JERUSALEM — In late 2014, Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that the Ukrainian nationalist organization Right Sector had “declared war” on the Jews of Odesa, beating 20 people across the city. It was a blatant falsehood, but not a surprising one.
During the first two years of the conflict, Russian media produced a steady stream of fake news about Ukrainian Jewry, with Kremlin-controlled outlets reporting on everything from putative Ukrainian pogroms to the supposed closure of Jewish schools and newspapers.
One of the recurrent leitmotifs of Russia’s disinformation campaign was the claim that Ukrainian Jews were fleeing en masse due to anti-Semitism. There was, in fact, no mass exodus. Ironically, however, Russia’s rapidly escalating war in the Donbas did result in the scattering of local Jewish communities.
Alongside war, poor economic conditions have driven many Ukrainians to seek greener pastures elsewhere, often in Poland or other countries of continental Europe. But a significant number of Ukrainian Jews have chosen a different destination: the state of Israel.
While they usually find respite from the war in Donbas, for many the adjustment is far from easy.
The ‘Russian diaspora’
By and large, Israel is an attractive destination for many Ukrainian Jews. It is the home of one of the largest Russian-speaking communities in the world — more than a million Israelis are emigres from Ukraine, Russia and other post-Soviet states — and offers automatic citizenship and resettlement to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent.
Historically, many of the country’s founding fathers were Russian-speaking Jews. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel engaged in a sustained effort to bring over as many Soviet Jews as possible. It boasts a vibrant Russian-language press and, in some cities like Haifa, Russian can be heard as often as Hebrew on the streets. All this seemingly makes it an appealing place to build a new life.
During the first several years of the conflict in Ukraine, immigration to Israel — known in Hebrew as making aliyah — rose and fell in sync with the ebb and flow of conflict. When things got worse, more Jews came. In total, 32,772 Ukrainians have migrated to Israel since 2013, according to data provided by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.
But new arrivals from Ukraine face challenges. A large proportion do not qualify as Jewish under Orthodox religious law, even though they are considered Jewish for the purposes of immigration.
This means that many of the newcomers will eventually face significant barriers when they attempt to marry through the state-controlled Rabbinate, which holds a monopoly over marriage and divorce. Many locals get around such regulations by marrying abroad, often in Cyprus. Such marriages are subsequently recognized by the Interior Ministry, if not by the religious authorities.
There are already several hundred thousand Israeli citizens who fall into this legal grey zone, prompting calls from politicians like Soviet-born Israeli lawmaker Avigdor Liberman, who represents a primarily Russian-speaking constituency, for religious reforms.
According to ITIM, a local NGO that assists Israelis in dealing with the rabbinate, many Russian-speakers here are “caught in a bureaucratic void, unable to marry in State-sanctioned weddings, and to partake in other basic rights of Jewish citizenry.” This, the group stated, is “unacceptable, particularly given the dysfunctional and inadequate State conversion system, which converts a mere 2,000 Israeli citizens to Judaism each year.”
But the biggest obstacles are economic and professional.
“Many newcomers are people with professions, and for them it is not an easy task to find their place in Israel,” said Roman Polonsky, the head of the Russian-speaking department at the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization tasked with promoting and facilitating Jewish immigration.
“You have to take into account that they could make aliyah over the last thirty years and they didn’t and they built their personal and professional lives there and then had to abandon them,” he said. Those hardest hit are the immigrants in their forties who are “not old enough to get pensions” but too old to easily integrate into the local job market, especially given the difficulty of learning Hebrew at a later age.
“This is the most pressing challenge for immigrants from Ukraine: jobs,” he said. “If you are talking about blue collar workers, they have more chances to find a job in Israel immediately.”
The security situation in Israel can also be a concern. But for many recent immigrants from Ukraine — particularly, those from the conflict zone — it is worse back home.
“They compare the situation in Israel to that in Ukraine and for them Israel is an island of stability, of prosperity,” Polonsky said.
“No doubt when they come, they have a lot of psychological difficulties, starting with language, but in general I can say they are very informed about the situation in Israel thanks to their relatives and friends here and the internet. They know about Iran and Hamas and it doesn’t scare them.”
In fact, one new immigrant told the Kyiv Post so explicitly, explaining that at least Israel has so-called Iron Dome anti-missile batteries that can knock down incoming rockets.
According to Benny Hadad, who runs immigration efforts for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, an American-Israeli non-profit group, even though many newcomers have gone through extremely stressful experiences in Ukraine, “we don’t see anything different in the people coming from [the Donbas] in terms of absorption. Psychiatric issues aren’t the top priority for many of the newcomers.”
Agreeing with Polonsky, he said that “language and jobs and other things are the top priorities for them.”
Immigrant struggle
Sitting at a table in a sidewalk cafe on Jerusalem’s busy downtown Jaffa Road, Anastasia and Katrin sat sipping their drinks and chatting in steady stream of Russian peppered with Hebrew. From Donetsk and Sevatopol respectively, the pair met in Israel and became friends. Both asked that their surnames be withheld to protect family living in Russian-controlled regions.
Anastasia, a member of the Donetsk Jewish community, came in 2014 and settled in Jerusalem. She said that her transition to Israeli life wasn’t overly difficult because she had already been thinking of making the move before the war erupted. It was harder for her parents.
“They had to uproot and make large changes, and when you’re later in life it’s harder to give up possessions. They had to leave their apartment and start fresh without language and skills,” she explained, sipping her coffee. “For me, (it’s) not my first time living abroad so the transition was smoother.”
While her parents’ move was jarring at first, she said that their decision to move to the city of Carmiel, which boasts a significant Russian-speaking community, meant that “they didn’t really have to adjust to the surroundings.”
For Anastasia’s family, it was the Russian-speakers from previous waves of immigration who posed one of the hardest challenges. They made fun of her mother’s dreams and told her that she would “never find a good job,” Anastasia said.
While her mother soon found work as a quality assurance engineer in a factory producing jet turbines, lingering doubts about life in Israel remained. Her non-Jewish father, on the other hand, quickly acclimated to life in Israel.
“He’s a happy camper,” Anastsia said. “I never saw him happier than here. He’s the biggest Zionist in the family and wears an Israeli flag pin on his jacket.”
For her part, Anastasia said that she isn’t particularly happy here, citing cultural barriers. Israelis generally have less respect for personal space and privacy and tend to be more outspoken than their Ukrainian counterparts, something that has caused resentment among some immigrants.
It’s a “less cultured country,” she explained, adding that the intersection of religion and state here can cause problems for the overwhelmingly secular Russian-speaking community. “I’m very much opposed to the fact that all the shops are closed [on the Sabbath] and the government is telling me what to spend my money on on my hard-earned day off.”
Katrin largely agrees with Anastasia, telling the Kyiv Post that she had similar issues, especially when it came to dealing with the strikingly different cultural norms here. But she sees “no future” back in Ukraine, she added.
Donbas legacy
Like Anastasia and Katrin, Chana Zlobin is ambivalent about life in the Middle East.
Only 16 when the war started, Zlobin fled Luhansk with her mother, ending up in a refugee center in Zhytomyr run by the Chabad Hasidic Jewish movement. By 2015, she was studying at a religious seminary in Israel but moved back to Ukraine, where she met and married her husband, himself an internally displaced person from Donetsk.
However, after a year that she described as one of the best in her life, they decided to return to Israel so that she could finish her degree. She now lives with her husband and three month-old son in the port city of Ashdod on the Mediterranean coast.
Things were initially tough financially, although her father, who remained in Luhansk, helped out by sending money to Israel, she said. Eventually, her husband, who does not speak Hebrew, found a job in a company run by Russian-speaking Israelis. While things are tight, she believes that, financially, there are more opportunities in Israel than in Ukraine.
“We chose to move here because it is the only state that pays and helps [Jews to] come,” she explained. “We had no money because of the war and no possibility to sell an apartment or car for money to start here. I really want to go back to Ukraine, [but] I understand that here there are more opportunities to make a living and build a life.”
Chana, who describes herself as a Ukrainian patriot and a reluctant emigre, said that people from the Donbas take flak from other Russian-speakers no matter what they do.
“People don’t understand what’s happening and it hurts when they say ‘you don’t love Ukraine and so you left.’ Sorry, but you don’t get it,” she said. “There was a war there and I could have been in the ground. I know a woman who always says ‘you left so you love Russia and your father is still there and he also loves Russia.’ I don’t speak about politics and the situation there.
“The problem is that most people only know the news from Russian television.”
Sam Sokol is a journalist based in Jerusalem.
