By COLlive reporter
Busloads of members of the Jewish community in Ukraine’s capital city were successfully evacuated early this week as Russian forces advanced and bombard Kiev.
Kiev’s Chief Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch said the evacuation was done at the suggestion of local security officials, afraid that civilians would be harmed in the fighting over Ukraine’s independence.
“Security officials told us that it will be a bigger help for them if we were out of the country than inside a bunker and responsible for our safety,” his son, Rabbi Ariel Markovitch told COLlive.com on Tuesday.
The convoy left Kiev in the predawn hours of Monday morning and traveled for hours until they crossed the border into Romania.
A Russian military strike tore through two apartment blocks in a town west of Kyiv on Tuesday, CNN reported. Russian forces also fired rockets near a TV tower and struck the Babi Yar mass gravesite of Holocaust victims.
The rocket attack took out broadcasting hardware, raising fears that Russia is attempting to knock out the city’s communications infrastructure, Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said.
Chabad Shluchim have been providing aid to their communities since Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine last week.
“We are working from here to evacuate more people and continue to help whoever we can,” Rabbi Ariel Markovich said, noting that the destinations they are offering to community members are the Carpathian Mountains or the Holy Land of Israel.
He added, “The Chabad center remains open to everyone. There are places to sleep there, as well as food and guards.”
Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch, who was born in Uzhhorod in western Ukraine, said that most of those who stayed behind are older and only have Ukrainian passports, meaning they cannot easily travel abroad, beyond the growing refugee camps on the Polish, Moldovan, Hungarian, Romanian and Slovakian borders.
“Many are in the synagogue,” he told the Times of Israel. “There they have food and security and a place to sleep. People who can’t leave their homes, we send food to them.”
B”H this group and others have been able to leave and find welcoming help across the borders.
In this article and many other news releases Babi Yar is referred to as a mass gravesite. We need to let the world know it is not a cemetary, not even a gravesite. No one is burried there. There are no matzevas. It is the site of the massacre of the Yidden of Kiev – 33,000 kedoshim – in a deep ravine from which here was no escape.
if you’re saying that the site was where 33000 people were killed – in a deep ravine, how is that not a gravesite? what’s your point?