KYIV, Ukraine — It was a putting picture: a bearded rabbi with a flak jacket over his tallit, hitting the bottom to take cowl as shells boomed round him.
Video footage of the second Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman got here beneath hearth whereas on a humanitarian mission to flooded southern Ukraine on June 8 has been considered greater than 1.5 million occasions on Twitter. It put a contemporary highlight on the chief rabbi of Ukraine, whose renown predates each that second and his humanitarian efforts since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“People recognize me,” the rabbi stated, eyes twinkling, from his workplace in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on a current afternoon.
Rabbi Azman, 57, sprang into motion when Russia invaded in February 2022, working to assist evacuate Jewish Ukrainians and recording appeals for assist and a halt to the struggle. The mattress that’s nonetheless arrange in his workplace at Kyiv’s Brodsky synagogue is a testomony to the depth of these early days, he stated. The rabbi initially labored even via Shabbat, the standard day of relaxation, and began filming video messages that went far and large.
His function as chief rabbi has specific resonance in a struggle that President Vladimir V. Putin has falsely claimed is about “denazifying” Ukraine, a rustic whose present president is Jewish and whose Jewish group has traditionally suffered persecution.
Born in Leningrad, the rabbi emigrated to Israel within the Nineteen Eighties to flee the previous Soviet Union. After marrying a Ukrainian lady, he got here to Ukraine within the early Nineties to assist youngsters affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe and later led the rehabilitation of Kyiv’s primary synagogue.
When Russian-backed fighters launched a struggle in jap Ukraine in 2014, Rabbi Azman helped evacuate civilians from the combating. He later arrange a village on the outskirts of Kyiv that he named Anatevka — just like the fictional shtetl within the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” — for displaced Jewish households.
The rabbi’s work earned him nationwide honors. Photographs of him shaking arms with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and different notable folks cowl a wall in his workplace.
But a few of his outstanding connections have at occasions forged a shadow over his work.
He was a vocal supporter of Donald J. Trump and has a longstanding relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose makes an attempt to influence Ukraine’s authorities to launch investigations that he believed would profit Mr. Trump have been key to the impeachment inquiry in opposition to the previous president. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — associates of Mr. Giuliani who have been convicted on marketing campaign finance violations — have been at one level board members for the rabbi’s U.S.-based Friends of Anatevka charity.
When requested in regards to the saga, Rabbi Azman turns into animated, insisting he has no real interest in politics.
“I don’t vote in America,” he stated, including: “I work for Ukraine.”
The rabbi emphasised that he’s merely a “quiet guy” attempting to succeed in a large viewers to assist his humanitarian efforts, which he says have value tens of millions. He considers his work much less a calling than “obligation,” one which took him to Kherson to assist with the flood response and to attract consideration to the devastation.
Although he not works on Shabbat, the rabbi maintains a packed schedule and posts frequent social media updates about his support efforts and Russian atrocities. On a current afternoon, he greeted an evacuee introduced by ambulance to Anatevka.
Many folks ask why he stays in Ukraine regardless of the risks, he stated.
“I thank God that he put me in the right time and the right place that I can save people, help people, 24/7,” he stated.
Source: www.nytimes.com