenko himself.
Therefore, the fact of death is confirmed.
Jewish affiliation — not yet.
November 15, 2025, Konstantin Guzenko was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit III degree. This is a state award, but in this case, it was associated with a contribution to Ukrainian media, professionalism, and selfless work in documenting the full-scale invasion, and does not serve as proof of Jewish origin.
Boris Urshansky, the father of Yuriy Urshansky, fought since 2014 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. But he died on July 21, 2025, from an oncological disease.
He remains in this material as a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Vladislav Holenkov died in the Ukrainian army. His younger brother Mark is a footballer who moved to Israel and is associated with “Maccabi Haifa.”
Rafael Nikanorov is needed in the article precisely as an example of registry error.
Initially, the message about his death spread with the claim that an Israeli died. Later, the source itself released a correction: the fighter turned out not to be an Israeli.
If secondary sites rewrote the first message and did not notice the second, the error begins to live its own life.
Pavel Bessarab is present in the user Fandom register as an Israeli volunteer. At the same time, detailed Ukrainian publications about the deceased serviceman and Hero of Ukraine did not provide reliable confirmation of either Israeli citizenship or an Israeli stage of biography.
Even the date in the user register diverges from Ukrainian sources.
Therefore, the name is indicated.
Bessarab is not included in confirmed Israelis.
Bessarab’s awards are confirmed: April 5, 2022 — distinction “Defender of Ukraine, hero of the city of Sumy”; December 5, 2022 — “For Services to Sumy Region” III degree; March 14, 2023 — city distinction “For Services to the City” II degree; December 15, 2023 — Ministry of Defense distinction “Iron Cross” No. 1622. In 2025, posthumously followed the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky III degree and the title Hero of Ukraine with the Order “Golden Star”. The president’s response to the petition confirms the very fact of the decree on the title of Hero of Ukraine, although the text of the decree is not published in open access, according to available data.
Bari Bonen was an Israeli citizen and helped Ukraine. Some databases include him in the lists of deceased Israeli volunteers.
But Bonen did not die in battle.
He was found dead in an apartment in Kyiv back on September 10, 2018. The police considered the version of suicide, people from his environment disputed it.
This is a separate story, not a front-line loss.
Konstantin Mrochko also remains here consciously.
He lived and worked in Israel for a long time, participated in the creation of a farm near Carmel; after his death, Israeli friends even named a wine in his honor.
But the own publication of NANews contains direct words of people who knew him: “he was not a Jew”. We also did not find confirmed Israeli citizenship.
Therefore, this is a Ukrainian hero with an important Israeli chapter of biography, not a proven “deceased Israeli.”
At the same time, Mrochko’s military merit is assessed at the highest state level: March 12, 2022, he was posthumously awarded the title Hero of Ukraine with the presentation of the order “Golden Star” — decree No. 127/2022. This award does not cancel our reservation about origin and citizenship.
And finally, Artem Reznik, a 30-year-old Jew from Kharkiv.
He indeed died on December 29, 2023 during a Russian missile strike.
But he was a civilian.
He cannot be mixed with Andrey Reznikov, a veteran of the IDF and a serviceman of the Ukrainian army.
Accuracy here means not only finding more names.
Sometimes it means timely removing a person from the wrong category.
Missing persons and those for whom there has long been no reliable data
It is necessary to separately mention the citizens of Israel and Jews who participated in the war, whose fate today remains unknown or insufficiently confirmed.
In January 2026, the Israeli investigative project ‘Shomrim’ reported, citing the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for Prisoners of War: at least 12 Israeli citizens are listed as missing or held in Russian captivity.
Most of them fought in the ranks of the Ukrainian army. A smaller part found themselves in combat zones under other circumstances. It mainly concerns people with dual Israeli-Ukrainian citizenship.
The names of these twelve are not publicly disclosed.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Israel separately confirmed to journalists at least eight missing Israelis. At the same time, the actual number may be higher: not all holders of two passports reported their second citizenship to the Ukrainian or Israeli authorities.
This is one of the reasons why our name-by-name search fundamentally cannot provide a complete list.
Individual cases are known from open sources.
Vladimir Beznosov, a religious Jew from Odessa, was seriously injured and is listed as missing.
Denis Semin, whom the Ukrainian list of Jews – participants in the war associates with the Brodsky Synagogue in Kyiv, is also listed as missing.
But it cannot be automatically assumed that they are among the twelve Israeli citizens reported by ‘Shomrim’: there is no published name list.
This is fundamental: missing is not dead. Until a person’s death is confirmed, they cannot be included in the memorial list of the deceased.
There is still insufficient open data on Igor Krais to confidently establish the current status. However, additional verification provided an important correction for Roman Kandybur and Igor Kovalenko: both are alive. In January 2026, Kandybur publicly spoke as the commander of the mobile group ‘Cultural Landing’, and Kovalenko remains publicly active as a serviceman.
Mikhail Milman, a native of Donetsk and an Israeli citizen, previously served in the IDF, and after the full-scale invasion, he came to Ukraine and joined the International Legion. We have not yet found reliable current information about his current situation.
The same caution must be exercised with Merab Shalalashvili, described as a Georgian Jew and Israeli citizen who served in the International Legion, and with volunteer paramedic Michael Jonah.
There is also a serviceman known only by the call sign ‘Izya’. It is known that he was injured, but there is insufficient fresh reliable data about his current condition.
The ‘Shomrim’ investigation also mentions another important episode: an Israeli citizen who fought in Ukraine told journalists about his Israeli comrade who died near Bakhmut. The name of this person is known to the editors, but it has not been publicly disclosed.
There is also a confirmed case of release from captivity: Vladimir Kozlovsky, an Israeli citizen, was captured by Russia in 2022 and was later released.
All these stories remain under our review. But until there is official confirmation of death or exact current status, we will not fill the gap with speculation.
That is why in this material we only talk about those fates that have been confirmed by open data, and separately note cases where information is still insufficient.
Known Jews and Israelis who defended and continue to defend Ukraine
A separate article is deserved by people who cannot be listed here in detail. The participation of Jews and Israelis in the defense of Ukraine is not only the story of the fallen and not only service with weapons in hand.
Since 2014, and especially after the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian Jews, together with the rest of Ukrainian society, have been resisting Russian aggression in various ways. Some fight as part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other defense units. Others engage in volunteering, helping the army, the wounded, evacuees, and the families of servicemen. Rabbis and Jewish communities provide humanitarian and spiritual support, helping their congregants and servicemen.
And dozens of Jewish communities across Ukraine continue to do what in wartime conditions has itself become a form of resilience: living a Jewish life under sirens, missile and drone attacks — conducting prayers, celebrating Shabbat and holidays, teaching children, supporting synagogues and communities, and burying the dead according to Jewish tradition.
Listing all these people in one article is impossible, and we do not even set ourselves such a task. Here we are talking specifically about servicemen, veterans, and people directly involved in the defense of Ukraine, whom we managed to identify from open sources.
Denis Desyatnik is one of the most famous examples. An Israeli who repatriated from Uzbekistan, he served for many years in the IDF and special units of the Israeli police. After the Russian invasion, he came to Ukraine, initially helping to evacuate people, then served in the structure of Ukrainian military intelligence and was involved in training fighters. Later he returned to Israel. The last reliable public confirmation we found was his interview in the summer of 2024.
Tsvi Arieli participated in the training of Ukrainian units from the early years of the war. In May 2016, Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov awarded him personalized award weapons for assistance in training units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. This is a departmental form of encouragement, not a presidential order.
Arie Ben-Yehuda, associated with Israel, fought for Ukraine and survived injuries.
Moshe Bizsemov, a Jewish serviceman from Mykolaiv and commander of a drone reconnaissance group, continued his service; NANovosti has already separately reported about him to the Israeli reader.
Andrey Chernetsky went through Bakhmut, survived several injuries, and publicly spoke about his Jewish identity and motivation to defend Ukraine.
Viktor Kovchak, a graduate of ‘Or Avner – Chabad’, received a severe injury, after which the lower part of his body was paralyzed. He survived.
Igor Tish – Yakov-David, a former IDF serviceman, covered two subordinates during a Russian strike and lost part of his arm. He also survived.
Grigory Pivovarov repatriated to Israel as a child, served in ‘Golani’, and has been defending Ukraine since 2014. After several injuries and concussions, he continued his service; as of May 2026, he was engaged in recruiting. Pivovarov is one of the most decorated living heroes of this selection: he is a full knight of the Order ‘For Courage’ – III, II, and I degrees, has the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky III degree, the medal ‘Defender of the Fatherland’, was awarded the medal ‘For Injury’ four times, and has other departmental signs. In March 2023, the receipt of the II degree was already confirmed, and by May 2025, the Verkhovna Rada reported that after being awarded the I degree, he became a full knight.
Among Ukrainian servicemen, there are also Jewish chaplains. Dmitry (David) Milman, call sign ‘Rebbe’, is an assistant to the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Asman. On April 20, 2023, his powers as a clergyman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine were approved by the head of the Military Chaplaincy Service, Colonel Alexei Tereshchuk. At that time, Milman was called the first and only rabbi officially cooperating with the Armed Forces of Ukraine in matters of spiritual-religious and humanitarian support for servicemen and their families. On April 7, 2025, Milman was entered into the register of those awarded the order ‘For the Development of Ukraine’ at the presentation of the commander of the military unit. Here it is fundamentally important: this is a public award of the WTO ‘Order’, not a state order of Ukraine.
Igor Sinyakov, Jewish name Yakov Pinchas, signed a contract with the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2025, received the official right to carry out chaplaincy activities, and in the rank of junior lieutenant headed the chaplaincy service of the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps of the Air Assault Forces. In the publications of the corps, he was called the first official Orthodox Jewish officer-chaplain of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In the official material of the corps, he is listed with a presidential award ‘For the Defense of Ukraine’, although I have not yet established the exact date of receipt. On December 6, 2023, he received a commemorative sign of the 93rd Brigade ‘Cold Yar’, and on March 6, 2025 in Dnipro — a commemorative medal ‘Defender of the Fatherland’; the latter should not be confused with the eponymous state medal.
Tamir Elboim worked as a military medic, Eyal Israeli served in a marine reconnaissance unit.
Yevgeny Rozenblit, a native of Chernobyl, serves in the Ukrainian army; his sister lives in Tirat Carmel. In the spring of 2026, he was entered into the National Register of Records of Ukraine and awarded a specially created sign ‘Steel Cross of the Heroes of Chernobyl’. This is a commemorative public recognition, not a state military award.
Viktor Fray, a former IDF tanker, fought in Ukraine, suffered concussions and severe injuries.
Natan Khazin, a participant in the Maidan, was at the origins of Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance.
David Cherkassky, a Chabadnik and officer of territorial defense, left military service after a severe injury and is engaged in volunteering. His father Alexander Cherkassky – Asher-Yosef, an Orthodox Jew, has been participating in the defense of Ukraine since 2014. In September 2016, at a meeting of the Dnipro City Council, Alexander Cherkassky received a medal for volunteer activity from a representative of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate. This is not a state military award.
There is also a serviceman known by the call sign ‘Hasid’, a veteran of Ukrainian forces and an instructor. On November 22, 2025, it was reported that he was awarded a medal International Police Association (IPA) for professionalism, courage, and contribution to defense. This is an international public-police award, not a state order of Ukraine.
Roman Kandybur, who was left with an unclear status in early open lists, is actually alive: in January 2026, he publicly spoke as the commander of the mobile group ‘Cultural Landing’.
Igor Kovalenko, a Ukrainian chess grandmaster and serviceman, is also alive and publicly active. On September 13, 2023, he was awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree; the next day, the Chess Federation reported on the personal presentation of the order by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
For other people from this section — in particular Denis Desyatnik, Arie Ben-Yehuda, Moshe Bizsemov, Andrey Chernetsky, Viktor Kovchak, and Igor Tish — I did not find sufficiently reliable open confirmation of a specific Ukrainian state or departmental award. This does not mean that they definitely did not have awards: only that I do not want to attribute someone else’s decree or unconfirmed distinction to a person.
This is already a separate big story: who among Israelis and Ukrainian Jews fought and continues to serve, how the former IDF experience turned out to be in demand in Ukraine, and why some of these people returned to service after severe injuries.
In the memorial material, we can only outline this line.
This is already a separate big story — about Ukrainian Jews and Israeli citizens who fought and are fighting for Ukraine, train its servicemen, save the wounded, serve as chaplains, and continue to help the army after severe injuries.
But beyond this list, there are even more people: rabbis, volunteers, employees of Jewish organizations, families of servicemen, and ordinary community members, who have lived all these years together with all of Ukraine under Russian attacks and continue to maintain Jewish life in the country.
In this memorial material, we deliberately limit ourselves to servicemen and those who directly participated in the defense of Ukraine. The history of the entire Jewish community of Ukraine during this war is much broader.
In memory of those who fell in the battle for the defense of the homeland — may their memory be blessed
Names we found: the deceased, missing, and cases requiring clarification
Below we have compiled in one place all the deceased and missing persons discovered during the preparation of this material — in the NANovosti archive, publications of Jewish communities, Ukrainian and Israeli media, memorial projects, and open lists of war participants.
This is not a complete list of all Jews and Israeli citizens who died or went missing in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Such an open state register does not exist, and some names known to Israeli and Ukrainian authorities have not been published at all.
Deceased defenders of Ukraine whom we managed to identify by name
Yevgeny Yatsina (‘Benya’) — a Jew, defender of Donetsk airport; died on January 21, 2015. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 270/2015 of May 15, 2015.
Serafim Sabaransky — a participant of Kharkiv Hillel; died defending Kharkiv in March 2022. Posthumously noted with the public medal ‘Unbreakable Heroes of the Russian-Ukrainian War’, entry of September 27, 2023.
Ali Shabay — a Jewish serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine; died on May 23, 2022, in the Kharkiv region. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 449/2022 of June 28, 2022.
Alexander Khalif — a Ukrainian serviceman who lived in Israel for several years; died on July 13, 2022.
Andrey Glembotsky (‘Kapa’) — a repatriate associated with Israel; died on August 23, 2022.
Dmitry Fialka (‘Shif’) — a Jew, Israeli citizen, IDF veteran, and former coach of ‘Maccabi Be’er Sheva’; died on September 1, 2022. Posthumously noted with the Lviv Honorary Sign of Saint George; the award was presented to the family on November 24, 2024.
Benjamin Giorgio Galli — an Italian-Dutch Jew, volunteer of the International Legion; died from wounds on September 18, 2022. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 16/2023 of January 13, 2023.
Gennady Michel — a Jewish officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, associated with Israel; died on October 28, 2022. Posthumously awarded the Order of Danilo Galitsky, decree No. 55/2023 of February 2, 2023.
Andrey Reznikov (‘Pero’) — an Israeli citizen, veteran of the ‘Golani’ brigade; died on November 7, 2022. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree; the number and date of the decree have not yet been established.
Vladislav Shein (‘Typhoon’) — a Jewish volunteer; died on November 8, 2022. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 141/2023 of March 8, 2023.
Daniel Peter Stiber (Daniel Sztyber) — a Polish Jewish volunteer; the main confirmed date of death is November 25, 2022, although other sources indicate a different date. Posthumously awarded the state medal ‘For Military Service to Ukraine’, decree No. 55/2023 of February 2, 2023; presented to the family on December 7, 2023.
Jonathan Jeffrey Shenkin — a British Jew, former IDF serviceman, and paramedic of the Ukrainian army; died in December 2022. The family reported a medal ‘Valour in Combat’ / ‘for valor in combat’, but the official Ukrainian name and date have not been established.
Alexander Dubovik (‘Partisan’) — a Jew associated with Israel; died on December 23, 2022. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 96/2024 of February 23, 2024.
Rodion Vayner — lived in Israel and served in the IDF; died on March 5, 2023, near Bakhmut. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 715/2023 of October 30, 2023.
Leonid Krasnov (‘Month’) — a serviceman from a Jewish family in Dnipro; died in 2023. Awarded the medal ‘For Military Service to Ukraine’, ‘Golden Cross’, the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, and posthumously — II degree of this order.
Maxim Shvartsman (‘Marvel’) — a Jewish serviceman, writer, and journalist who lived with his family in Israel for some time; died on July 15, 2023. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 750/2023 of November 16, 2023; the order was presented to the family on July 18, 2024.
Vyacheslav Adamenko (‘Israel’) — a citizen of Ukraine and Israel, who served for many years in Israeli security structures; died on March 4, 2024.
David Starover — a Jewish serviceman of the 59th brigade; died on April 14, 2024, near Netailovo.
David Straber (David Strauber) — a serviceman from the Vinnytsia Jewish community, a graduate of ‘Or Avner – Chabad’; died in the spring of 2024, death later confirmed by DNA.
Anton Beskonechny — a Jewish serviceman from Mykolaiv; died in the spring of 2024 near Chasov Yar.
Daniel, surname not publicly named — a Jewish serviceman of a special unit of Ukraine; died in the spring of 2024 and was buried according to Jewish rites.
Maxim Bulygin (‘Wolf’) — a graduate of Zhytomyr ‘Or Avner’ and a member of the Jewish community; died on June 10, 2024. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 787/2024 of November 27, 2024; presented to the family on April 16, 2025.
Semyon Jensen (‘Sem’) — a Jewish serviceman who previously studied in Jerusalem; died on July 12, 2024.
Anton Samborsky — Matityahu — the adopted son of the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine Moshe Asman; died on July 24, 2024. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 787/2024 of November 27, 2024; the wife received the order on April 25, 2025. Also noted with the Kyiv medal ‘Honor. Glory. State’.
Oleg Rubin — grew up in Israel, served in the IDF in the ‘Kfir’ brigade, then defended Ukraine; died on February 18, 2025. Different surname variants are found in sources.
Maxim Nelipa — a Ukrainian actor and serviceman with Jewish roots; died on May 12, 2025. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Merit’ III degree, decree No. 680/2025 of September 12, 2025.
Benyamin Asher (‘Nemo’) — a 21-year-old Hungarian Jewish volunteer; died on May 24, 2025. Posthumously noted with the departmental sign of the Ministry of Defense ‘Iron Cross’ and the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree; on February 25, 2026, also received a public medal ‘For Self-Sacrifice’ in Toronto.
Andrey Korovsky / Kurovsky — a teacher at the Jewish school ‘Or Avner’ and a drone operator; died on the front from a heart attack on May 28, 2025.
Tsvi-Hirsh Zvergazda (‘Grinch’) — an Odessa Jew, a graduate of ‘Or Avner – Chabad’; died in June 2025. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Courage’ III degree, decree No. 698/2025 of September 30, 2025.
Yuri Urshansky — an officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, associated with the Jewish community of Uzhgorod; died on August 26, 2025, after a Russian FPV drone attack.
Deceased and dead, whom we also discovered, but include only with a caveat
David Chichkan — a Ukrainian artist and serviceman; died on August 10, 2025, from wounds received at the front. He is included in the Jewish list, but independent confirmation of his Jewish origin has not yet been found.
Konstantin Guzenko — a photographer and serviceman of the 35th Marine Brigade; died on November 1, 2025. The Jewish list itself indicates that his belonging to Judaism is still being established. Posthumously awarded the Order ‘For Merit’ III degree on November 15, 2025.
Andrey Yurchenko — appears in several memorial projects as a representative of Israel; the death is indicated as March 31, 2024, but reliable independent confirmation of Israeli citizenship and the circumstances of death is insufficient.
Denis, surname not established — mentioned in international lists as an Israeli volunteer who died on February 14, 2023, near Soledar. The surname variant ‘Savchenko’ is not considered confirmed.
Vladislav Golenkov — a Ukrainian serviceman who died in the war, brother of footballer Mark Golenkov, associated with Israel. The Jewishness or Israeli citizenship of Vladislav himself has not been confirmed by us.
Pavel Bessarab — a Ukrainian serviceman who died in January 2025. One of the user memorial projects calls him an Israeli volunteer, but reliable confirmation of this connection has not been found. Awarded a number of local and departmental distinctions, the ‘Iron Cross’ of the Ministry of Defense, and posthumously — the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky III degree and the title Hero of Ukraine with the ‘Golden Star’ order.
Konstantin Mrochko — died defending Ukraine after several years of living and working in Israel. At the same time, people who knew him here directly told NANovosti that he was not Jewish; confirmation of Israeli citizenship is also absent. Hero of Ukraine with the ‘Golden Star’ order, posthumously, decree No. 127/2022 of March 12, 2022.
Rafael Nikanorov — after the report of death, was initially named an Israeli, but later the source itself corrected this information: he was not an Israeli.
Boris Urshansky — father of Yuri Urshansky, a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war and a lieutenant colonel; died on July 21, 2025, from an oncological disease. He does not belong to those who died in battle.
Bari Bonen — an Israeli citizen who helped Ukraine; died in Kyiv in 2018. He did not die in combat, so we do not include him in the list of fallen defenders.
Artem Reznik — a 30-year-old Jew from Kharkiv, died on December 29, 2023, during a Russian missile strike. He was a civilian, not a serviceman.
Missing persons and Israelis in Russian captivity
According to the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for Prisoners of War, published by the investigative project ‘Shomrim’ in January 2026, at least 12 Israeli citizens are considered missing or held in Russian captivity in connection with the war in Ukraine. Most of them fought on the Ukrainian side. Their names are not publicly disclosed. This number cannot be mechanically added to the surnames listed below — we do not know if they are included in these twelve.
Vladimir Beznosov — a religious Jew from Odessa; after a severe injury, he is listed as missing.
Denis Syomin — associated with the Brodsky Synagogue in Kyiv; listed as missing in the open list.
People for whom there has long been no sufficiently reliable current data
We do not call them missing if such an official status was not found, and even more so do not record them as deceased:
Igor Krais — insufficient current data.
Mikhail Milman — a native of Donetsk, an Israeli citizen and former IDF soldier, who came to fight for Ukraine; no fresh reliable confirmation of the current status.
Merab Shalalashvili — appears as a Georgian Jew and Israeli citizen who served in the International Legion; current status not established.
Michael Jonah — volunteer paramedic with Donetsk roots; current status not established.
“Iza” — a serviceman known only by the call sign; known about his injury, but we could not find fresh reliable information about his further condition.
Thus, after additional verification of the status of Roman Kandybur and Igor Kovalenko, we individually consider 48 deceased, dead, missing, or people with an unestablished status. Kandybur and Kovalenko are excluded from this count as alive and moved above to the section about those who defended and are defending Ukraine. And this figure still does not represent the number of Jewish and Israeli casualties in the war.
It cannot simply be added to at least 12 unnamed Israeli citizens whom Ukrainian authorities consider missing or held in Russian captivity: some of these people may theoretically overlap with the names known to us, and their identities are not publicly disclosed.
Therefore, the main result of our work remains not the number.
The main thing is to preserve the names of those who were identified, honestly indicate doubts where documents are insufficient, and not call a person deceased whose fate is still unknown.
Formally, Pavel Syutkin, of course, was not imprisoned for borscht. On September 15, 2026, the Zyuzinsky District Court of Moscow sentenced the 61-year-old writer and historian of Russian cuisine to six years in a general regime colony on charges of spreading, according to Russian legislation, “knowingly false information” about the Russian army. He was also banned from administering websites and other internet resources for four more years. The prosecution requested eight years.
But the phrase “six years for Ukrainian borscht” did not arise out of nowhere. It combines two stories of one person. For decades, Syutkin debunked beautiful myths about the “primordial Russian cuisine” and publicly stated that the modern Ukrainian tradition of borscht has its own history. After the start of the big war, the same person began writing about what was happening in Ukraine — and one of such publications led him to the dock.
His case also shows how far the mechanism of criminal prosecution for anti-war statements has spread in Russia. Now, for a long sentence, it is not at all necessary to be an opposition leader or an organizer of street protests. Sometimes a few paragraphs in Telegram are enough — even if before the war the public knew their author primarily for books about soups, pies, and the history of Soviet canteens. Human Rights Watch reports hundreds of criminal cases related to publications about the Russian army and speeches against the war.
Who is Pavel Syutkin and where is he known from
Pavel Syutkin was born in 1965 in Krasnodar, graduated from MGIMO, became a candidate of historical sciences, worked in the financial sector and in public service. Since the early 2010s, the history of food gradually became his main professional topic.
Together with his wife Olga Syutkina, he engaged in the study of Russian and Soviet gastronomy. It was not a collection of entertaining recipes “from grandmother’s chest.” The Syutkins worked with old cookbooks, pre-revolutionary editions, memoirs, Soviet press, trying to establish when a particular dish really appeared and where the document ends and the beautiful national legend begins.
They wrote “The Uninvented History of Russian Cuisine,” “The Uninvented History of Soviet Cuisine,” “The Uninvented History of Russian Products,” CCCP CookBook: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, “Russian Cuisine: From Myth to Science,” and other books. RBC calls Syutkin the author of eight books, notes the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards he received, and his participation in Expo-2015 in Milan as an official representative of Russia.
Moreover, Syutkin’s fame was not limited to readers of historical research. He appeared on television and radio as an expert on the history of cuisine. He was invited to talk about the origin of products, Soviet gastronomy, and old recipes. For a significant part of the audience, he was precisely “that historian about food,” and not a political figure at all.
Pavel and Olga Syutkin also have a Telegram channel “Russian Cuisine: History” — @FoodHistory. Its archive contains old recipes, products, books, culinary traditions, the history of Soviet and pre-revolutionary food.
After February 2022, war began to appear more and more often alongside gastronomy there.
Thus, the culinary blog gradually became part of a criminal case.
What Syutkin wrote about Bucha
The reason for the prosecution was a publication that appeared on Telegram in April 2022. Syutkin wrote about strikes on Kyiv and the deaths of civilians in Bucha, comparing what was happening with events of World War II and recalling Babyn Yar.
The Russian accusation considered the published information to be knowingly false. The court found Syutkin guilty under paragraph “d” of part 2 of article 207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation — dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of Russian armed forces, committed, according to the accusation, out of political hatred.
Syutkin himself did not plead guilty. In letters from prison, he called his case political and said that he was being punished “for words and an open anti-war position.” This is Syutkin’s position; the Russian court took the opposite legal assessment of his publication.
For the Israeli reader, there is a separate painful detail here. Syutkin himself referred to Babyn Yar — the site of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis in occupied Kyiv. How appropriate the specific historical analogy is can be discussed separately. But the choice of image shows his usual way of thinking: the historian tried to view the present through already known testimonies of the past.
That is why for NAnews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency this is not only the story of one Russian criminal case. It is also a story about what happens when a dispute about testimonies and interpretations of the past ceases to remain a dispute among historians.
And what does Ukrainian borscht have to do with it
Here the story becomes almost grotesque.
Syutkin indeed publicly said things for years that did not fit well with the popular notion of borscht as an unquestionably “primordial Russian dish.” But he did not replace one national legend with another.
His position was more complex.
Ancient predecessors of borscht, the historian explained, appeared long before modern nation-states. The dish itself changed over centuries, there were different regional variants, and the old borscht could differ quite significantly from the familiar red soup today.
But when Syutkin was asked not about ancient etymology, but about the established national culinary tradition, the answer became much more definite.
In a 2018 interview, when asked to whom borscht belongs — Ukraine, Russia, or Poland — Syutkin replied: “No, it is still a Ukrainian dish”. He explained this primarily by the place of borscht in everyday Ukrainian culture and the vast number of its local varieties.
In 2020, when the Ukrainian application to UNESCO was discussed, Syutkin already provided a historical argument: in Russian culinary literature of the 19th century, borscht was primarily referred to as “Little Russian”, meaning it was associated specifically with the Ukrainian gastronomic tradition.
He admitted that Russia could theoretically try to present borscht as a joint Russian-Ukrainian heritage, but doubted that such a construction could be convincingly proven by historical sources.
This is a significant difference. Syutkin did not say that Russians did not and do not cook borscht. He distinguished between two things: the prevalence of the dish today and the history of the cultural tradition from which it grew.
Perhaps this is the best way to explain his professional approach.
He did not ask the dish for a passport. He asked the sources for a date.
Ukraine achieved recognition of borscht culture at UNESCO
On July 1, 2022, the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee included Culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking in the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The consideration of the Ukrainian application was accelerated due to the full-scale war, displacement of people, and the threat to the preservation of the tradition itself.
The object of recognition was not a recipe with a mandatory amount of beets or cabbage, but a much broader cultural practice. UNESCO talks about regional varieties, family recipe transmission, joint preparation, holidays, customs, and the role of borscht as one of the markers of Ukrainian identity.
At the same time, the organization specifically made a reservation: borscht is cooked in other countries of the region as well, and the inclusion of the Ukrainian tradition in the list does not mean exclusive ownership of Ukraine over the dish itself. That is, the popular dispute “UNESCO decided whose borscht it is now” is formulated incorrectly. The international organization recognized specifically the Ukrainian culture of its preparation and the need for its protection.
For the Israeli reader, this dispute is not at all academic. Borscht arrived here long ago with immigrants from Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR, but in recent years it increasingly exists precisely as an element of modern Ukrainian culture in Israel.
NAnews has already told about the Israeli journalist and writer Igor Kulakov, a descendant of a tzadik, who dedicated a separate book to Ukrainian borscht — “My Book About Borscht”. For Kulakov, borscht is not just a recipe, but family memory, culture, and the history of Ukraine, which he now tells in Israel.
For NAnews readers, this story, by the way, is not new at all. We have already told about it when we wrote about Borshch Party in Jaffa — an evening of Ukrainian borscht in Israel, where the culture of this dish was already connected with the Ukrainian-Jewish and Israeli environment. In that material, we separately reminded about the UNESCO decision of 2022.
That is, for Israel, borscht has long ceased to be only a home memory of immigrants from the former USSR. Here it exists as a public Ukrainian cultural tradition — with books, lectures, festivals, evenings in Jaffa and Ashkelon.
And against this background, the words of the Russian historian Syutkin look especially interesting.
He called borscht Ukrainian and explained it with historical sources even before the UNESCO decision. And the international recognition of 2022 consolidated not the myth of “exclusive ownership of the soup,” but the existence of a separate Ukrainian cultural tradition, which Syutkin spoke about several years earlier.
And then the state came not for the history of food
At this point, the two lines of Syutkin’s biography converge.
When he argued with myths about Russian cuisine, the argument remained an argument. Syutkin could write a book, the opponent — a response article. One could open an old cookbook and find out where the name first appears, what the composition of the dish was, and what was called “Little Russian” in the 19th century.
After 2022, the rules changed.
Human Rights Watch reported in September 2025 about at least 641 people subjected to criminal prosecution since the start of the full-scale invasion on charges of spreading “false information” about the army or its “discreditation.” In total, according to the human rights organization, by that time, criminal cases for speeches against the war affected more than a thousand people.
Russian authorities justify such norms by the need to counteract knowingly false information about the armed forces. Human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, view many such cases as part of a broader system of suppressing peaceful criticism of the war.
And the case of Syutkin is especially indicative not because he is some extraordinarily influential opponent of the Kremlin.
Quite the opposite.
He did not lead a political party. He did not command a protest movement. He was not a professional military observer. The man wrote books about cuisine, went on television to talk about recipes, represented Russia at Expo, studied old culinary editions, and together with his wife ran a channel about the history of food.
And then he wrote a few paragraphs about the war.
Not long ago, state and major Russian TV channels themselves invited him to tell viewers why historical reality is often more complex than a beautiful legend. When it came to borscht, this thought could be discussed.
When it came to Bucha, the mechanism turned out to be different.
Closed trial. Criminal article. Six years in a colony.
Therefore, the headline “six years for Ukrainian borscht” is factually inaccurate. There is no charge in the criminal case for recognizing borscht as Ukrainian. Syutkin was convicted for publications about Russian military, which the court found to be knowingly false.
But borscht helps to understand who exactly was imprisoned.
A historian whose entire professional work was built around a simple habit: not accepting a beautiful and convenient version of the past just because it has been repeated for a very long time.
With borscht, this habit led him to old Russian cookbooks and the conclusion that the Ukrainian tradition has its own history.
With the war, it led him to a publication about Bucha.
For the first, he was argued with.
For the second, the Russian court gave him six years.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) in Israel today is perceived not only as a religious institution. For many Ukrainians who found themselves in the country after the war, relocation, and the painful break from their usual lives, such communities have become places where language, prayer, social circles, and the feeling that the connection with home has not completely disappeared are preserved. This is why the topic of UGCC in Israel interests not only believers but also a much wider circle of people — families, volunteers, community activists, and those who are simply looking for a comprehensible human environment in a new country.
The official formula sounds quite specific: according to (April 11, 2026) the head of the UGCC, His Beatitude Sviatoslav, there are four parishes operating in Israel. The same report states that the church itself is represented in almost 50 countries worldwide, has about a thousand parishes outside Ukraine, 16 eparchies-exarchates in Ukraine, and 20 beyond its borders.
For the Israeli audience, this is an important emphasis: it is not about a random group of enthusiasts, but about a part of a large global structure of Ukrainian church life.
In short:
it preserves the Eastern, Byzantine rite, like the Orthodox, but at the same time is in unity with Rome and the Pope.
How it differs from others:
From Orthodox churches
The worship, icons, calendar, and liturgical tradition are largely Eastern and very similar to Orthodox, but canonically the UGCC is part of the Catholic Church.
From the Roman Catholic Church
The UGCC is also a Catholic Church, but not of the Latin rite. It has a different rite, a different church culture, its own traditions of worship, church singing, spirituality, and historical development.
Key dates:
988 — The Baptism of Rus in Kyiv, a common root for future Orthodox and Greek Catholic traditions in Ukrainian lands.
1596 — The Union of Brest. Part of the hierarchy of the Kyiv Metropolis entered into communion with Rome, preserving the Eastern rite. This is a key date for the origin of the UGCC.
1946 — the so-called Lviv pseudo-council in the USSR, after which the UGCC was forcibly liquidated by the Soviet authorities and driven underground.
1989 — legalization of the UGCC at the end of the Soviet period.
1991 and beyond — active restoration of the church structure in independent Ukraine and abroad.
In one sentence: The UGCC is a Ukrainian church of the Eastern rite, which prays according to the Byzantine tradition, but belongs to the Catholic Church.
Where the UGCC is already visible on the map of Israel
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) in Israel today: four parishes, five cities, and one large Ukrainian community
Looking at open church data – https://map.ugcc.ua/, several cities are especially clearly confirmed – 3:
In Jaffa on the UGCC map, the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is indicated at 22 Abed El Rauf El Bitar St., and the schedule of services is published.
In Haifa, the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is indicated at Paldyam 10, Haifa, with Sunday liturgy and a contact phone number.
In Netanya, the UGCC community is marked at Ahad Ha’Am Str. 4, with a note that services are held in a rented space.
In Jerusalem — it is there, according to all available information, that the fourth parish is located. In open church sources, Jerusalem is listed as a place of UGCC service on Mount Zion, in the Franciscan Monastery St. Francis Ad Coenaculum / Franciscan Monastery on Mount Zion. This is confirmed by both church publications about UGCC service in Jerusalem and data about the Franciscan Monastery on Zion. The UGCC website confirms that Bishop Stepan Sus celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem during a pastoral visit to Israel. It is also stated that UGCC faithful in the country have been cared for by two Franciscans from Ukraine — Fr. Bozhidar Tsvirenko and Fr. Patrick Igor Sovyak — for seven years. This means that Jerusalem in the church life of Ukrainians in Israel is not a symbolic point on the map, but a real place of spiritual presence.
Ashdod also appears in open formulations not by chance. It is named among Ukrainian-speaking communities, which means this city is already integrated into the practical network of church life. Yes, this does not necessarily mean a separate parish in the same administrative sense as other points. But for people on the ground, such a difference is often secondary. What is more important is whether there is a service, a priest, people, and a place to come to.
This geography looks very logical for Israel.
Jaffa is connected with Greater Tel Aviv and Gush Dan, Netanya has long remained an important point of Ukrainian presence, and Haifa naturally gathers the north of the country. In such places, the church works not only as a space for prayer but also as a living community where you can meet people with similar experiences, hear Ukrainian speech, and receive informal support without unnecessary explanations.
At the same time, in community life itself, the picture is broader than official statistics.
In the description of the Facebook page of the UGCC in Israel – https://www.facebook.com/UKRGKC/ – Greek Catholic Ukrainian-speaking communities are listed in five cities: Jaffa, Netanya, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Ashdod.
Here is where the nuance often confused in retellings appears: the number of official parishes and the map of actual community presence are not necessarily the same. Formally, there are four parishes, but the actual network of meetings, services, and pastoral work may cover more points.
Why the difference between a “parish” and a “community” is really important
For the average reader, this may seem like a trifle, but in practice, the difference is significant. A parish is an official church status. A community is a living environment of people who gather for liturgy, confession, the blessing of Easter dishes, holidays, and meetings. Sometimes both statuses coincide in one place, and sometimes church life is broader than the administrative scheme.
This is why in the public field, two seemingly different formulas can exist simultaneously — “four parishes” and “five cities of community presence.” In reality, they do not contradict each other but describe different levels of one reality.
This is where the topic of the UGCC in Israel ceases to be purely a church reference. In the middle of this story, a broader social meaning appears, which is well seen by NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency: Ukrainian church life in the country becomes part of the overall infrastructure of Ukrainian presence in Israel. Not only spiritual but also human, cultural, and internally supportive.
What people are really looking for
When Ukrainians in Israel search for information about the church, they are not looking for terminology.
They are looking for understandable answers: where the service takes place, in what language, whether they can come with children, where to celebrate Easter, where to go in Jaffa, Haifa, Netanya, or Jerusalem, whether there are their own people there, and whether there will be someone who understands without long explanations. In this sense, the living map of communities is almost always more important than the dry administrative figure, even if the figure sets the official guideline.
Why the topic of the UGCC in Israel will only grow
After 2022, Ukrainian communities abroad began to play a much broader role than before. It is no longer just about worship. It is about preserving the language, connecting families, supporting new waves of relocation, and the opportunity not to fall out of one’s cultural and spiritual environment in conditions of a prolonged crisis.
For Israel, this is especially sensitive. The country itself lives in a state of constant tension, and therefore any stable community spaces acquire additional value. Where for someone there is just a church address, for another person it turns out to be a place where they can feel the ground under their feet again.
This is why the most accurate formula today sounds like this: officially, the UGCC has four parishes in Israel, and in public community life, Jaffa, Netanya, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Ashdod are constantly mentioned. This is not a contradiction, but a living reality of the Ukrainian community in Israel, which continues to gather itself anew — through faith, language, memory, and each other’s presence.
Staff Sergeant Grigory Pivovarov, call sign “Jew”, is a citizen of Israel who came to Ukraine during the Maidan and has been fighting against Russian aggression since 2014. His interview with the 24th Separate Assault Regiment “Aidar” is not only a personal story of a fighter but also an important conversation about the IDF, Ukraine, citizenship, anti-Semitism, Russian propaganda, and the price of a true choice.
An Israeli who chose Ukraine not with words, but with service
On April 30, 2026, the 24th Separate Assault Regiment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine “Aidar” published a video interview with Grigory Pivovarov — a staff sergeant, fighter with the call sign “Jew” and a citizen of Israel who has been fighting for Ukraine since 2014.
The video is titled: “Jew. About Israel, the IDF, Maidan, citizenship, and the war since 2014“.
This is not just a story of a foreigner who found himself in the Ukrainian war. It is the story of a person who went through the Maidan, the volunteer movement, the front, injuries, command positions, and still speaks of Ukraine as his home.
At the beginning of the interview, Grigory Pivovarov introduces himself directly: his name is Grigory, call sign — “Jew”, he is a fighter of the “Aidar” regiment, and he is a foreigner, a citizen of Israel, who has been fighting for Ukraine’s independence since 2014.
Call sign “Jew”. Citizen of Israel has been fighting for Ukraine’s Independence since 2014 / 24th Separate Assault Regiment “Aidar” – News of Israel
For the Israeli audience, this story is especially important. It intersects several lines at once: the experience of the IDF, Jewish identity, the Ukrainian war for freedom, Russian aggression, and the personal choice of a person who could live in another country but decided to stay with those he calls brothers.
From Maidan to “Aidar”: how Grigory Pivovarov’s journey began
According to Pivovarov, his arrival in Ukraine during the Maidan was largely accidental.
Before that, he lived in Barcelona, engaged in club projects and tourism. He was invited to Ukraine by a medic friend who needed strong people for evacuating the wounded. Grigory recalls that his friend explained simply: he was a former Israeli soldier, not afraid of blood, and could help where people capable of acting under pressure were needed.
He arrived in Kyiv in February 2014. He didn’t make it to Mariinsky on February 18, but found himself on the barricades on Khreshchatyk when the APC was burning. After a concussion, he was evacuated along with other participants in the events.
Then came the victory of the Maidan, the student movement, alarming news from Crimea, and the gradual realization that everything was not ending with a change of power. Ukraine was entering a war, although at that time many still did not call it a war in the full sense.
In May 2014, Pivovarov joined “Aidar”. In the interview, he specifies the date: on May 19, 2014, he arrived at the unit. Later there were transitions, legal complexities due to his status as a foreigner, service in other structures, and a return to “Aidar”, where in February 2016 he officially became a serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Why exactly “Aidar”
One of the strong moments of the interview is the answer to the question of why he has remained in “Aidar” for so many years.
Pivovarov says that this unit reminds him of the unit where he served in the IDF: people from different walks of life come there, and they are made into strong fighters. According to him, “Aidar” does not chase PR but simply does its job.
This phrase clearly shows the nerve of the entire conversation. For him, the army is not a decoration, not a slogan, and not a place for beautiful photos. It is an environment where it is tested who is next to you, who endures, who returns after injury, and who does not abandon their own.
What is the 24th Separate Assault Regiment “Aidar” and why is this name so important
The 24th Separate Assault Regiment “Aidar” is the 24th Separate Assault Regiment “Aidar”, a combat unit of the Ukrainian Ground Forces.
The “Aidar” itself grew out of a volunteer battalion that appeared in 2014 after the Maidan and the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
The name is associated with the Aidar River in the Luhansk region. In Ukrainian military memory, this name has become one of the symbols of the first months of resistance when volunteer formations often covered those sections of the front where the state system was still being rebuilt under the reality of a large war.
The official website of the regiment emphasizes that “Aidar” began its journey in 2014 and has always been a combat unit. Among the values of the regiment are indicated ideology, brotherhood, continuity, internal culture of the fighter, personal responsibility, and result.
This is important for understanding the video itself. Pivovarov’s interview is not a separate biography against the backdrop of war. It is the story of a person who found himself inside a unit with a very strong volunteer tradition.
The official site of “Aidar” also describes the procedure for joining the regiment: application, recruiter call, selection interview, medical examination, document check, contract signing, and start of service. Among the requirements are age, readiness to serve in the army vertical, physical fitness, absence of convictions, and readiness to work in a team.
NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency draws attention to this connection: the story of Grigory Pivovarov shows how the Ukrainian war became a matter not only for the citizens of Ukraine but also for people who consciously chose the side of freedom — not by passport, but by conviction.
How Russia views “Aidar”
In Russia, “Aidar” is viewed extremely hostilely — both at the level of propaganda and at the level of official legal position.
In the Russian version, “Aidar” is called a “national battalion”, “extremists”, and a “terrorist organization”. In December 2023, the FSB included the Ukrainian “Aidar” in the Russian list of terrorist organizations. Before that, the unit had already been recognized in the Russian Federation as extremist and banned.
For Russian propaganda, “Aidar” is one of the symbols of Ukrainian resistance that needs to be demonized. Like “Azov” or “Right Sector”, it is usually shown not as a unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but as “punishers”, “Nazis”, and “militants”. This is how Moscow tries to present the war against Ukraine not as RF aggression, but as a struggle against supposedly “extremists”.
This status is also used by Russian courts. Ukrainian military personnel can be prosecuted simply for serving in “Aidar”. For example, there is a known case of military medic Victoria Tkachenko, whom a Russian court sentenced precisely for serving in a unit recognized by the Russian Federation as “terrorist”.
On the front, “Aidar” is perceived by Russian military and pro-Russian militants as a dangerous and hated enemy. This coincides with what Grigory Pivovarov says in the interview: according to him, for the enemy, “Aidar” is a very scary name, and freed “Aidar” fighters can be “counted on the fingers”.
In short: in Russia, “Aidar” is officially banned, demonized in propaganda, and among Russian military personnel, it is perceived as one of the most hated Ukrainian combat symbols since 2014.
IDF, Israel, and the Ukrainian front
In the interview, there is a separate layer important for readers in Israel. Pivovarov is a citizen of Israel, a former Israeli soldier, a person who knows from the inside what military culture is, responsibility to the unit, and the experience of war with an enemy that uses Soviet and Russian weapons.
He says that his father lives in Israel, is a family doctor, and a captain of medicine in the reserve. He also talks about his younger brother, who served in the IDF, was a paramedic-shooter, and then became the head of the medical service.
In one of the most indicative fragments, Pivovarov connects the Israeli and Ukrainian experience through a common source of threat.
He reminds that the Soviet Union sponsored Israel’s enemies, and modern Russia supports Hamas, Hezbollah, and other forces fighting against Israel. According to him, ATGMs, mortars, rockets, “Grads”, and “Katyushas” have a clear origin in this military chain.
For the Israeli reader, this is not abstract geopolitics. It is an attempt to explain: Ukraine and Israel face different fronts of one big problem — aggressive regimes and their allies who use terror, missile strikes, propaganda, and war against the civilian population.
“My home is Ukraine”
One of the strongest answers in the video is to the question: where is his home.
Pivovarov answers: “My home is Ukraine.”
He further explains why Russian manipulation of the anti-Semitism theme became one of the reasons for his internal resistance. He says he was outraged by stories that Ukrainians are anti-Semites and points to historical facts that Russian propaganda either distorts or completely ignores.
He mentions Ukrainians among the Righteous Among the Nations, talks about the Jewish pages of Ukrainian history, about the connections between the Ukrainian national movement and Zionists, and also recalls Vladimir Jabotinsky and Symon Petliura. In his logic, this is not an academic lecture, but a personal response to Russia’s attempt to steal Ukraine’s historical subjectivity and present Ukrainians as enemies of Jews.
Yes, the Ukrainian-Jewish history is complex. It had tragedies, pain, pogroms, the Holocaust, collaborationism, Soviet lies, and real conflicts of memory.
But that is why such testimonies are important. Pivovarov does not offer a primitive picture. He talks about how Russian propaganda uses anti-Semitism as a tool to poison attitudes towards Ukraine and hide its own aggression.
Injuries, command, and citizenship that is still not there
In the interview, Grigory Pivovarov talks about returning after injuries because he could not leave his brothers. The first injury — because his own pulled him out. The second — because he needed to return. The third — because, in his words, he was ashamed to leave the unit after being appointed platoon commander. He doesn’t even consider another injury serious, although it was recorded.
His path within the army is also indicative: a simple infantryman, grenade launcher, squad leader, chief sergeant of the platoon, platoon commander, acting company commander, and then work in the regiment’s recruitment.
This is the biography of a person who did not come for symbolic participation. He really lived this war.
And against this background, the topic of citizenship sounds especially acute. Pivovarov says that there are awards, ranks, injuries, service since 2014, but there is still no Ukrainian citizenship. He lists his distinctions and does not hide his disappointment: the state he defends has not yet become his state legally.
This is one of the main meanings of the video. Ukraine knows how to accept blood, service, and loyalty. But the bureaucratic system does not always know how to quickly and honestly recognize those who have already proven their belonging to the country by deed.
Appeal to Ukrainians
The final part of the interview is an appeal to Ukrainians who are unsure whether to serve and where exactly to go.
Pivovarov speaks harshly but without theatrics: the enemy does not sleep. He recalls the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Mariupol, Bakhmut, Kurakhovo, Vuhledar — places he saw alive and then saw destroyed. His argument is simple: if people do not want to see this near their homes, the state needs to be defended now.
He urges not to wait until the TCC takes a person, but to choose a unit in advance, contact familiar military personnel, look for those with whom you want to serve, and make a conscious decision.
Separately, he invites to “Aidar”, emphasizing that the unit has retained the spirit of the first volunteer battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and its commanders have gone through real battles, injuries, and the front path.
Why this video is important for Ukraine, Israel, and the Jewish audience
The story of Grigory Pivovarov breaks several propaganda schemes at once.
For years, Russia has been trying to present Ukraine as a country alien to Jews. But before the viewer is a citizen of Israel with the call sign “Jew”, who came to Ukraine, saw the Maidan, went to war, has been serving in a Ukrainian unit since 2014, and says that his home is Ukraine.
Russia tries to portray the Ukrainian army as an artificial construct. But before the viewer is a person who compares the spirit of “Aidar” with what he knows from the IDF: responsibility, camaraderie, different people in one line, commanders with combat experience, and readiness to return to their own.
Russia tries to use the theme of anti-Semitism as a weapon against Ukraine. But before the viewer is a Jew and Israeli who speaks directly about the manipulation of this theme and about how Ukrainian history is much deeper and more complex than Russian clichés.
For Israel, this video is also not secondary. It reminds that Russia’s war against Ukraine and the war of Iran’s terrorist allies against Israel are in the same moral field: it is about the right of a people to live freely, protect their home, and not be destroyed by someone else’s imperial or terrorist will.
Open ending
The video of the 24th Separate Assault Regiment “Aidar” is a presentation not only of one fighter. It is a presentation of choice.
Grigory Pivovarov could have stayed in Israel, Europe, or any other point in his biography. But he found himself in Ukraine, stayed after the Maidan, went through the war since 2014, and continues to speak of this country as home, even without a Ukrainian passport.
Perhaps this is the main question for the state and society: who really becomes Ukrainian — the one who received the document, or the one who has been defending the country for years at the cost of their own health, blood, and life?
The video leaves this question open. But Grigory Pivovarov’s answer has already sounded on the front.
While the US tries to block Iran’s access to international banks, dollars, oil revenues, and intermediary companies, and Israel seeks and blocks the financial infrastructure of the IRGC and its proxies, Tehran has a partner interested in the exact opposite. Russia is helping Iran build its own payment channels, less dependent on the Western financial system.
On September 14, 2026, this story received a rather specific name — VTB.
The US Department of the Treasury included one of the largest Russian state banks in the sanctions circuit for Iran. And it’s important not to get confused here: VTB is not under American sanctions for the first time. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the bank was already under strict US blocking restrictions. The news is different — now VTB has come under the action of American Executive Order 13902 for working in Iran’s financial sector.
And this already changes the position of those who work neither in Russia nor in Iran.
Washington separately warned foreign financial institutions: after the new Iranian basis, continuing significant operations with VTB increases the risk of secondary sanctions. Simply put, the problem may now arise not only for the Russian bank itself. It may appear for a bank in a third country that decides it can somehow work simultaneously with VTB and the American financial system. The US Treasury advises such institutions to terminate relations with VTB.
What Russia built for Iran
The American document is interesting precisely for its details.
According to the US Treasury, VTB in recent years has been opening a banking presence in Iran, establishing correspondent relationships with Iranian financial institutions already under American sanctions, and creating a payment system in Russian rubles and Iranian rials.
There is also a more serious point. Washington claims that VTB took steps to move billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. Here it is important not to amplify the wording: the US Treasury did not state that all these billions have already been successfully transferred. It writes specifically about steps to move them.
The story, meanwhile, began long before the sanctions on September 14.
VTB’s representation appeared in Iran back in 2023. In January 2025, the head of the bank, Andrey Kostin, announced plans to turn it into a full-fledged branch in Tehran. It was assumed that it would serve Russian-Iranian foreign trade, conduct settlements in national currencies, and engage in trade and export financing.
In September 2025, VTB announced that it had received principal consent from the Central Bank of Iran to open a branch. But something else sounded much more interesting: settlements in the pair ruble — Iranian rial were already available through VTB’s infrastructure. The Russian bank explained the meaning of the project quite frankly — the direct channel was supposed to make international settlements between Russia and Iran cheaper and remove some intermediaries.
So it was not about a symbolic office with a sign in Tehran. A practical financial infrastructure was being built for two states, each of which has long been learning to live under Western sanctions.
In the spring of 2026, plans for expansion had to be slowed down. On March 26, Kostin said that the issue of opening a branch was not being considered at the moment. But already on June 30, he stated that VTB could return to it after a change in the military situation around Iran. The representation itself, meanwhile, was preserved.
So the formula “Russia helps Iran bypass economic isolation” is no longer a political slogan here. At least, the American Treasury has now put a banking document under it.
The US has started hunting not only for Iran
There is another reason why the decision on VTB is more important than another line in the sanctions list.
On August 24, the Donald Trump administration announced Operation Economic Outcast. The American Treasury called the start of the operation Economic D-Day and formulated the goal without much diplomatic phrasing: to block economic channels that support the authorities of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Moreover, Washington is now targeting not only Iran itself. It is going after banks, carriers, intermediaries, exchangers, and companies outside its borders.
On August 28, FinCEN began proceedings against Banque Misr UAE. According to the US Treasury, between January 2024 and June 2026, the bank processed about 1.8 billion dollars for 103 companies that may be related to Iran’s shadow banking network. Washington proposed depriving the bank’s UAE division of access to American correspondent accounts.
On September 4, it was Turkey’s turn. The US imposed sanctions against Golden Global Bank, which, according to the Treasury, conducted operations worth tens of millions of dollars for structures associated with the Quds Force and provided Iran with international banking access. Four days later, the Iranian aviation sector was hit, on September 10 — networks serving Hezbollah and Kata’ib Hezbollah. And on September 14, Russian VTB appeared in this chain.
The sequence is quite clear. Washington is trying to make servicing Iran so dangerous for foreign banks and businesses that the income from such work no longer justifies the risk of losing access to the dollar.
Russia is doing exactly the opposite — helping reduce Tehran’s dependence on those channels that Washington can block.
And here Israel appears
For Israel, this is not an abstract financial war somewhere between Washington and Moscow.
The money that the IRGC can receive, save, or withdraw from sanctions can further finance weapons, purchases, missile programs, and Iranian proxies. Therefore, Israel has long been trying to work not only at the endpoint where the money has already reached Hezbollah but also along the financial chain itself.
On July 1, 2026, Defense Minister Israel Katz signed sanctions orders against 37 cryptocurrency wallets, which, according to the Israeli National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing, were part of the IRGC’s infrastructure. More than 24 million shekels in cryptocurrencies were identified in the wallets; Israel links this network, among other things, to the financing of Hezbollah.
Even earlier, Israeli intelligence and the NBCTF uncovered the so-called Iranian Shadow Consortium led by Sepehr Energy Jahan. According to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, through a network of front companies, Iranian security forces sell oil worth billions of dollars a year, bypassing international restrictions, and the proceeds are used for military infrastructure and terrorism financing.
And here the Russian part becomes almost inevitable for Israel.
Earlier, NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency, analyzing Ukraine’s joining the next European sanctions against Iran, already wrote about how the Russian war against Ukraine and Iranian military infrastructure are increasingly existing as two different stories. Iran helped Russia with weapons and technologies, Ukraine gradually includes Iran in its own sanctions policy, and now the US officially points to a major Russian bank as an element of the financial infrastructure helping Tehran bypass restrictions.
For Israel, the question now sounds unpleasantly simple: if the Russian banking infrastructure helps Iran maintain financial breathing, why should it be considered separately from other Iranian channels?
Can Israel hit VTB itself
Yes, but not like the US.
Israel does not have the American dollar, the global network of correspondent accounts, and the ability to put almost any major foreign bank before a choice: refuse a dubious operation or risk access to the US financial system. Here, Washington’s capabilities are simply not available to Jerusalem, and pretending otherwise would be self-deception.
But Israel has something else.
The National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing at the Ministry of Defense works with the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies, and financial regulators. Israeli legislation allows for the application of designations, blocking orders, arrest, and confiscation of assets if their connection to terrorist organizations or terrorism financing is proven. The NBCTF also directly indicates international cooperation with foreign partners and financial institutions as one of its tasks.
This is the most interesting direction.
If Israeli intelligence discovers not just a “Russian bank trading with Iran,” but specific accounts, companies, payment chains, cryptocurrency wallets, or intermediaries through which money goes to the IRGC, the Quds Force, or organizations like Hezbollah, such material can already be turned into a sanctions dossier.
And it is not necessary for the last signature under it to be put by Israel.
The most painful combination may look different: Israeli intelligence establishes the chain, the NBCTF documents the connection to terrorism financing, the information goes to the Americans and other partners, and then OFAC does what it does best — turns a banking operation into a risk of losing the American market.
That is why the VTB story is more interesting for Israel than another Russian statement about a “strategic partnership” with Iran.
You can hit not only the bank
There is also the oil part of the system.
Iran needs more than just a bank capable of making a payment. First, it needs to get the money itself. A significant part of this chain begins with the sale of oil: extraction, a fictitious owner of the cargo, tanker, transshipment, trader, shell company, bank, exchanger — and only then do the funds return to the structures Tehran wanted to transfer them to.
These are the constructions Israel is already trying to uncover. The Sepehr Energy Jahan story showed that the Israeli side considers oil and commercial companies not separate from terrorism if the proceeds ultimately go to Iran’s security structures.
Therefore, the next logical question concerns not only VTB.
Which Russian companies service Iranian payments? Who helps convert rubles and rials? Which intermediaries connect trade with the financial system of third countries? Is Russian infrastructure used to service IRGC companies? Where do these funds go next?
There is no public answer to some of these questions yet. And here you cannot skip over the evidence. The American document against VTB is serious, but by itself, it does not yet provide grounds to record any Russian-Iranian trade operation as terrorism financing.
It will have to be sorted out by chains.
Ukraine is not on the sidelines in this story either
For Kyiv, VTB has long been part of the Russian state financial system operating during the war against Ukraine. Now the same bank is also in the US Iranian sanctions circuit.
This strengthens the argument that has become increasingly obvious in recent years: Russian-Iranian cooperation cannot be conveniently sorted into different folders — here “Ukraine,” here “Israel,” and here separately “sanctions.”
Iranian Shahed technology came into the Russian war against Ukraine. Moscow and Tehran were building settlements outside the Western financial system. Iranian security structures are looking for money for their own programs and proxies, which directly threaten Israel. And Russian structures, according to the US, help this financial system work.
Therefore, Kyiv and Jerusalem have another area of quite practical cooperation: not statements about “coinciding threats,” but the exchange of information about companies, logistics, technologies, and financial intermediaries that simultaneously work between Russia and Iran.
VTB may be only the first Russian name
So far, the main blow has been dealt by Washington.
The US is capable of doing what Israel cannot do on its own: making a foreign bank think about whether a few profitable operations with Russia and Iran are worth the risk of losing correspondent accounts in America. After September 14, this risk for VTB’s partners has become significantly higher.
Israel’s advantage lies elsewhere — in the ability to find hidden connections between formally ordinary business, oil, cryptocurrency, intermediaries, and IRGC structures. This is the model Israel has already applied against Iranian wallets and oil networks.
Therefore, the next step looks quite obvious. If Moscow decided to help Tehran maintain financial channels at a time when the US and Israel are trying to close them, Russian intermediaries of these channels should stop being invisible to Israel just because they are located in Russia.
Perhaps the VTB story has just marked a new boundary.
Russia has become accustomed to thinking that cooperation with Iran allows two sanctioned states to jointly build an alternative settlement system and thereby reduce Western pressure. Now the Americans are trying to turn this very help into an additional source of sanctions risk.
And Israel has another choice: to continue hunting only for Iranian money at the end of the route or to start looking more closely at those who help this money make the journey at all.
The story of the death of British Hasid Yitzhak Elmakayes in Uman turned into an almost ready-made detective story within a day. The man went into the forest to pray, was found dead, reports of signs of violence came from Israel, and the Ukrainian police opened a case under the article of premeditated murder. If you only gather these four facts and put them together, the conclusion seems to suggest itself.
But it will be incorrect for now.
The Ukrainian police, after examining the body, reported something completely different: no external signs of violent death were preliminarily found. The cause of death is still being established, and examinations have been appointed. This contradiction between the initial Israeli reports and the official investigation data is perhaps more important than all the emotional versions surrounding the incident.
Material prepared by Editorial Staff of NANews. We compared the reports of the Ukrainian police with what was published by Israeli and Jewish media because several details in this story have already managed to change meaning on the way from one source to another.
What exactly happened on September 12
The report of the discovery of the body was received by the Uman District Police Department on September 12, 2026, around noon. The man was found not in an abstract “forest near Uman,” as some publications initially wrote, but on Kotsyubinsky Street — in a forest strip opposite one of the houses.
The police identified the deceased: he was a 44-year-old British citizen living in London. He entered Ukraine on August 10, 2026, more than a month before he was found dead. The United Jewish Community of Ukraine reported that the deceased was Jewish and the father of seven children.
Israeli media call him Yitzhak Elmakayes. In the first publications, the age varied — more often they wrote about 45 years, sometimes just “about 45.” This is a common thing for the first hours after a tragedy, but now we have police data: 44 years.
According to preliminary reports from United Hatzalah, the man was discovered by Hasidim who were in the forest for prayer and solitude. When the medics arrived, there were no signs of life, and death was pronounced on the spot. The head of the United Hatzalah delegation in Uman, Aaron Ben-Harush, later confirmed the incident and reported that the organization is cooperating with Ukrainian authorities on the issue of transferring the body for burial.
“He went alone into the forest” sounds scarier than it looks for a Breslov Hasid
One of the details that works especially well in scary retellings is that Elmakayes allegedly went alone into the forest and then disappeared. Only later did the police report something that significantly changes this fragment of the story.
Investigators found people he had contact with in Uman. According to acquaintances, the man tried to communicate less with others, spent a significant amount of time alone, and repeatedly came to this forest strip to pray. So the place where the body was found was not an unexpected point or a place of an unknown meeting.
For Breslov Hasidim, there is nothing exotic here. The practice of solitary prayer — hitbodedut, התבודדות — involves a person being alone and addressing God in their own words. A forest, field, or quiet place away from people is perfectly natural for this.
This does not explain Elmakayes’s death. But it removes one artificially created mystery: the mere fact that he was alone in the forest strip does not yet speak of any crime.
Where did the “signs of violence” come from then
And here the story really doesn’t add up — and pretending there’s no contradiction would be wrong.
Several Israeli publications reported that Elmakayes’s body was allegedly found with signs of violence. Times of Israel conveyed exactly this version, citing reports in Hebrew. Walla wrote even more definitively: the body was found with signs of violence, and within the Jewish community, there is suspicion of murder, although the local police did not officially confirm it at that time.
The Ukrainian police on September 14 provided a different picture.
Their report stated: “preliminarily, no external signs of violent death were found by law enforcement”. The cause of death has not yet been named by the police, an investigation is underway, and necessary examinations have been appointed.
Who made a mistake — the first witnesses, journalists, people within the community, or the preliminary external examination simply does not yet provide an answer — is currently unknown. And guessing here is unnecessary. Damage from a fall, postmortem changes, an injury that turned out to be unrelated to the cause of death, or indeed violence — this is already the work of a forensic doctor, not Telegram or editorial offices.
It is precisely the result of the examination here that will be the document after which further discussion can take place.
But didn’t the police open a case of premeditated murder?
Yes. And this is the most convenient detail for a loud headline.
Information about the death has been entered into the Unified Register of Pre-trial Investigations under Part 1 of Article 115 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — premeditated murder. If an Israeli reader sees only the title of the article in the Ukrainian code, the conclusion seems obvious: the police suspect that the Hasid was killed.
Not necessarily.
The Ukrainian police have a long-standing practice of registering under Part 1 of Article 115 the discovery of a body even when there are no signs of violence during the examination, and a completely different cause of death seems most likely. For example, the police in the Lviv region opened a case under this article after discovering a man in a river: no signs of violence were found, the cause was to be established by forensic examination. In Odessa, the police explicitly wrote about possible registration under Article 115 with the note “accident” when there were also no visible signs of violence on the body.
There were even more illustrative cases: drownings, discovery of a body in a park, presumed accident — and the procedural article at the first stage is still the same.
Therefore, “a case has been opened under Article 115” and “the police have established that a murder occurred” are two completely different phrases.
And for NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency it is more important not to spread the scary version before the investigation, but to show the reader why the Ukrainian legal wording looks harsher than the actual position of the police.
Why the community is seeking the speedy transfer of the body
There is no mystery here. After Elmakayes was found dead, Jewish organizations began working with Ukrainian authorities to transfer the body for burial as soon as possible.
Aaron Ben-Harush from United Hatzalah confirmed that representatives of the organization are dealing with this issue. Israeli Walla also reported that the international division of ZAKA is involved in the procedure of releasing the body and its further burial.
From here, probably, the more colorful version about “the community raised all connections and is trying to wrest the body from Ukrainian experts” grew. There are indeed connections and negotiations, and the participation of several organizations too. But we found no confirmation of the story about some “local authorities,” pressure on investigators, or attempts to interfere with the investigation.
The situation itself is quite conflictual, without embellishments. For a religious Jewish family, a delay in burial is a heavy thing, and they try to lay the body to rest as quickly as possible. For a Ukrainian investigator, the sudden death of a foreign citizen during a massive international pilgrimage is a case where handing over the body before necessary procedures and then discovering that an important examination was not conducted would be a completely different problem.
Both sides are in a hurry here. Just each for their own reason.
And another Ukrainian-Israeli layer
Elmakayes’s death did not occur on an ordinary September day. Tens of thousands of pilgrims were in Uman, the city was living in a special mode, and Ukrainian and Israeli police were working together.
Therefore, the death of a British citizen almost automatically became a case where several systems intersected: Ukrainian police, Israeli representatives, United Hatzalah, ZAKA, the religious community, and the family of the deceased.
Hence the huge number of versions. Someone saw the body and decided the person was beaten. Someone heard the article number of the Ukrainian Criminal Code and read it as official confirmation of murder. Someone saw the struggle for the speedy release of the body and already drew “diplomats and local authorities.”
For now, the solid part of the story is much shorter.
Yitzhak Elmakayes was 44 years old. He lived in London, was the father of seven children, and arrived in Ukraine on August 10. On September 12, he was found dead in a forest strip on Kotsyubinsky Street in Uman — in a place where, according to acquaintances, he had already come to pray. During the initial examination, the Ukrainian police did not find external signs of violent death but appointed examinations and began an investigation.
There are initial reports of possible signs of violence. They cannot simply be discarded because they were there, and it was precisely with them that the Israeli part of this story began. But turning them into an established murder is even more impossible for now.
Currently, the answer lies not in a loud headline but with the forensic expert. And if the examination shows something that differs from the initial police examination, then the story will indeed change. Until that moment, it is more correct to leave the word “murder” with a question mark — as a version being checked, not as an already established fact.
On July 2, 2025, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine decided to grant the burial site of Tzadik Rabbi Nachman in the city of Uman the status of a site of national significance. This decision enhances the protection of the holy site and highlights its unique value for both Ukrainian and Jewish cultural and spiritual heritage.
This was reported by the government representative in the Verkhovna Rada, Taras Melnychuk.
“The category of the local landmark ‘Prominent Site — the Tomb of Tzadik Nachman’, located at Hryhorii Kosynka Street 1, Uman, Cherkasy region, has been changed to a national landmark under the category of history.”
The tomb of Tzadik Rabbi Nachman is the central pilgrimage site for Breslov Hasidim, especially during Rosh Hashanah. In 2025, the Jewish New Year falls on October 2–4, and tens of thousands of pilgrims from Israel and other countries are expected to arrive.
The History of Rabbi Nachman’s Grave in Uman: From Neglect to a National Symbol
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) was the grandson of the Baal Shem Tov and founder of Breslov Hasidism, one of the deepest and most influential spiritual paths in Jewish tradition. During the final months of his life, he suffered from a serious illness and decided to move to Uman, the site where thousands of Jews were massacred during the Haidamak uprising in 1768. He explained this as a desire to be buried near the martyrs who had died for their faith.
On October 16, 1810 (17 Tishrei 5571), during the Sukkot holiday, Rabbi Nachman passed away and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Uman.
Spiritual Legacy and the Power of Tikkun Klali
Shortly before his death, Rabbi Nachman made a spiritual promise that became the foundation for Hasidic pilgrimage:
«מי שיבוא על קברי ויתן פרוטה לצדקה ויאמר אלו העשרה מזמורים – אני אתאמץ מאוד להושיעו» “Whoever comes to my grave, gives a coin to charity, and recites these ten psalms — I will exert myself greatly to help him.”
This refers to Tikkun Klali, the general remedy for the soul through the recitation of ten specific Psalms. This practice is especially important on Rosh Hashanah, when the tzadik is believed to intercede on behalf of pilgrims during the Heavenly Judgment.
An even stronger expression is preserved in oral tradition:
«אפילו אם הוא בשאול תחתית – אמשכהו משם» “Even if he is in the lowest depths of hell — I will pull him out.”
Destruction and Forgetting in the 20th Century
Until the 1920s, pilgrims visited Rabbi Nachman’s grave annually. After the Bolshevik revolution, everything changed:
In the 1930s, the synagogue at the site was turned into a metal factory;
The cemetery was built over with residential buildings and gardens;
Pilgrimage was forbidden and dangerous.
Despite this, even during the Stalinist era, individual Hasidim came secretly, posing as tourists. Until the mid-1930s, a small underground beit midrash operated at the site.
Revival: From Small Groups to Tens of Thousands
With the beginning of perestroika in the USSR, pilgrimage resumed:
1988: 250 pilgrims celebrated Rosh Hashanah in Uman for the first time.
1989: about 1,000 participants.
1990: over 2,000.
1991: dozens of flights from Israel, the US, Canada, UK, France, Australia.
After the collapse of the USSR, the pilgrimage became massive. By 2015–2016, the number of pilgrims during Rosh Hashanah reached 30,000–31,000 annually.
State Recognition: Kravchuk’s 1994 Decree
On June 7, 1994, by decree of President Leonid Kravchuk, Rabbi Nachman’s grave received official status as a historical and cultural center.
Land Purchase and the Establishment of a Foundation
In the early 1990s, Breslov Hasidim purchased the land on which the grave and its adjacent infrastructure are located. In 1996, the International Charitable Foundation of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was registered in Uman, with Nathan Ben-Nun as its president.
The foundation manages:
synagogues and prayer halls;
educational institutions (cheders);
mikvahs and charity points;
hostels for pilgrims;
security services and medical support.
Reburial Attempt: Conflict with the Tzadik’s Will
In January 1993, during a visit to Jerusalem, President Leonid Kravchuk agreed to the possible transfer of Rabbi Nachman’s remains to Israel. However, this provoked a strong reaction from Breslov Hasidim, as such a move contradicted the tzadik’s own will.
Later, two Israeli Hasidim attempted to exhume the grave secretly but were stopped by Ukrainian police. Since then, the issue of transfer has been officially closed.
Yushchenko’s Decree and an Unfulfilled Program
In 2005, President Viktor Yushchenko signed a decree instructing the Cabinet to develop a state support program for pilgrimages to Uman. However, the government failed to implement it.
In 2007, during a visit to Israel, representatives of the foundation presented Yushchenko with a Cup of Blessing in gratitude for his support of the pilgrims and recognition of Uman’s significance for the Jewish people.
Anti-Semitic Act of Vandalism in 2016
In December 2016, a building on the complex’s territory was doused in red paint and a pig’s head with a swastika was thrown inside. The crime caused an international outcry and was taken under personal control of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General.
donations for mikvahs, candles, food, and complex needs;
logistics and safety during wartime;
the foundation’s structure and operations in Ukraine and abroad.
What Are “Monuments of National Importance” in Ukraine and What Does It Mean for the Grave of Tzadik Nachman?
Monuments of national importance in Ukraine are heritage sites that hold exceptional historical, spiritual, artistic, scientific, or cultural value. They are protected at the state level and included in the State Register of Immovable Monuments of Ukraine by the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers.
Criteria for National Status
To receive the status of a national monument, a site must meet one or more of the following criteria:
Uniqueness and exceptional historical significance — participation in key events or association with prominent individuals;
Architectural and artistic value — a monument of architecture, construction, or art;
Religious and cultural significance — a special role for an entire nation or religious community, both historically and today;
International recognition — a site of pilgrimage or international attention.
What Changes with National Status?
Granting the grave of Tzadik Nachman in Uman the status of a national monument means:
Before
After
Protection at the local level
State-level protection under Ukrainian law
Limited restoration resources
Priority funding for preservation, improvement, and security
No strict rules for nearby construction
Development restrictions in the protection zone
Lower international status
Recognition at national and international levels
What Does It Mean for the Hasidic Community and Pilgrims?
For the Jewish community in Ukraine and Hasidim around the world, this Cabinet decision of July 2, 2025 is a historic milestone. The Ukrainian government now takes official responsibility for preserving the grave of the founder of Breslov Hasidism. This ensures long-term protection of the holy site from vandalism, unauthorized development, and bureaucratic instability.
The grave of Tzadik Nachman is no longer just a religious site, but a recognized national symbol of Ukraine’s spiritual heritage. It is an important step in strengthening the bond between the Ukrainian and Jewish peoples, which is especially vital in today’s world.
Moreover, this status opens doors for international cooperation in cultural tourism, attracting investments, and organizing pilgrimages in partnership with both Ukrainian and foreign stakeholders.
Thus, the new status is not just a formality. It is a recognition of the deep connection between this place, the history of Ukraine, and the Jewish people. No matter how the political situation evolves, state protection ensures that the memory of Tzadik Nachman will be preserved for future generations.
You can follow updates on this topic and other important developments in Jewish life in Ukraine on the website of NAnews – Israel News.
Conclusion: A Place That Unites
The designation of the grave of Rabbi Nachman as a monument of national importance is an act of memory, respect, and recognition. It is a gesture that strengthens ties between the Jewish and Ukrainian peoples, between Israel and Ukraine, between spiritual heritage and modern statehood.
On September 8, 2026, an exhibition opened in Kyiv, the title of which initially seems almost chamber-like: “Painted Prayers. Endangered Painting in the Synagogues of Ukrainian Bukovina” — translated from Ukrainian as “Painted Prayers. Synagogue Paintings of Ukrainian Bukovina at Risk”.
In fact, the story here is much more than a few old walls and photographs. It is about the Jewish world of Bukovina, which for decades was destroyed, disappeared, rebuilt, silenced, and now it is literally being reassembled — through paintings, architecture, old images, digital models, and the work of young artists.
The exhibition opened in the Grand Hall of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine on Bulvarno-Kudryavska, 20. It runs from September 8 to October 10, 2026. The National Academy of Arts of Ukraine is the main source of information for this material.
And I think something else is fundamental. The National Academy speaks of these monuments specifically as Jewish heritage of Ukraine and emphasizes the significance of the project for Ukrainian culture.
Not “traces of a foreign people on the country’s territory.” Not “exoticism of former Bukovina.” Their heritage, which must be saved.
This difference in wording explains a lot.
Not a foreign story: in Kyiv, they are saving the paintings of synagogues of Ukrainian Bukovina – exhibition ‘Painted Prayers. Synagogue Paintings of Ukrainian Bukovina at Risk’
The exhibition was detailed by the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, which published material on September 11, 2026, about the opening of the project, its participants, the history of the study of Bukovina synagogues, and new technologies for preserving paintings. The Academy provides the composition of the Ukrainian-German team, talks about working with the synagogue in Novoselytsia, creating its digital model, the participation of young Ukrainian artists, and the further route of the exhibition. The full message from the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine can be read here.
Not only art historians were present at the opening
The project was presented by the leadership of the National Academy. At the opening, the president of the NAM of Ukraine Victor Sydorenko, first vice-president Valery Bitaev, vice-presidents Yuriy Vakulenko and Oles Sanin, academic secretary of the department of art synthesis Nikolai Yakovlev spoke.
They talked about the combination of scientific work, art, and new technologies, as well as the international composition of the team. The Academy separately notes the role of the curator — Professor Yevhen Kotlyar, a corresponding member of the NAM of Ukraine, who has been studying art Judaica and synagogue art for many years.
This is an important name for the whole story because the current Kyiv exhibition did not arise from scratch.
Kotlyar worked on the topic of Bukovina synagogues together with the Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovina Jews, whose director is Nikolai Kushnir. The result of that work was a bilingual catalog and a series of traveling exhibitions that were shown in various cities of Ukraine back in 2016–2017.
So this is not a project invented yesterday for another commemorative date. This line of research has been going on for at least a decade, and the current stage has simply become much more technological and international.
2016, 2023, 2025, 2026: how the project was assembled
The next point is October 2023.
Then, on the initiative of the Ukraine Art Aid Center, a Ukrainian-German working group was formed. The center is headed by Dr. Johannes Nathan. The task was extremely practical: to find modern ways to preserve the Jewish heritage of Ukraine, which is threatened with physical destruction in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The work of the group was coordinated by Professor Stefan Hoppe. The German exhibition version was curated by Professor Alexandra Lipinska.
Then the project moved out of research offices.
In November 2025, the exhibition was first shown at the University and City Library of Cologne. After Cologne, it began traveling around Germany. At the time of the opening of the Kyiv exhibition, the German version was in Düsseldorf, with further plans for Augsburg, Marburg, and other cities.
And in parallel, a Ukrainian route emerged.
The first exhibition of the project in Ukraine opened at the National Academy of Arts. Yevhen Kotlyar called this, in essence, recognition of the significance of the topic for Ukrainian culture.
Here, perhaps, the main idea of the whole story arises. Jewish synagogues of Bukovina are not being returned to Ukraine from outside. They have always been part of the history of this land. Just part of this history lay too long under plaster, behind closed doors, or in old archives.
Four exhibitions within one
The organizers specifically designed the space so that the visitor goes through four interconnected blocks, rather than just looking at a set of beautiful photographs.
The first is the historical and cultural context and material environment of the life of Bukovina Jews. That is, the viewer is first explained who lived here, in what environment the communities existed, and why these buildings appeared at all.
The second block is dedicated to the architecture of synagogues and the reconstruction of iconographic programs of paintings. Modern photographs stand next to historical images, reconstruction drawings, texts, and painted copies of lost or damaged fragments.
The third shows what is happening with this heritage today. Students of the Department of Monumental Painting of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts do not just look at old walls in lectures. Anna Shcherbakova and Tatyana Zamnius practically studied them and created painted reconstructions. Vadim Koltun, now living in Germany, uses plots, motifs, and ornamentation of synagogue paintings in his own work.
The fourth block is technology. Laser scanning, digital twin, three-dimensional fixation, and an animated model of a building that may not survive the next decades physically.
And it is here that Novoselytsia appears.
The synagogue where the paintings were found — and almost immediately realized they could be lost
The synagogue in Novoselytsia, Chernivtsi region, became one of the central objects of the entire exhibition.
At the opening, this was discussed by human rights activist and former dissident Iosif Zisels, head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine and executive vice-president of the Congress of National Communities of Ukraine.
According to him, the unique paintings of the semi-destroyed Novoselytsia synagogue were revealed about fifteen years ago. But their discovery did not mean salvation. On the contrary, it became clear that the discovered heritage was in an extremely vulnerable state. The Academy uses a very harsh wording: the paintings were revealed and simultaneously practically “doomed.”
Now they are trying to at least accurately record this synagogue.
As part of the project, three-dimensional images and an animated model of the building were created. The work was carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Architecture of the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz and the Ukrainian company Skeiron.
The methodology for creating a digital twin and working with laser scanning is presented by Professor Jan Lutteroth. Moreover, the current project has already received continuation in the international program Opt3D, dedicated to cross-border research of architectural monuments at risk. It includes four synagogues from Ukraine.
For readers of NANews, this story is not new. Back on February 2, 2025, we showed in detail how Ukrainian specialists digitize Bukovina synagogues and why their digital twin is needed at all.
And on July 4, 2026, we returned to this topic more broadly — in a material about the attempt to preserve Jewish monuments of Ukraine in digital form before some of them are physically lost.
Now the continuation of that work is visible. Scanning did not remain a technological experiment for a couple of beautiful 3D models. It has entered museum, research, and educational work.
Who exactly is making “Painted Prayers”
Behind the exhibition is a rather large international team, and it is worth listing them here precisely because it shows the scale of the work.
The authorship team included Stefan Hoppe from the Institute of Art History at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich; Alexandra Lipinska, associated with the Institute of Art History at the University of Cologne and the University of Wrocław; Yevhen Kotlyar from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts and the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
Also in the team is Nikolai Kushnir — Chernivtsi Museum of the History and Culture of Bukovina Jews and Chernivtsi National University named after Yuriy Fedkovych; Jan Lutteroth — Institute of Architecture in Mainz and the Johann Gottfried Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg; Andreas Pfutzner — Martin Buber Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Cologne.
The Ukrainian technical partner was the Lviv-based Skeiron.
Translations were done by Oksana Kozyr-Fedotova and Nikolai Kushnir. The design was developed by Jeanette Bonefeld and Yulianna Vishchak, and the digital implementation of the exhibition was carried out by Alyona Barkalova.
The work was funded by the Ukraine Art Aid Center, Böckler-Mare-Balticum-Stiftung, and the Jewish cultural center “Beit-Dan” in Kharkiv.
When you see all these names and organizations together, it becomes harder to call what is happening simply “an exhibition about synagogues.” It is already a system: a historian finds and explains the object, an architect records it, an artist reconstructs it, a digital specialist creates a model, and a student takes this visual language into their work a few years later.
This is how culture continues to live. Not by itself, unfortunately. Someone pulls it out of a crumbling building with their hands every time.
Zisels and Finberg: there is also a story of Jewish revival in Ukraine
In Kyiv, not only Iosif Zisels spoke.
Leonid Finberg — sociologist, director of the Center for the Study of the History and Culture of East European Jewry, and chief editor of the publishing house “Dukh i Litera” — also spoke.
The National Academy of Arts especially notes that Zisels and Finberg were active participants in the Jewish revival in Ukraine from the first years of independence and played an important role in the institutionalization of Jewish public and cultural life in the country.
Finberg spoke about the need to continue publishing scientific books on Jewish artistic heritage. He also reminded of the studies of Jewish art that Ukrainian scientists were engaged in back in the 1920s–1930s.
This detail breaks another too simple story. As if the study of Jewish heritage in Ukraine appeared only today, as a result of European grants or new memory policies. No. There were researchers before the war, there were attempts to study this in the 20th century, there were people who rebuilt Jewish public life after Ukraine regained independence in 1991.
And today this process no longer looks marginal.
It takes place in the hall of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
Jews in Ukraine — not guests who arrived yesterday
Here I will separate the author’s assessment from the Academy’s message.
You cannot speak for all Ukrainian Jews: “they feel at home” — and put a period. Everyone has their own biography. There is tragic family memory, emigration, the Holocaust, Soviet anti-Semitism, old and new conflicts. It would be untrue to smooth everything over with one beautiful phrase.
But there is another criterion of home, and it is much more serious than a slogan.
Whose history is considered part of the country’s history?
If the paintings of a Jewish synagogue in a small town in Bukovina are studied by Ukrainian scientists; if the Ukrainian art academy trains students on them; if the state National Academy of Arts calls them the Jewish heritage of Ukraine; if a Ukrainian company scans a crumbling building for future restoration — then Jews here are not museum “aliens.”
Their culture is embedded in the history of the country because it was created here.
This is not a gift to Jews from modern Ukraine. No one “allows” this history to become Ukrainian. It already was — just historical memory too often cut out pieces that did not fit into a convenient scheme.
Bukovina is especially ruthless to such schemes. In one region, different languages, religions, states, and cultures intersected for centuries. Separating the Jewish part from this history so that everything else remains intact is impossible. It will already be another, artificially truncated Bukovina.
Young artists are more important than another memorial plaque
I think the work of Anna Shcherbakova, Tatyana Zamnius, and Vadim Koltun speaks more about the future of the project than ceremonial speeches.
Why?
Because a monument can be conserved — and forgotten. You can open a memorial plaque, take photos, report, and then walk past again.
Something else is happening here. A young Ukrainian artist studies the principle of constructing Jewish synagogue painting, tries to restore a lost part, understands symbols and ornament. At some point, what was considered the heritage of the past already enters their own professional experience.
From this moment, the boundary “their culture — our culture” begins to crumble on its own.
Not because someone declared a year of tolerance. Just a student of the art academy works with this material as part of the cultural environment they need to know.
This is the integration of memory, not a poster about it.
From Bukovina to Podolia: this is already becoming a map of Ukraine
Moreover, Bukovina is not an isolated case.
Just a few days ago, on September 10, 2026, NANews reported on a large expedition across Jewish Podolia: researchers surveyed more than 30 historical synagogues in Ukraine.
When you put Podolia and Bukovina side by side, the geography begins to change. Before us is no longer a few preserved “Jewish objects.” A whole network of towns and villages is visible, where Jewish life was part of the usual urban fabric.
The synagogue stood there not in a parallel reality. People came out of it onto the same street as everyone else.
This simple thing is sometimes lost behind the word “heritage.”
The war made this work urgent
The project has a reason to hurry, and the National Academy formulates it completely openly.
The Ukrainian-German group was created in 2023 specifically to find ways to save Jewish monuments under the threat of physical destruction during the Russian-Ukrainian war.
So the digital twin today is not a fashionable museum toy.
There is a building. There is a painting. There is a war. There is the usual aging of structures, lack of sufficient funds, decades of previous neglect. And no one can guarantee what state this object will be in five or ten years.
NANews has already compiled a separate chronology of Jewish objects in Ukraine damaged or destroyed as a result of Russian aggression.
Therefore, the phrase “manage to save” now sounds literally.
If it is not possible to preserve the physical wall, data, images, dimensions, the location of paintings, and scientific description must remain. So that after the war there is at least a possibility to return to restoration, and not start from scratch and a few random photographs.
Why the opening was done right now
The date was also not chosen by chance.
The Academy directly links the September presentation with two events: the approach of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the anniversary of the mass killings in Babi Yar.
One calendar marker speaks of the continuation of life, the other — of the attempt to destroy this life.
Between them is an exhibition about a culture that still did not disappear.
At the opening, Kyiv violinist and vocalist Adel Kontorovich, a member of the symphonic Gos_orchestra, performed. She played traditional Hasidic melodies — nigunim. The National Academy separately notes that this music became part of the overall emotional structure of the evening.
And here the story unexpectedly stops being just about walls.
When the nigun sounds again in Kyiv, and young artists nearby show reconstructions of the murals of the Bukovinian synagogue, it is not quite a memorial for a vanished culture.
Culture is being used again.
For Israel, this is also a family story.
From Israel, such an exhibition can easily be seen as just another European heritage preservation project. And that would be a mistake.
For the Israeli reader, the names Chernivtsi, Novoselytsia, Kyiv, Podolia, Zhytomyr, Odessa often sound different than for a European tourist. Behind them lies family geography — the birthplace of a grandfather, the story of a great-grandmother, the city from which someone left for Eretz Yisrael, a surname on an old photograph.
We write a lot about this in our section about Jews from Ukraine. And every time the same problem arises: Israel remembers the people well, but not always the environment from which they came.
Synagogue murals return precisely the environment.
Not just a list of the deceased. Not just a photograph of a rabbi. Not just a memorial.
The walls show what the visual world of the Jewish community was like, what people saw in front of them during prayer, what artistic language they created. And if this language is preserved today in Ukraine, it directly concerns Israel, where the descendants of that world live.
Germany, Ukraine, and Jewish heritage — a difficult but important construction.
There is another layer in the current project that should not be overlooked.
It is Ukrainian-German.
The first exhibition is held in Cologne, then Düsseldorf, with Augsburg and Marburg ahead. German universities participate in research and digital documentation. German and Ukrainian specialists work together to preserve monuments of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
No exhibition can ‘close’ the Holocaust, and it would be strange to try to see a beautiful historical reconciliation with a ready-made finale here.
But history does not provide ready-made finales.
It provides the next action.
Today, this action becomes the joint work to ensure that another Jewish synagogue does not disappear without a trace.
“They lived at home.”
It seems to me that this is exactly what the entire exhibition leads to.
The Jews of Bukovina were not a temporary population that once passed through Ukrainian land and left behind interesting ornaments. Here was their everyday life. Here they built communities and buildings, created art, prayed, raised children.
After them, the walls remained.
The Soviet period, the Holocaust, emigration, border changes, and the current war turned many of these walls into ruins. Now sometimes it is necessary to save at least their digital geometry.
But there is an important change.
In modern Ukraine, there is less and less need to explain why it is necessary to preserve a Jewish synagogue as part of Ukrainian heritage. The National Academy of Arts talks about this almost routinely: this is Jewish heritage of Ukraine, it is important for Ukrainian culture and needs to be studied, shown, and saved.
Perhaps this is what a normal attitude towards shared history looks like.
Not pretending that there were never conflicts, anti-Semitism, or catastrophes in it. Not rewriting the past in convenient colors. But also not pushing Jews out of the country’s history, leaving them only a separate chapter about the Holocaust.
There was life before the Holocaust. After it, life continued too.
Today, Iosif Zisels and Leonid Finberg stand in the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and talk about preserving Jewish culture. Yevhen Kotlyar has been studying synagogue painting for many years. Mykola Kushnir works with the heritage of the Jews of Bukovina. Ukrainian Skeiron scans the synagogue in Novoselytsia. Kharkiv students restore its painting.
This is no longer a story about ‘once Jews lived here.’
They lived here at home. Their culture is woven into the history of Ukraine, not glued to it on the side.
And perhaps one of the most important changes of recent decades is that today this thought no longer needs to be proven with loud words. Sometimes it is enough to see who is saving the old murals from the wall.
“Every Jew is a messenger of the Almighty to restore the connection of the people of Israel with their tradition and roots. This is the duty of every Jew, regardless of their personal level of Torah knowledge. Even if your knowledge is not great, go out and share it with those who have not yet received it.”
For the Israeli reader and for Jews around the world, it is important to understand one basic thing in the story of Menachem Mendel Schneerson: his connection with Ukraine is not a decorative footnote, but the starting point of his entire biography. The Lubavitcher Rebbe was born on April 18, 1902 in Nikolaev, grew up in Yekaterinoslav, now Dnipro, and came from a family deeply embedded in the Jewish leadership of the south of present-day Ukraine, before passing through Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, and New York to become the seventh Chabad Rebbe and one of the most influential figures in modern Jewry.
If you look at the biography not from the end, but from the beginning, its route looks extremely specific.
April 18, 1902 — birth in Nikolaev; 1909 — the family’s move to Yekaterinoslav after his father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, was appointed city rabbi; March 1915 — bar mitzvah in Yekaterinoslav; November 1928 — wedding in Warsaw; 1933 — Paris; June 23, 1941 — arrival in New York; January 17, 1951 — official assumption of the role of the seventh Rebbe; June 12, 1994 — end of earthly life. This sequence is important not only for the dates. It shows that the “American Rebbe” grew out of a specific Ukrainian Jewish space.
The Ukrainian roots of this story are much deeper than just a place of birth.
Jews from Ukraine: Menachem Mendel Schneerson — from Ukrainian Nikolaev to worldwide fame
Nikolaev in this biography is not a random city from the metrics.
On his maternal side, Schneerson’s grandfather, Rabbi Meir Shlomo Yanovsky, was the chief rabbi of Nikolaev. On his paternal side, his father, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, became the rabbi of Yekaterinoslav in 1909 and later the chief rabbi of the city, where he served for decades. Thus, the future Rebbe grew up not just in a religious family, but in a home that was at the very center of Ukrainian urban Jewish life at the beginning of the 20th century.
That is why Ukraine for him is not only the geography of birth but also the first school of public leadership. Chabad.org directly links the Rebbe’s childhood with the family’s move to the large Ukrainian city of Yekaterinoslav, where his father became the spiritual leader of the local community.
By his bar mitzvah in 1915, Menachem Mendel was known for his scholarship and piety, and the family environment itself combined strict religious tradition, communal responsibility, and intellectual openness.
There is also a more dramatic Ukrainian line.
In the early Soviet years, his father became one of the most prominent religious figures of Jewish USSR. After the departure of the sixth Rebbe from the USSR in 1927, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak essentially became the most prominent direct heir of the early Chabad Rebbes on Soviet territory until he was arrested in 1939. Menachem Mendel later spoke of him as a man who took responsibility for spreading Judaism in this country. For the topic of Ukraine, this is fundamental: the Schneerson home in Dnipro was not just a home of scholars, but a home of resistance to the spiritual devastation of Jewish life.
Another strong, though less known, Ukrainian stroke concerns the family during the war years. Materials from the Jewish community of Dnipro directly state that Dov-Ber Schneerson, the Rebbe’s brother and the second son of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak, was among the victims of the Nazis on the territory of a psychiatric hospital in Igren near Dnipro. This is an important point: Ukraine in the history of the Schneerson family is not only a homeland and community but also a space of personal family tragedy.
From Yekaterinoslav to New York
After the Ukrainian stage, Schneerson’s biography enters the European and then the global dimension. In November 1928, he married Chaya Mushka, the daughter of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, in Warsaw. After that, he lived and studied in Berlin, and in 1933 moved to Paris. This European phase is no less important than the Ukrainian one: it explains why the Rebbe’s personality combined not only Hasidic depth but also an interest in science, technology, modern culture, and languages.
He left Europe already in the pre-war catastrophe. On June 12, 1941, he and his wife boarded the ship Serpa Pinto in Lisbon, and on June 23, 1941, on the 28th of Sivan 5701, arrived in New York. Almost immediately after arrival, his father-in-law, the sixth Rebbe, appointed him to head Chabad’s social and educational programs. This was not yet a formal position as head of the movement, but it was here that his organizational revolution began.
Formal leadership came later.
After the death of the sixth Rebbe in 1950, Menachem Mendel Schneerson long resisted accepting the title, but eventually, on January 17, 1951, became the seventh Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. Sources agree on the main point: it was after 1951 that Chabad began to transform from a relatively small Hasidic environment into a global system, and the Rebbe himself became a central figure for hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of people who perceived him as a spiritual authority far beyond the narrow Chabad circle.
What exactly he organized Chabad, not just “expanded” it
Here it is important not to slide into the general formula “he made Chabad global.”
In fact, the mechanism was quite specific. Immediately after arriving in the USA, the Rebbe was put in charge of the educational and social direction of the movement’s work. This work was carried out through Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch — the educational center, through Machne Israel — the structure of public and religious mobilization, and through Kehot — the publishing center. The Rebbe himself said in the early 1950s that his father-in-law “chose him” for the implementation of the tasks of Merkos and Machne Israel, and these institutions should not be allowed to weaken.
In other words, under him, Chabad became not just a school of ideas, but a system of institutions.
The second element is the emphasis on education.
Even in early letters and speeches around Merkos, the focus is constantly on schools, including for girls, on youth circles, on literature, on teaching not only “our own,” but also the widest possible Jewish circle. Even before he became Rebbe, this logic was already visible: building a living network of schools and educational centers instead of passively waiting for people to return to tradition on their own.
The third element is shlichut, that is, the system of emissaries.
The Rebbe did not build a centralized pyramid only from Brooklyn. He built a network of emissary families who went to specific cities and countries and opened local centers there. The Chabad House is the nerve center of all the educational and public programs of the shaliach, and the Rebbe constantly demanded the expansion of existing centers and the opening of new ones where Jews live. Therefore, the network grew not as an abstract brand, but as thousands of local homes, schools, synagogues, dining rooms, youth programs, and crisis assistance.
The fourth element is the ability to translate Hasidic tradition into the language of the modern world.
Already after 1951, the Rebbe spoke about the role of American Jewry, about personal responsibility, about historical mission, and at the same time did not limit the work to one country. His early steps to strengthen the network in North Africa, and then a broader deployment of the global system, show that he thought of Chabad not as a community “for its own,” but as a global infrastructure of Jewish presence.
The result is known quantitatively. According to Chabad.org, today 4,900 emissary families work through 3,500 institutions in 100 countries and territories. And the US Congress in the 1994 Gold Medal Act directly spoke of a center of “more than 2,000 educational, social, and rehabilitation institutions” that grew around his work. This is an important figure for your text: the global Chabad network is not a metaphor, but an institutional fact.
What Ukraine remembers about him today
Ukrainian memory of Menachem Mendel Schneerson is not based on random publications, but on documents, city toponymy, archival editions, and living community practice. And this is fundamentally important for such an article: Ukraine remembers him not only as a global Rebbe but also as its native son, whose biography begins in Nikolaev and continues in Yekaterinoslav, now Dnipro. This memory is especially noticeable today in two cities — Nikolaev and Dnipro, and in each of them, it is fixed in its own way.
The first and strongest layer of memory is archival. The State Archive of the Nikolaev Region published a register of metric books, which directly states that the book of the Nikolaev synagogue with birth records for 1902–1903 is stored as fund 484, inventory 1, case 1486. This is not yet the published birth record of Schneerson himself, but it is an accurate archival roadmap to it. For serious research, this is a key argument: Ukraine preserves not only the memory of the Rebbe but also the documentary fabric of his origin. That is why the conversation about his connection with Ukraine relies not on retellings, but on real archival funds. Here your initial archival framework is also very important.
The second layer is memorial-research. In 2019, the State Archive of the Nikolaev Region presented the book “Our Fellow Countryman Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The History of the Lavat-Yanovsky-Schneerson Family in Nikolaev”. The official page of the archive directly states that the book outlines the biographies of three generations of the Lavat-Yanovsky-Schneerson family, “whose fates were closely connected with Nikolaev,” and gives a brief outline of the life and spiritual activity of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. This is a very strong detail: it is not about a private brochure of enthusiasts, but about a publication that the state archival institution itself brings into the public space. That is, Ukraine not only knows that Schneerson was born in Nikolaev but also formalizes it as part of its own local history.
The third layer is urban toponymy, that is, memory inscribed not on an archival shelf, but on the everyday map of the country. In Nikolaev, Schneerson Street exists as an active city address object: this is visible from the official materials of the Nikolaev City Council’s Department of Education, where “vul. Schneersona (Karl Liebknecht)” is mentioned. For the article, this is important not only as a formal fact of renaming but also as a sign that the Rebbe’s name has become part of everyday city reality — not external, but local, Nikolaev name. In your archival text, it is separately recorded that the renaming refers to February 19, 2016 and is formalized by a city order.
But if Nikolaev primarily preserves the place of birth and archival memory, then Dnipro today preserves already living and active memory of Schneerson. Here his name is present not only in stories about the family but also in the urban environment. The Dnipro History Museum has a separate page about Menachem Mendel Schneerson Street, where the date of renaming is indicated — November 26, 2015. On this museum page, a detailed biographical reference is given: birth in Nikolaev, the family’s move to Yekaterinoslav, his father’s service in the city, the beginning of leadership in Chabad in 1951, and Schneerson’s role in creating the emissary institution. This is not only internal religious memory but part of officially accessible urban historical navigation.
Even more importantly, Schneerson’s name in Dnipro exists not as a museum plaque, but as part of active Jewish infrastructure. The official page of the Jewish Lyceum No. 144 named after Levi Yitzchak Schneerson indicates its address as 1 Menachem-Mendel Shneerson St., Dnipro, and also reminds that the school moved to this street back in 1993, when the former Minin Street received a new name. This means that Schneerson’s name is embedded not only in memory but also in the everyday educational life of the Dnipro Jewish community. Every day it exists there as a real school address, not just as a memorial formula.
The fourth layer is community memory, and here Dnipro is especially indicative. In April 2025, a farbrengen was held in the “Alter Shul” synagogue on the occasion of the 123rd anniversary of the birth of Menachem Mendel Schneerson. The community material states that the event was dedicated specifically to the anniversary of the birth of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Adam Smilyansky separately reminded that it was thanks to the Rebbe that his personal shaliach in Dnipro became Shmuel Kaminetsky, who created the modern community of the city. That is, the memory of Schneerson in Ukraine here lives not only as respect for the past but also as an explanation of the origin of the very modern Dnipro Jewish world.
In January 2026, Dnipro again marked this memory in an even more large-scale form. A large farbrengen dedicated to Yud Shevat was held at the Menorah Center, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the moment when Menachem Mendel Schneerson assumed leadership of the Jewish people and the title of Lubavitcher Rebbe. The DJC publication emphasizes that at this evening, the chief rabbi of Dnipro, Shmuel Kaminetsky, told how he arrived in the city in 1990 by direct order of the Rebbe to revive Jewish life. This is a very important link: in Ukraine, Schneerson is remembered not only as a person of the past but also as someone whose decisions continue to work through current rabbis, schools, and institutions.
There is also another level — educational. Already on February 1, 2026, special events were held at the Dnipro Jewish Lyceum for Yud Shevat, where students were reminded that it is on this date that the Sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe is remembered and the beginning of the leadership of the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is celebrated, “whose teachings continue to inspire the Jewish people around the world today.” This is an especially strong stroke: the memory of him in Ukraine is transmitted not only through adults and archivists but also through the school environment, that is, it becomes part of the upbringing of a new generation of Ukrainian Jews.
Therefore, it is most correct to formulate it this way. Ukraine today remembers Menachem Mendel Schneerson in several modes at once. Nikolaev preserves him as an archival fact, family history, and city name. Dnipro preserves him as part of its city map, active educational infrastructure, and living religious memory. And this is perhaps the most important conclusion: the memory of Schneerson in Ukraine is not reduced to one memorial plaque or one archival reference. It exists simultaneously in documents, in books, on the city map, in street names, in school addresses, in farbrengens, in school programs, and in the language of the modern community.
Chabad in modern Ukraine
Modern Chabad in Ukraine is not one center and not one loud surname, but a branched network of communities, schools, synagogues, humanitarian projects, and emissary rabbis who began arriving in the country immediately after the collapse of the USSR.
It was in the 1990s that one after another, the shluchim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe arrived in Ukraine, and from that moment not just “the revival of religious life” began, but the systematic restoration of Jewish infrastructure: from kindergartens and schools to community centers, yeshivas, programs for helping the elderly, and supporting families. For understanding the legacy of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, this is fundamental: his Chabad model did not remain an American or Israeli story but literally returned to the land where his childhood and youth passed.
The main support center of this network became Dnipro. It was here in 1990 that the Rebbe sent Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky and his wife Chana as his emissaries. Since then, Kaminetsky has become one of the central figures of Jewish revival in Ukraine. His arrival in Dnipropetrovsk effectively opened a new era for the city community: a large institutional structure began to be built around him, which later turned Dnipro into one of the strongest Chabad centers in Eastern Europe. On the Ukrainian Chabad map, Dnipro is not just one of the cities, but a factual organizational hub from which educational, humanitarian, and coordination processes have been going on for many years.
At the same time, the northeastern line began to be built. In Kharkiv since September 1990, Rabbi Moishe Moskowitz has been living and serving. His arrival is associated with the beginning of the return of the choral synagogue and the restoration of school and community infrastructure. For the Kharkiv community, this was not just the arrival of a new spiritual leader, but the start of a real institutional assembly of the community after the Soviet break. In Zhitomir in 1992, simultaneously with the return of the synagogue, the family of the young rabbi Shlomo Wilhelm arrived. Over time, Zhitomir became one of the main centers of the western and central Ukrainian Jewish space, and Wilhelm himself became one of the notable figures in the Chabad and educational life of the country. These two lines — Kharkiv and Zhitomir — clearly show that Chabad in Ukraine was not built only around the capital or around Dnipro. It immediately grew as a network of strong regional communities.
A special place is occupied by Kyiv, where several important figures and directions must be distinguished. On the one hand, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine indicates that Rabbi Raphael Rutman became the Rebbe’s emissary in Ukraine in 1993, and in Kyiv participated in the creation of two schools and a junior rabbinical college. This is a very important line of institutional construction: it is about the Kyiv educational base of Chabad, which began to take shape already in the first post-Soviet years. In the capital today, there is also the Kedem community, headed by Pinchas Vyshedsky, who previously worked in Donetsk. That is, Kyiv is not one center, but a node where different Chabad lines, communities, and leaders intersect.
On the other hand, separately and necessarily in this section, Moshe Asman must be named. He is associated with the Kyiv Chabad environment and with the Brodsky Synagogue, which in recent years has become one of the most notable symbols of Jewish life in the capital. Asman is one of the most public and recognizable figures of Jewish Ukraine, especially after the start of the full-scale war. It is through him that the Kyiv line of Chabad has gone far beyond the internal community life: into humanitarian work, into international appeals, into the public representation of Ukrainian Jewry. He cannot be simply placed in line with city rabbis as another regional emissary. In the modern Ukrainian reality, Asman is already a separate metropolitan and national level.
The southern and central direction of the network also developed in stages.
In Zaporozhye, Rabbi Nochum Ehrentreu, after working in Minsk and Dnipro, was appointed chief rabbi of the region in 1997. In Kremenchug, Rabbi Shlomo Salamon came to Ukraine in 1998 and became the rabbi of the city. In Odessa, one of the key leaders of the south became Rabbi Avraham Wolff: from 1992 to August 1998, he was the rabbi of Kherson, and then in August 1998, he headed the Odessa United Jewish Community. This biography is especially indicative because it demonstrates not static, but movement within the Ukrainian Chabad network: emissaries worked in one city and then moved to another, strengthening already larger centers.
After this, the network continued to expand in the early 2000s. In Poltava, Rabbi Yosef Segal has been living and serving since July 4, 2001. In Krivoy Rog, Rabbi Leron Edery has been working since 2002. In Chernivtsi, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Glitshtayn was sent to Bukovina as the chief rabbi of the Chernivtsi region in 2003, and already in 2004, he organized the creation of the community and the restoration of the synagogue. In Sumy, Rabbi Yechiel Levitan moved in 2004 and became the chief rabbi of the city. All these names are important not as a directory for the sake of a directory, but as proof of scale: by the early 2000s, Chabad in Ukraine was no longer a series of separate missions, but a stable national system of presence.
One cannot forget about the east of the country. In Luhansk, Rabbi Shalom Gopin arrived in 1999, after which a school, kindergarten, and other programs were opened in the region. This is especially important in historical perspective: Chabad in Ukraine managed to take root even in those regions that later found themselves at the epicenter of war and occupation. Therefore, the modern map of Chabad in Ukraine is not only a map of active synagogues but also a map of lost, evacuated, or destroyed centers, behind which there are still specific shaliach families and decades of work.
If you put this picture together as a whole, the main thing is visible. Chabad in modern Ukraine is a network that was built in waves: 1990–1992 gave the first key cities — Dnipro, Kharkiv, Zhitomir; 1993–1999 strengthened Kyiv, Zaporozhye, Kremenchug, Odessa, Luhansk; 2001–2004 expanded the presence to Poltava, Krivoy Rog, Chernivtsi, and Sumy. And next to this broad regional map stands the special Kyiv figure of Moshe Asman, who represents not just one city center, but the public face of a significant part of Ukrainian Jewry in wartime.
This is how this section should sound: not as a general paragraph about “the revival of Chabad,” but as a living map of people, families, cities, and dates. Because in the Ukrainian case, Chabad is primarily a network of specific emissaries who came to specific cities and for years rebuilt Jewish life.
Kyiv and Moshe Asman: a separate line within modern Jewish Ukraine
If Dnipro in the history of modern Chabad in Ukraine is the main institutional center, then Kyiv and Moshe Reuven Asman is a completely different, separate level.
Asman is important not only as a city rabbi and not only as a person associated with the Brodsky Synagogue. He has become one of the most notable public figures of Jewish Ukraine in general: from a religious, humanitarian, media, and partly diplomatic point of view. And that is why in the text about Chabad in modern Ukraine, he cannot be left in the status of “another Kyiv rabbi.”
His biography itself explains why he stands out so much from the general row. According to his official office, Moshe Asman was born in 1966 in Leningrad, in his youth was associated with the movement of Soviet refuseniks, and in his teenage years was even publicly named by the Soviet press as “an enemy of Soviet power.” In 1987, he was able to leave for Israel, where he studied at a Chabad yeshiva, later served as a chaplain in the IDF, and worked with the Children of Chernobyl project, helping children from the Chernobyl zone. For the Israeli reader, this is especially important: Asman is not only a Ukrainian rabbi but also a person with Israeli experience, who then returned to the space of the former USSR as a religious leader and organizer.
The key date for the Ukrainian plot is 1995.
It was then, according to the official biography of his office, that Asman was sent to Kyiv to return the historic Brodsky Synagogue to the Jewish community and to reassemble a full-fledged community life around it. The synagogue was built in 1898, lost for religious life during Soviet times, and after the collapse of the USSR became an object of struggle for return to the Jewish community. Asman did not come there to a ready-made platform: the theater still remained in the building, there was no full-fledged community infrastructure, and the task was not just to “open the synagogue,” but to turn it into a real religious and public center of Kyiv.
This is a very important point. In the case of Asman, the Brodsky Synagogue is not just a place of service. It is his main Kyiv project and symbol.
After the theater left the building in 1997, Asman led the restoration work, and three years later the synagogue reopened. He directly explained his plan this way: he did not want to build a “European museum synagogue,” he wanted to make a Jewish home and a Jewish community center. It is this formula that makes him a special figure: he envisioned the Kyiv community not as a facade religious institution, but as a living center capable of gathering people, returning them to practical connection with Judaism, and building a system of assistance, education, and identity.
Around the Brodsky Synagogue under Asman, not only a prayer but also a social environment grew.
Since 1995, he and his family have been restoring Kyiv’s Jewish life through community programs, school education, food for the needy, religious services, and assistance infrastructure. Even if part of these formulations comes from his own team, independent media confirm the general vector: the Brodsky Synagogue under Asman became not just a place of worship, but a full-fledged center of the Kyiv Jewish community. This is important for the section on modern Chabad: here the typical Chabad logic is visible — not separately “rabbi,” separately “synagogue,” separately “social assistance,” but all at once, in one node.
After 2014, his role became even wider. It was after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas that Asman created the Anatevka settlement near Kyiv — as a place for Jewish families who became internally displaced persons.
The project was named after the famous shtetl from the world of Sholem Aleichem, but it was rooted in Ukrainian reality: it was not a literary decoration, but a real response to the wave of forced relocation. In Anatevka, houses, a wooden synagogue, schools, and space for hundreds of people appeared. For understanding the scale of Asman’s figure, this is very important: he turned out to be not only a rabbi of a city synagogue but also the creator of a separate community settlement for Jews displaced by the war from their usual lives.
After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, it was this ability to quickly translate the religious community into emergency rescue mode that made Asman one of the most notable figures of Jewish Ukraine. The Brodsky Synagogue, serving the Kyiv Chabad-Lubavitch community, became a transit point for Jews fleeing from combat areas, and Asman himself was the person behind the evacuation efforts. His official office today states that the structure under his leadership helped evacuate more than 40,000 Ukrainians and continues to conduct large-scale humanitarian work; this figure is best presented as an estimate of his office, but the fact of wide evacuation and humanitarian activity is confirmed by independent publications.
It was during this period that Asman stepped out of the framework of a purely religious leader and became the media face of a significant part of Ukrainian Jewry.
Over the past three decades, he first led the Kyiv community, and then became a notable figure already at the national level; during the full-scale war, he traveled to the front line, made international appeals, visited Washington, and abroad raised the issue of Russian aggression against Ukraine. His frontline trips, viral support videos, and his role as a person who made the community a center of assistance not only for Jews but also for civilian structures and those in need in general. For your article, this is the strongest stroke: Asman is not a cabinet rabbi and not an internal communal administrator, but a field, military, humanitarian, and public leader.
There is also another important aspect — his place in the system of military and public representation.
In April 2023, the ceremony of appointing Rabbi David Milman as a chaplain for Jewish servicemen of Ukraine took place precisely in Asman’s office in the Brodsky Synagogue. This is symbolic: Asman’s Kyiv platform has become not only a place of prayer and assistance to refugees but also a point from which Jewish religious life intersects with the Ukrainian army and the state system of military service. For the section on Chabad in modern Ukraine, this is a very valuable detail because it shows how the community has integrated into the reality of a warring country.
That is why Moshe Asman in the section on modern Chabad in Ukraine is better written about not in one line, but as a separate phenomenon. He combines several roles at once: a Chabad rabbi by origin and school, the restorer of the Brodsky Synagogue, the creator of the Kyiv community center, the initiator of Anatevka, the organizer of evacuation and humanitarian assistance during the war, and one of the most notable international voices of Ukrainian Jewry. If Dnipro gives Chabad in Ukraine its institutional backbone, then Asman’s line gives it a metropolitan, public, and in many ways human face.
Why this is important right now
For Israel and world Jewry, the story of Schneerson is not only the story of one genius but also the story of how Jewish life can return from almost complete destruction.
Nikolaev, Yekaterinoslav, Soviet persecutions, war, exile, emigration — all this could have remained only a tragic tale of a lost world. But in the case of Schneerson, something else happened. From the Ukrainian Jewish experience grew a global religious network; and decades later, this network itself returned to Ukraine — already in the form of rabbis, schools, communities, and memorial work.
That is why the formula can be harsh and clear: Menachem Mendel Schneerson is not just a great Jewish leader born on the territory of present-day Ukraine. He was a man whose family, spiritual, and early public biography grew out of the Ukrainian Jewish space; and his legacy today is again present in Ukraine both as memory and as a living institutional network.
