Episode 38: The Fire of Shlichus 🔥 | With Chaya Wolff, Chabad shlucha in Odessa, Ukraine

00:01 Speaker 1 What is it like to return to live and work in the country where your father was imprisoned as a young man? What do you do when war breaks out and you’re responsible for an orphanage and a nursing home with hundreds of Jews? And how, despite everything, do you keep moving forward until you reach your goal? Join me for an especially shlichus-focused podcast with Chaya Wolf, a Chabad shlucha in Odesa, Ukraine. This episode was sponsored by Pninim.com, Israel’s largest pearl importer. On the website and at the store in the Diamond Exchange district, you’ll find an enormous, stunning selection of genuine, distinctive pearl jewelry, without middlemen’s markups. So if you want to treat yourself to the finest-quality jewelry at the best price, Pninim.com. For details: 058-763-6736. Intro, and we’re off. How do we make our lives lives of shlichus, full of meaning? I’m Chani Moskowitz, a shlucha in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In this podcast, we’ll meet different women who have brought their shlichus into a range of fields, and through their stories, they’ll help each of us find and refine our own shlichus in the world. Because living the life we were created to live is the best there is. Shlichus as a way of life. We’re starting now. Hello, Chaya Wolf.

01:25 Speaker 2 Hello, hello, Chani.

01:27 Speaker 1 A shlucha from Odesa, and also my aunt, among other things. We have to mention that.

01:32 Speaker 2 You mention that right at the start.

01:33 Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

01:34 Speaker 2 All the secrets.

01:35 Speaker 1 That’s our family connection.

01:36 Speaker 2 Uh-huh.

01:37 Speaker 1 So I think you should start with the family you come from, because there’s something quite extraordinary there.

01:46 Speaker 2 I’m from the Greenberg family, and I’m the tenth of, bli ayin hara, seventeen children. And whenever people talk to me about large families, and how hard it is, I say: If my parents had thought after nine children that that was enough, where would I be today?

02:05 Speaker 1 Wait, you’re the tenth.

02:06 Speaker 2 I’m the tenth. And almost all my siblings are scattered around the world. They’ve opened Chabad Houses and communities in all sorts of places on shlichus from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of course.

02:21 Speaker 1 Throw out five places.

02:23 Speaker 2 Alaska, California, Washington, Germany, Paris, Shanghai in China. We’re in Ukraine. I can’t even remember the rest of the places now. There’s Solon, Ohio, and so on and so forth. I mean—

02:40 Speaker 1 In an ordinary family, you say, “Let’s see if anyone remembers everyone’s names.” You have to remember where each one is, too.

02:44 Speaker 2 Never mind that in our family we don’t use names, because everyone is Mendy and Mushky and Mussy. So for us it has to be Mendy Alaska and Mendy—

02:52 Speaker 1 Right.

02:52 Speaker 2 Solon and Mendy California. And when we have two Mendys in Shanghai, it gets even more complicated.

02:58 Speaker 1 That’s wild.

02:59 Speaker 2 So yes, baruch Hashem, it’s wonderful growing up in a family like that. You always have a support group and people to turn to for advice. Our extended family WhatsApp is really active 24/7, because the one who lives in Shanghai and the one who lives in Alaska are exactly twenty-four hours apart. I mean—

03:24 Speaker 1 Wow.

03:25 Speaker 2 One is bringing in Shabbos when the other is already ending it. So there’s no day or night for us. Whenever you have a halachic question... I remember that at the beginning of my shlichus, I had a very important halachic question. It was six in the morning in Ukraine, and I thought, “Which rabbi am I going to call at six in the morning on the eve of Yom Tov?” Then I remembered I have a brother in Alaska.

03:45 Speaker 1 So basically you have a brother in every time zone.

03:47 Speaker 2 Exactly. So I called my sister-in-law and said, “Listen, I have this question, and Yom Tov starts early. I need an answer now.” She immediately called a rabbi in Chicago and asked my brother, and—there are so many advantages to having a big family. There are always simchas, always events, and you really do have that support group, especially in difficult times and at special moments.

04:12 Speaker 1 Yes.

04:14 Speaker 2 That comes with it.

04:16 Speaker 1 Just as there are simchas, there are also...

04:17 Speaker 2 Yes, there are lots of simchas, and lots of other events too.

04:19 Speaker 1 Who was the first to go on shlichus?

04:22 Speaker 2 My sister Rachel went on shlichus, oh, it must have been—

04:25 Speaker 1 To Paris?

04:26 Speaker 2 Almost forty years ago. To Texas.

04:28 Speaker 1 And do you think that has an influence? Like, when one person goes—

04:31 Speaker 2 Very much.

04:31 Speaker 1 Peer pressure.

04:32 Speaker 2 It isn’t peer pressure; it’s the opposite. When I was a fifteen-year-old girl, I went to help her on shlichus. Help her, right? At the time, I felt like I was fulfilling my purpose. She was a campus shlucha, and I went there for the summer. I stayed with her for a full two months and saw how a Chabad House works with young people, with the odd hours when young men and women students show up at a Chabad House—at student hours—and how they welcome them, and how much patience they have. And at the same time, community members come too. I mean—

05:05 Speaker 1 Yes.

05:06 Speaker 2 The whole community, and minyanim, and Yom Tov meals and Shabbos meals and events. When I saw it, I said, “Wow, I want this too.” And of course it comes from the family, from my parents. My parents are originally from Russia. What’s very interesting—and this takes us a bit further ahead—is that my mother was born in Odesa.

05:26 Speaker 1 Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

05:28 Speaker 2 Yes. When she was three, they fled during the war. World War II.

05:31 Speaker 1 Wait, did they speak Russian at home? Do you know Russian?

05:33 Speaker 2 They—no, I didn’t know a word of Russian.

05:34 Speaker 1 What a shame.

05:35 Speaker 2 When they immigrated to Israel in 1966—which is a story in itself—there was no Russian spoken at home at all. They wanted to close that door. Everything that had happened there—

05:46 Speaker 1 That was it. Their connection to it was not...

05:48 Speaker 2 It was very painful. My father was imprisoned under Stalin for his Jewishness, and he was released after Stalin died, following a retrial. When they arrived in Israel, they didn’t want to remember anything, anything at all, from what had happened there. And even when I was a young woman and Beis Rivkah sent students from the college on shlichus to help—

06:09 Speaker 1 A semester of shlichus, yes.

06:10 Speaker 2 A semester of shlichus there, helping in schools. My father said, “No, there’s no way you’re going there.” And when I met the man who would become my husband—he was already a rabbi there in Ukraine—it was fairly obvious that we’d go to see the place of shlichus first. So my father said, “First change your ID, your surname, everything, and then you can go.” He was thinking the KGB—

06:36 Speaker 1 Yes.

06:36 Speaker 2 —would still be tracking the Greenberg family. And he was right, because afterward—first of all, we were being listened to all the time.

06:44 Speaker 1 Yes, that’s...

06:45 Speaker 2 And we were constantly under surveillance. At first they thought we were Americans, Israelis.

06:49 Speaker 1 What year did you go?

06:51 Speaker 2 Wow. It was right after, on 10 Tammuz of that—10 Tammuz, after the Gulf War.

06:57 Speaker 1 5752, yes.

07:01 Speaker 2 We went on shlichus, and later we wanted to get my father’s arrest file. We submitted repeated requests, and I was given permission to look at the file. Not to take possession of it—they wouldn’t release the files. The file was kept in KGB storage for seventy years.

07:23 Speaker 1 Wow.

07:23 Speaker 2 They keep their archives for up to seventy years. They found the file. It was very moving, and very, very hard to look through it. Afterward I had to sign to confirm that I was his daughter, and I saw the file.

07:36 Speaker 1 Were you allowed to photograph it? No.

07:37 Speaker 2 We weren’t allowed to photograph anything.

07:39 Speaker 1 So you’re the only one who saw it?

07:40 Speaker 2 I actually saw it. Later, after my father passed away, we got the file, and we managed to photograph it too, by roundabout means. What we discovered there was unbelievable. But... We had, in fact, returned on shlichus to Odesa, to the very synagogue where my great-grandfather had been the rabbi.

08:03 Speaker 1 Wow.

08:04 Speaker 2 My great-grandfather, Rabbi Zusha Friedman, was the last rabbi in Odesa. There are many synagogues there, and the first building the government returned to the Jewish community was this particular one.

08:19 Speaker 1 The building you use.

08:20 Speaker 2 At 21 Osipova Street—

08:21 Speaker 1 Yes.

08:22 Speaker 2 It was called the Malbushei Arumim Synagogue, the tailors’ synagogue. This was at a time when every trade had its own synagogue, and there were lots of neighborhood synagogues like that in Odesa, which was a thoroughly Jewish city. And who became the rabbi there, of all people? Who was chosen as rabbi? His great-grandson—my husband is—

08:45 Speaker 1 Wow.

08:46 Speaker 2 His great-grandson. We’re only the fourth generation.

08:49 Speaker 1 Right. Wow.

08:50 Speaker 2 That’s what they mean when they say the Torah returns to its rightful owners. Stalin killed two of my great-grandfather Zusha Friedman’s sons. Then Hitler came, killed the Jews there, and people had to flee. In the end, the One Who arranges all things brought us there—to that very synagogue. My husband and I, of all people, came there. It was incredibly moving when my daughter was born and, in that same synagogue, we called her name at the Torah reading: Nechama Din—Nechamalia[?].

09:22 Speaker 1 After her grandmother.

09:23 Speaker 2 That was her grandmother’s name.

09:24 Speaker 1 Wow.

09:24 Speaker 2 Who was born there, the daughter of Zusha Friedman, who is my grandmother. So it was all very moving. I didn’t know a word of Russian when I arrived, and we started everything from scratch. Even though it was a very Jewish city, where everyone knew what matzah was, and Yom Kippur and Yizkor—those were familiar concepts. People were very proud of their Judaism, but they carried this very heavy burden on their backs called Judaism, and they had suffered for it.

09:56 Speaker 1 You’re talking about the older generation.

09:57 Speaker 2 I’m talking about the older generation, who knew what it meant to be Jewish and to be called “zhidy.” They had to change their documents and their names to assimilate and be part of society, because otherwise they suffered, or died, or were exiled to Siberia, as happened—

10:16 Speaker 1 Exactly, to your father.

10:16 Speaker 2 To my father, and to the religious families who sanctified Hashem’s name.

10:19 Speaker 1 What did they actually find in his arrest file? Just the things he had been doing underground and all that?

10:26 Speaker 2 They accused them of espionage.

10:29 Speaker 1 That’s insane.

10:30 Speaker 2 And to think he was a seventeen-year-old boy. A few months ago, we received a document from Romania, and it’s very interesting. They had crossed the border, and the Romanians caught them and handed them back to the Russians. When they caught them, they sent the Russians information saying they’d caught a group: five boys. Well, three young men, an older man, and a child. They wrote that they had caught members of the Schneersohn sect’s cell, which was fighting the Communist government.

11:09 Speaker 1 The Frierdiker Rebbe, actually.

11:11 Speaker 2 No, it was already the Rebbe. They claimed that 770 was a center, a branch of the Mossad or something like that—an organization opposed to Communism, operating under the guise of a yeshiva, an institute for rabbinic studies. The boys said they wanted to go study in yeshiva, and that was why they had crossed the border. So they called them agents of the counterrevolution and so on, opponents of the government, and imprisoned them. In the verdict, the judge wrote something frightening in itself: “Unfortunately, the law allowing the death penalty has already been repealed—

12:06 Speaker 1 Oh my.

12:06 Speaker 2 “And I’m forced to give them only twenty-five years.”

12:08 Speaker 1 Oh my goodness.

12:10 Speaker 2 With that sentence, he and Lev Kavka[?] went to prison knowing they would spend the rest of their lives there. We always asked my father, “How did you hold on? Why did you keep observing the mitzvos there?” He tried to keep Shabbos and kosher. “Why did you do it? These aren’t mitzvos for which you must give your life rather than transgress.” He said, “I knew I wasn’t getting out of there. I was sure I wasn’t getting out. I said, if I’m going to die, I’ll die as a Jew.”

12:38 Speaker 1 Wow. Oh my goodness. How many years was he there in the end?

12:41 Speaker 2 Almost seven years.

12:43 Speaker 1 Wow, it’s like something out of a movie.

12:46 Speaker 2 Yes, it’s...

12:47 Speaker 1 Wow.

12:48 Speaker 2 So later, when he heard that we wanted to go back there, he said the KGB was still operating. And that was true—

12:54 Speaker 1 He was right.

12:55 Speaker 2 The KGB was still operating. He was right. The question is what they did with the information. I have to say that today there’s complete openness. We do whatever we want Jewishly, with no problem at all. Schools, all the educational institutions, all the community activities, brisses, weddings, events, holidays—everything, everything, everything takes place...

13:21 Speaker 1 It’s the opposite now; in a way, things have turned around. I think that in all the cities in Ukraine there’s full support from the...

13:27 Speaker 2 Right, right, there is—

13:28 Speaker 1 It’s something very noticeable, and...

13:31 Speaker 2 Right. They don’t just allow us to do these things; they support us, too.

13:36 Speaker 1 Wow. So you arrived there and just started building.

13:41 Speaker 2 Yes.

13:41 Speaker 1 Wait, the rabbi had already been there before that.

13:45 Speaker 2 Yes, right. He had already been there as a young man. He spent two years in Kherson. He went there with other young men as shluchim for the summer. Then the community asked, “What about Rosh Hashanah? Who will be here?” So they said, “All right, we’ll arrange something for Rosh Hashanah, and after the holidays—after Rosh Hashanah—we’ll leave.” Then they asked, “What about Simchas Torah?” And they stayed. That’s how they stayed, month after month, for two years. They even opened a preschool and a school. By the time I arrived, there was already something there.

14:10 Speaker 1 That’s incredible. You say it so casually, but take two young men today and tell them, “Open a preschool. Open a school.” I mean...

14:15 Speaker 2 They were twenty-two.

14:17 Speaker 1 Without knowing the language.

14:18 Speaker 2 Without knowing the language. And to think parents trusted them.

14:22 Speaker 1 It’s unbelievable.

14:22 Speaker 2 I mean, it’s a school. It’s not coming for a holiday, having some fun, and leaving. It’s very interesting. You could really see the Rebbe’s power. It was extraordinary, almost miraculous. It’s hard to believe: you approach an adult and say, “You’ll be the principal of my school. You’ll be a teacher at my school.” Who are you, anyway? What are you talking about? He says, “I’ll pay you.” When we paid a teacher a hundred dollars a month, it was twice what the municipality paid. So people probably figured, “Okay, however long this lasts, at least for now it’s...”

14:56 Speaker 1 Worth it.

14:57 Speaker 2 Worth it, because inflation there was terrible, and you couldn’t live on the local salaries. So that’s how we recruited the staff. But the way the parents trusted us and came—that was remarkable. When we opened the school in Odessa, there were sixty-three children.

15:14 Speaker 1 Wow.

15:14 Speaker 2 First and second grades. We opened first and second grades right away.

15:17 Speaker 1 There was a thirst for it.

15:19 Speaker 2 Right.

15:20 Speaker 1 In a way, people had been waiting for it.

15:22 Speaker 2 That’s what I was starting to say. There was this idea: “I’m Jewish, I’m a zhid,” but they didn’t know why they were hated. “Why do they call us zhidy? What’s wrong with us?” Because Jewish life, the holidays, all the substance of Judaism—none of it was there anymore. And there was no one left for them to hear about it from, because the older generation was so afraid, and that fear...

15:45 Speaker 1 Of their children informing on them, too.

15:46 Speaker 2 Of being informed on, exactly. And the next generation, who had already assimilated because of the circumstances, no longer knew how to pass it on. So the grandchildren really knew nothing. They only knew they were zhidy, and they didn’t know...

15:59 Speaker 1 But what does that mean? Right.

16:00 Speaker 2 What made it even harder was when Misha Rabinovich came to the office and asked to enroll in the school, but he wasn’t Jewish. Because according to halachah, you need a Jewish mother, and in Odessa especially, assimilation had already been going on for four generations.

16:16 Speaker 1 Oh, that’s so painful.

16:17 Speaker 2 It’s very painful. My husband always said that the hardest thing about shlichus was telling a Misha Rabinovich like that, “I can’t accept your daughter into the school.” They say, “What? Igor Petrov suddenly turns out to be Jewish, and he’s fine, but I’m Misha! I was beaten up all the time. I didn’t change my name or my family name because I was Jewish. I fought over it, I got beaten up over it, and I couldn’t get into university because of it.” It’s very hard. Very, very hard. A while ago I interviewed a Holocaust survivor who’s almost ninety, an actress by profession in Odessa, in the Odessa theater. To this day she’s full of energy and dresses like an actress. She told me something terrible. She was born during the war. She said, “We’re a generation born into war, and all my friends are the generation going into war now.”

17:18 Speaker 1 Oh, that’s... wow.

17:19 Speaker 2 It’s so painful. She tells her story. Her father was Jewish, and a neighboring family took her in and hid her, because they had to. The Nazis came to kill her, too, because she had a Jewish father. She described the dangers that family faced, and the dangers she faced. She says, “When I was a baby, they hid me in a suitcase. Then I grew bigger, and they hid me in a wardrobe. Then I grew bigger, and they hid me in [unclear], in the basement.”

17:50 Speaker 1 Wow.

17:50 Speaker 2 “For years.” She says that in the family she grew up with, when she was old enough to remember—about six or seven—there was a twelve-year-old boy who said to her, “What’s with those eyes of yours?” She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand why they were looking for her and not for him. What was the difference? She says she went into the bathroom and scrubbed her eyes really, really hard. Then she came out and asked, “Is it okay now?” He told her, “No, you’re still the same.”

18:17 Speaker 1 Wow.

18:18 Speaker 2 And then you think: today we tell this woman that she isn’t...

18:23 Speaker 1 That you’re not Jewish.

18:24 Speaker 2 It’s terribly, terribly hard. I say it’s fortunate I only heard this account now, because if I’d heard it twenty-five years ago, I don’t know what I would have done about the children I didn’t accept into our school.

18:38 Speaker 1 It’s terribly hard.

18:38 Speaker 2 I didn’t accept them.

18:39 Speaker 1 You come and explain the halachah to them, but they don’t even know what halachah is yet.

18:42 Speaker 2 But for us—right, they have no idea what halachah is.

18:45 Speaker 1 Yes, so they ask, “Why?” I mean...

18:46 Speaker 2 I say to myself: I’m running a school—what did I come here for? Of course, every kind of help matters. As the Baal Shem Tov says, material help for a Jew is material help, and spiritual help is spiritual help. They’re separate things. You have to help everyone with their material needs. When people come and eat kosher food, or come and have a place to daven—each thing stands on its own. Every mitzvah is a tremendous privilege: to help someone do that mitzvah. And as the Rebbe said, that mitzvah will itself take care of what comes next for the person. It will lead to another mitzvah—one mitzvah leads to another.

19:22 Speaker 1 Yes.

19:23 Speaker 2 When [unclear] asked the Rebbe, “What’s the point of putting tefillin on someone, or giving him kosher food and making a blessing with him? What does it accomplish? They disappear; they leave.” The Rebbe told him, “Don’t worry about that. You do your part. That mitzvah will bring him…”

19:39 Speaker 1 It stands on its own, too.

19:39 Speaker 2 It stands on its own, and it will lead him forward spiritually. Our job is to do what we can today. But when you ask, nevertheless, what’s the goal? How do you want to see your school graduates? How do you want to see a university graduate? I want to see a chuppah. In the fight against assimilation, I say that once they marry Jews, I’ve done my part. Anything beyond that is a bonus. If they continue, if they have a bris for their son and send their children to Jewish institutions, that’s already a wonderful gain. But if I bring children who have only a Jewish father into my institutions—because according to halachah, unfortunately, Jewish identity follows the mother—then what? The boys and girls will fall in love at my school, and then they’ll come and say, “Rabbi, perform our wedding.” And I’ll say, “No, no, no, I can’t do that.”

20:27 Speaker 1 All the way up to the chuppah.

20:28 Speaker 2 So what have I accomplished? This difficulty is one of the challenges that constantly comes up on shlichus. Every shliach faces a thousand and one things like this, making these decisions all day long, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking.

20:42 Speaker 1 Well… it means breaking families apart, really.

20:47 Speaker 2 That’s such a hard question. What do you advise a couple when he’s Jewish and she isn’t, or the other way around? You can’t advise them to divorce. On the other hand…

20:58 Speaker 1 Especially when they already have children.

21:00 Speaker 2 They already have children. On the other hand, you also can’t start persuading someone to convert. Because a genuine conversion has to come from the person who wants to convert. There’s a reason we say “a convert who converts”: that’s someone who has a soul. This is one of the complicated things about shlichus.

21:19 Speaker 1 I think that’s one of the reasons—this is just my guess—that you founded the university.

21:23 Speaker 2 Right.

21:24 Speaker 1 Let’s go through this for a moment. You have a kindergarten and a school.

21:28 Speaker 2 Right.

21:29 Speaker 1 A university that Jewish young men and women come to from all over Ukraine.

21:33 Speaker 2 Right.

21:34 Speaker 1 From all over Ukraine. And so many marriages have come out of it.

21:36 Speaker 2 Yes.

21:37 Speaker 1 And—

21:37 Speaker 2 An orphanage.

21:38 Speaker 1 An orphanage.

21:39 Speaker 2 A home for the elderly, and we have the whole community framework and a cultural center.

21:44 Speaker 1 From birth to the grave.

21:46 Speaker 2 Yes. And a kosher store and a kosher restaurant. In other words, we really do have a complete framework so that every Jewish child, every Jewish person, can choose whether to continue living as a Jew in Odessa, make aliyah, or move somewhere else. We give them that possibility. We don’t just teach a person what it means to be Jewish and how to live as a Jew; we also give them the opportunity to do it in a dignified, enjoyable, beautiful, and joyful way. So we’ve really tried, and we keep trying, because this work never ends, and there’s always room to improve and keep going. But the thing with the university was that when we started, we began with a kindergarten, an elementary school, and a high school, alongside a shul, a kollel, and Torah classes. And of course, the money is never…

22:40 Speaker 1 You’re constantly having to choose.

22:41 Speaker 2 You’re constantly having to choose.

22:42 Speaker 1 What to prioritize.

22:43 Speaker 2 I mean, at the beginning we arrived with very little money. We were talking about expenses of, say, five thousand dollars a month. And you think: five thousand dollars could pay for life-saving medication or treatment for an adult who’s just come asking for help, or it could pay the entire kindergarten and elementary school staff for three or four months.

23:03 Speaker 1 Wow, in those days, that was just…

23:05 Speaker 2 And you ask yourself, which matters more? In Odessa it was actually easier to choose, because there were many other Jewish organizations there. We said, okay, they’ll take care of the adults, and we’ll focus on the next generation, the young generation. We want to build the next generation of Jewish life in Odessa and Ukraine, help them grow, and change their way of life and their way of thinking. Because even the Jewish people, when they left Egypt, spent forty years in the desert. Hakadosh Boruch Hu didn’t bring them straight into Eretz Yisroel for a reason.

23:35 Speaker 1 Right.

23:36 Speaker 2 Because going from slavery to freedom requires changing a lot in your mind.

23:40 Speaker 1 You’re taking people whose first and only piece of knowledge is that they’re Jewish. They don’t even know what that means.

23:45 Speaker 2 Completely.

23:45 Speaker 1 They celebrate all the Christian holidays, not even because they’re Christian, but simply because that’s what’s around them. That’s what…

23:50 Speaker 2 Right. And many families came to us where the father wasn’t Jewish. One student told me something that gave me chills, though at first I didn’t even understand it. She said, “At home we had a discussion about whether we’d celebrate Pesach or Easter. And then my father said, ‘If you celebrate Pesach, then we celebrate Easter too. If you all go to shul on Pesach, then you all come with me to church on Easter.’” I asked her, “So what did you do?” She said, “We decided not to celebrate anything.” Wow. She was explaining why she hadn’t come to shul or to the Pesach Seder. And I thought, it’s a good thing she didn’t ask me, because if she had asked me what the right thing to do was, I don’t know. What do you suggest in a situation like that? Certainly not to go there and celebrate Easter. But on the other hand, that was his condition. So she didn’t come, she didn’t buy matzos, and they didn’t bring Pesach into their home either. People there face such difficult situations, and we aren’t aware of them. We were born in Israel, in a sheltered environment. I was born into a Chabad family, the family of a rabbi and shlucha. That was our home. It was our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My father traveled to the Rebbe every year for the month of the festivals, and each year he took one of the children along so the Rebbe could see and bless us. I mean, it was obvious that after we got married we would go on shlichus; the only question was where. For me, the choice was easier, because my husband was already in Ukraine and was already running a community, so it was the most natural thing. He told me, “Let’s try it for a month, and then you’ll decide.” It was clear that we were going, and—like those salespeople who say, “Yes, just give it a try and…” Right, but then I really thought, what’s the difference between Texas, where I’d been with my sister, or

25:42 Speaker 2 With my brother, who lives in El Paso—and what’s the difference between people in Kherson or Odessa? I mean, right. Here there are Jews who don’t really know what to do or how, and there are Jews there who don’t really know what to do or how. Although there’s a big difference. I mean, in the United States, there weren’t Jews who hadn’t had a bris; there weren’t Jews who didn’t know basic things. You arrive in Ukraine and hold a hachnasas Sefer Torah for the first time. People have no idea what you want from them. Right. So everything really was new, and it truly was a miracle that they respected outsiders. Without Russian, using our hands and feet, we managed to explain things that were both very deep and very basic. And even afterward, when we learned the language, there were always mistakes in—well, I don’t know if you can learn Russian perfectly without mistakes. You can, just as you can learn Hebrew, so I suppose you can learn Russian too, but we didn’t even have time to take private lessons, and at first there was no one to learn with. A challenge in itself. But I actually taught Hebrew to classes at the school. That’s what taught me Russian, because the children were so patient. I tell you, I don’t know if, as a student, I would have been so generous to a teacher who didn’t know Hebrew. The adults too—imagine, they’re listening to classes. Right. Because the shluchim were just starting out. There was a thirst. They really respected us. There was a thirst. Patience and respect— Yes, yes. Here in Israel it wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have worked. Yes, that’s the Rebbe’s bracha. Really, you can’t understand how we had all that incredible success in Ukraine—and still do, despite the war and all the upheaval. It truly was success beyond the natural order. Absolutely. Schools with hundreds of students, large communities, minyanim, and— An empire. All the institutions. Absolutely. It really is,

27:26 Speaker 2 well, something with no equal anywhere in the world. Absolutely. Tell me, does the university actually award an official, state-recognized degree? Of course. We have agreements with seven universities in the city and elsewhere in Ukraine. Their lecturers come to our university and teach the courses they give at their own universities. They come to teach on our campus, so our students are always in a Jewish setting with Jewish friends, male and female. A dormitory and everything. Yes, of course, dormitories—a building for the boys and a building for the girls. And the students, first of all, because the groups are small, they have to know the material. They have to study, because when a lecturer is sitting with five students and someone doesn’t understand, he can’t move on. Right. Or if someone isn’t paying attention, the student can’t just tune out. So it’s very interesting: they really have to study, and they earn their degrees and receive a diploma from the original university, because they’re actually enrolled at that university, the home institution. Ours is a branch. Yes, their branch. And in fact we pay twice. First we pay the tuition under the agreement for the student to study at the university, and then we pay each teacher who comes to teach, because they’re teaching an additional hour for us. Wow. So the expenses really are substantial, but the result truly is... It’s not—it’s never completely satisfying, but it really is wonderful. No, wait, this actually provided a solution for all of Ukraine. Right, because... We’re in touch with the children from infancy, and then, at the most critical time, at seventeen, they go out into the world. One of our students said to me, “Chaya, what do you think? When I’m sitting in a classroom with forty female students, what am

29:24 Speaker 2 I thinking about?” And little by little, that made us realize that we couldn’t just leave our students to fend for themselves. Why had we raised them all those years? It made no sense. From age one, from daycare until age seventeen, when they finish eleventh grade in Ukraine, they’re surrounded by Jewish holidays and davening and brachos, all the concepts, lessons in Jewish history, tradition and Torah. And then where does he go? We throw him into the deep end and let him manage on his own at the most critical stage. Exactly. So we opened the university, which really is a very, very important institution and is operating today as well. We haven’t discontinued it or closed it, even though the number of students has dropped. Many students have left now because of the war, especially the young men who face conscription and were afraid to stay, but we’re continuing with it. Do you have some idea how many couples, say, came out of there? We don’t count couples, but we— Wonderful. We made a wall of photos from weddings held in Odessa. There are more than fifty couples who... Wow. And there are more photos we’re still missing. It’s simply amazing. Yes. Tell me about the orphanage—what was its... how did it begin? That’s an institution that— No, you know, not everyone wakes up one morning and starts an orphanage. No, we never dreamed we would need to start something like that. It was simply that one day a grandmother arrived with her grandson and granddaughter, aged six and eight. She went into my husband’s office and said, “Rabbi, take the children.” He asked her, “What do you mean?” She said, “Last night they murdered my daughter, their mother, near her home, for a wedding ring worth thirty dollars.” Oh, my goodness. So he said to her, “All right, I’ll give you something now,” and took a hundred dollars out of his pocket. “Here, buy them whatever they need.” But she said, “No, that won’t help me. I can’t. I

31:17 Speaker 2 go to the market at six in the morning. I have a little booth there, my stall. I need to sell.” Besides, she lived in a kommunalnaya kvartira, a communal apartment—which means a room, really. A one-room apartment with a shared kitchen and shared toilets, and the toilets there were actually out in the yard. In other words, no conditions at all for raising two more children. So we started asking, “Wait, is there family who can help? Uncles or aunts, anyone?” No. Her daughter had been her only child. The grandmother’s husband had already passed away, and she had no brothers or sisters. In other words, there wasn’t a single relative who could take them in and help. So my husband said, “You know what? Take this money for food and clothes, whatever you need. Come back on September first.” This was in the middle of August. Then he called me and said, “Listen, we have to do something, because otherwise they’re coming home with us on September first.” Welcome, two new children. So we started looking into whether there was a need for this and what it meant to run an orphanage. We got the process moving, and we needed to hire perhaps fifteen employees to make everything official—a director, a nurse, a doctor, a psychologist, a cleaner, babysitters—and rent an apartment. In other words, we had to build an entire system, while at the same time checking whether there was a need. And on September first, we opened the orphanage with seven children. Wow. How did another five suddenly appear? Someone who heard about it came and said, “Oh yes, I took in a child like that because my neighbor passed away. He was her grandson, and he had no one in the world.” Wow. “And I know he’s a Jewish child.” She brought the documents and proved he was Jewish. Then someone else came. And it wasn’t just in Odessa. We immediately publicized it throughout southern Ukraine, Nikolaev

33:07 Speaker 2 And Kherson. And suddenly you hear about another grandmother raising a child, another neighbor who took in a child. Of course, we checked documents, because you can’t help everyone. That’s how we started, with seven children. Wow. And it grew. Once people heard about it, it kept growing, and today there’s a boys’ building and a girls’ building. When the war came, one of the most critical questions was: What do we do with the children? It was clear that if we had to evacuate, we had to evacuate them, but we didn’t have their documents. You mean bureaucratic documents, like passports. There were no passports, first of all. And we didn’t have all the birth certificates either, because some of the children, for example, had a grandmother who was their legal guardian, and the child was with us simply to help her raise her grandchild. She would come visit once every two months or once every six months, or we would even send the child to her for a week once a year. We didn’t have documents. We had a note from the grandmother asking us to educate her child, like babysitting, like a boarding school. How could I take them across a border? Even if they didn’t have passports and it was possible to cross without passports, they had no documents at all. Oh, wow. And trying to find all those people in the chaos of the war was completely out of the question. In the end, we left. We got them out. How? How? It was an operation. I don’t even know how to describe it. How many people were with you? At first, we sent out two buses, 120 people—the children and staff—and they were allowed across the borders. This was already after a week of fighting, and they announced that children would be allowed out with just birth certificates. In other words, they didn’t need passports or parental permission to cross the border. In general, or only for you? In general. When we heard that this rule had been issued

35:10 Speaker 2 in the morning—by the afternoon, they announced that it had gone into effect: no parental permission was needed, just birth certificates. Whatever identification document they had, they would let the children through. The next morning, at six, the buses set out. Oh, wow. Did you know where you were going? We knew nothing. We knew we were heading toward Berlin, and we had asked Rabbi Teichtal, the shliach, to help us. He said he would try to arrange some sort of hostel, hotel, something that could take us in. And we set out. We didn’t even go with them. We sent our son Mendy and our righteous Mushky with their little baby. We put them at the head of the group. When we told them, “You know, get ready—you’re leaving with them tomorrow morning,” they said, “What do we have to do with this? What are we going to do with them? What’s our job?” I remember my husband telling him: “Bring them back safely to Odessa.” Oh, wow. They crossed the borders. After they had crossed two borders, and we saw that what we had arranged was actually working—the Ukraine–Moldova border was one thing; there was some kind of agreement between the Ukrainian and Moldovan authorities, and Moldova is right next door. Right. But to continue to Germany, they had to go through Romania and Hungary and enter the European Union. That really required calling on contacts in Germany. It was a three-day journey that words can’t begin to describe. Apart from the bureaucracy, you also had to contact all the grandmothers and everyone else to let them know you were leaving. We didn’t contact anyone. We just got up and left. So anyone who didn’t contact you on their own... And no one came looking for their children or grandchildren. No one asked. Oh. No one asked to find

37:04 Speaker 2 another solution, and no one came and said, “I’m leaving for Israel; I want to take my child.” The opposite. They were happy that we took them and looked after them. Yes, they were happy we took them. Once we saw that they had crossed two borders, we decided to offer other children from the school and kindergarten the chance to leave with me personally if they wanted to. And single mothers—if mothers wanted to leave too, we would take the mothers and children. We thought, how many will really want to leave? Let’s give them the option. After all, we had to rent a hotel, rent a place. We were taking a staff of teachers and caregivers, so we could take a few more children and care for them too, help a few more families. We said we would leave the next day. Within twenty-four hours, 180 people signed up. Oh my goodness. You get there in the morning and think: All right, they signed up just in case, but when the time comes to actually take the children out, or for women to leave their husbands behind, that’s different. Let’s see who shows up. Yes. And you arrive at six in the morning—curfew ended at five—and the area beside the children’s home is simply full. Wow. I looked around, and you know no one has documents, nothing is organized, and I said to my husband, “There’s no way I’m going out with them alone. You’re coming with me.” That was also a very, very difficult decision, because if we left, what message would that send the rest of the community? That everyone needed to leave, that we were leaving and everything was shutting down. And you really didn’t know what was happening, because—what was the situation in Odessa at the time? I don’t remember. There were seven ships off the coast of Odessa, and this was after another speech by Putin in which he spoke about Odessa as the next city. In other words, it was only a question of time

38:58 Speaker 2 before they entered Odessa. And that’s without even mentioning the missiles, explosions, and air-raid sirens all the time. Yes. Missiles hadn’t fallen inside the city—apart from the airport and the edge of the city, they hadn’t fallen inside it. An oil depot right at the edge of the city was also destroyed, and there were fires and everything. But there was fear. There was this unbelievable chaos: you were already seeing tanks opposite the shul in Kharkiv, that huge convoy heading toward Kyiv, and Kherson had already been occupied. Right. When we left, Kherson was already occupied, less than three hours from us. And Mykolaiv was being shelled nonstop. So what were we supposed to wait for? Everyone was leaving. You would hear that four million had left the country, then five million; the number was rising by hundreds of thousands every day. So that’s why we decided to leave and to take those single-parent families out too. And there were stories at the borders too. So you arrive with a Ukrainian birth certificate. If you’ve seen a Ukrainian birth certificate, there’s no photo, and everything is written in Ukrainian. In handwriting too. In handwriting. Now you’re crossing the border, and I’m standing at the Romanian and Hungarian borders, and they call me over to read them the name and date of birth, because even the date of birth isn’t written in numbers—the month is written out in Ukrainian. Which is different. Wow, right. I could have said it was Misha Rabinovich, born on the twenty-ninth of January. I could have said whatever I wanted, and they just entered it into their computer. Those were miracles. There’s no other way to explain how they actually agreed to let us through at the borders. They took my word for it. They simply took all the documents together, from the first bus, the second bus, the third bus. They just took

41:01 Speaker 2 all the documents, and I’m standing beside them, reading them out. The few who had passports had their names written in English, so the officials copied the letters. But dozens of people had only birth certificates. And then there were the families. If you know a little about Russian families, you know that one family can have three different surnames. The mother kept her maiden name. The father has his own surname. Sometimes the children were even given their grandmother’s surname, or one child has the father’s surname and another has the mother’s. And people ask, “What is this? Are they a family?” And you say they’re a family, and they believe you because you said so. They don’t start checking; we have no documents with us to prove they’re a family. It really was a very difficult journey. I remember the drivers who came to pick us up. We left on Friday morning, so we spent Shabbos in Moldova, at a holiday resort, where the wonderful shluchim took care of us. We waited for the buses that had taken the children to Berlin to come back and pick us up. During the trip, I remember asking them to stop again. We were supposed to stop once every four hours, but I had pregnant women and women with two-month-old babies. Our youngest baby was Tuvia, five weeks old. Born in the orphanage. Wow. Born in the orphanage. We simply had to stop every hour and a half or two hours. One woman felt sick; another fainted. These were women who had left their husbands, left everything, left their elderly mothers, and everyone was so stressed and so panicked. I remember the driver saying to me, “You’re worse than the children. We told the children we’d stop in four hours, and everyone managed. Everyone held on, everyone was

42:53 Speaker 2 fine, it was quiet on the bus. And with you, we’re stopping every hour and a half. When are we going to get to Berlin?” It was also the stress, the worry, and the uncertainty—no one knew what would happen. The mothers were—the children had gone on a trip. The mothers understood the situation. For the children, it was a school trip. Yes. Especially because the amazing Mendy and Mushky told them, “Think of it this way: we’re going on a trip through Europe now.” Such energy. Traveling through Europe, singing songs—they made it fun, which was incredible. Of course, there were also students who understood more of what was happening, but everyone was very withdrawn. It was quiet. It was like—you’re crossing a border now. At one border, they waited six hours. We didn’t even have to wait that long, and still we traveled for such a long time. It was a very hard trip, very hard. And when you arrive in Germany, the community really embraces us and helps us. We received letters from the United States and all sorts of places, and gifts and donations. The entire Jewish people truly rallied to help, and that will never be forgotten. The Jewish people were afraid it would be like what happened during World War II—that people didn’t know, didn’t hear, didn’t think, didn’t help, and afterward the communities said, “How could we have done such a thing?” Six million Jews were exterminated, and perhaps we could have saved many of them. And now they really kept arranging buses for us, making sure we had food, really taking care of us. The concern was very, very genuine, and they truly helped. But as with anything, how long can it go on? We were living on borrowed time. We thought we were coming for two weeks, a month at most, and it kept going on and on and on, until it had already been half a year. And someone from the hotel comes and says, “I’m sorry, this isn’t what we discussed. It’s already been nine months.”

44:31 Speaker 3 The start of a new school year is...

44:32 Speaker 2 And it starts—and September first is approaching, and what do you do? And...

44:38 Speaker 3 How many of you were there? All the children and adults together.

44:40 Speaker 2 We were more than three hundred people.

44:42 Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

44:43 Speaker 2 Morning, noon, and night, holidays, Shabbos, birthdays. We held brissim there. After just a week, mothers came and asked for their sons to have a bris.

44:53 Speaker 3 Oh my goodness.

44:54 Speaker 2 I mean, wonderful things happened there, and things were accomplished, and we became so close. Mothers from the school who had barely known us before... At that school there are two mothers who...

45:06 Speaker 3 Yes.

45:06 Speaker 2 were busy with their work, with...

45:08 Speaker 3 It’s surreal, and suddenly they’re living with you.

45:12 Speaker 2 Twenty-four seven.

45:13 Speaker 3 Crazy.

45:13 Speaker 2 Living together has a lot of advantages, but at a certain point it becomes very burdensome. We tried as much as we could to keep things light and easy and optimistic. And everyone was in constant contact with Odessa, because everything had been left behind. It’s not as though this was a planned trip and people had packed up and sold everything. Each person could take one ten-kilo bag.

45:34 Speaker 3 Yes.

45:35 Speaker 2 Everyone had to choose what to take, and even then, you could barely move on the bus, because we traveled by bus. How much can you take with you? As time went on, of course, people began getting things out of their homes. They asked neighbors and relatives who had stayed behind, and people started bringing more and more things that had been left behind to the hotel. And then we had left in the winter, and summer arrived, and the children were growing. You need clothes, you need Shabbos clothes, you need everyday clothes. It’s so complicated, and so... And you need dental care, and you need vaccinations for the children.

46:10 Speaker 3 Right. How did Germany receive you, bureaucratically speaking?

46:12 Speaker 2 Very well. The Germans—

46:14 Speaker 3 As refugees, basically.

46:14 Speaker 2 I have to say, they accepted us as refugees, but they also helped us. We had no documents, and they gave everyone refugee status and health insurance. They even vaccinated all the children before we had health insurance.

46:28 Speaker 3 Wow.

46:29 Speaker 2 Which really is amazing, amazing, amazing. I have to mention that. Even Israel wasn’t prepared to accept us on those terms.

46:37 Speaker 3 Wow.

46:39 Speaker 2 It was a very difficult time. And after a year, we saw that it was simply impossible. This was apparently going to be a war of attrition. We pray every day for it to end, but it doesn’t look like it will. It really doesn’t. But...

46:53 Speaker 3 You went back to Odessa.

46:54 Speaker 2 We did. And you know what surprised me? I was sure it would be easiest for the children from the orphanage, because one dormitory here, another dormitory there—what difference would it make? But it was the opposite. In Berlin, the children had much better conditions. Every two children had a hotel room with their own bathroom and shower. We thought they would... We were in a hotel, and for half a year we were in a hotel by a lake, with a stunning view and wonderful fresh air. But they wanted to go home. They wanted the dormitory where five or six children sleep in a room, with shared showers, as they say, at the end of the hall.

47:28 Speaker 3 Yes, I’ve been there.

47:29 Speaker 2 They wanted to go home.

47:31 Speaker 3 Wow.

47:32 Speaker 2 It was so moving to see them return to their rooms, to their beds. It was heartbreaking.

47:38 Speaker 3 Because that’s their home, really.

47:40 Speaker 2 That’s their home.

47:42 Speaker 3 And what does it look like now, during the war?

47:46 Speaker 2 Boruch Hashem, boruch Hashem. First of all, Odessa really is... You can’t say that all of Ukraine is experiencing the war in the same way. You can’t say that. Of course, some things affect everyone: the economy has collapsed throughout Ukraine, people have lost their jobs—especially in Odessa, which relies on tourism. And that’s without even talking about what it lost during COVID. So now, with the war, it’s really...

48:07 Speaker 3 Let’s focus on one tragedy.

48:10 Speaker 2 Yes. So people have lost their jobs. The economic situation is terrible. But in terms of missiles, in terms of fear and worry, Odessa is still functioning more or less like a normal city.

48:24 Speaker 3 Maybe if that weren’t the case, you wouldn’t have been able to return. You would have had to think of something else.

48:28 Speaker 2 In the summer, when we asked the mayor and the military officials whether we could bring the children back, they didn’t want to take responsibility for that decision. Later, in February, we didn’t ask them anymore. But by then we were already teaching in person. While we were in Germany, the community that remained in Odessa reopened as usual. The preschools were open by the summer—in June, we opened them. We prepared a shelter, made it suitable for use, and opened a preschool.

48:54 Speaker 3 So the children joined in the middle of the second semester.

48:57 Speaker 2 I said, if children can attend preschool and school in Odessa, why do those in Germany have to stay there? If we can carry on, and we have transportation and food and a whole system, and teachers and staff, and people here are going about their lives, going to work, why do they have to stay there? My husband and I were constantly traveling back and forth, which was very difficult, because there’s no airport in Ukraine now either.

49:18 Speaker 3 How far are you from the border? From Moldova?

49:21 Speaker 2 We’re very close to the border. We’re an hour away.

49:23 Speaker 3 Oh, wow.

49:24 Speaker 2 We’re very close to the border. It’s just that sometimes you stand at the border for hours—

49:28 Speaker 3 Yes.

49:28 Speaker 2 And waiting to cross the border. Then another two hours to the airport. But there were periods when there were no flights from Moldova either, because they were afraid the Ukrainians would come there, so we had to travel all the way to Romania. That was less pleasant, but you do what you have to do on shlichus.

49:43 Speaker 3 Yes.

49:44 Speaker 2 So when we found ourselves in that situation, we tried to make the best of it. And that’s it—we really did return. A year into the war, we were back in Odessa, carrying on with what we had. What really surprised me was how many new Jewish people joined the community—people who had lived in Odessa all their lives. I asked some of them, “Where were you?” I thought maybe they lived at the edge of the city, maybe they didn’t know there was a community.

50:05 Speaker 3 That’s part of war too. It’s painful.

50:08 Speaker 2 They said, “We didn’t need anything. Everything was fine. We didn’t need help. We had our friends and our jobs.” I said, “And now?” They said, “Now there’s a war. Now we want...” Some said, “We want to be on the community’s lists, so people know we exist. If, G-d forbid, something happens, they’ll know there’s another Jewish family here.” Others said, “Now we’re missing that warmth, because now we...” And some simply came because they needed humanitarian aid...

50:35 Speaker 3 Suddenly they needed it.

50:36 Speaker 2 Suddenly they needed it. Every month, every month, we distribute seven hundred—seven thousand, seven thousand boxes of—

50:43 Speaker 3 Wow.

50:43 Speaker 2 Food to seven thousand families. It’s unbelievable. Our database of family records grew by close to a thousand people.

51:00 Speaker 3 Wow.

51:01 Speaker 2 People we didn’t even know existed.

51:03 Speaker 3 In earlier wars, people wanted to hide their Jewishness, and now it’s the opposite.

51:07 Speaker 2 Yes, because Jewish communities around the world really are helping so, so much. That has to be said.

51:11 Speaker 3 Absolutely.

51:11 Speaker 2 It’s truly that sense of unity and caring. There’s the Russian community, which helped get men out of the country. There’s JRNU, a Chabad organization set up specifically to help with food, food packages and activities for children. That’s so important, because now, with donations too—we’ve always lived on donations, on local donations from Odessa businesspeople and donations from around the world. Now there are no businesspeople in Odessa; there are no people earning money. The amounts coming from within Odessa are tiny. Everything comes from outside. And keeping all these institutions running, even now—yes, maybe sixty percent of our community is scattered around the world, in Israel, Europe and the United States, but there are new people, and the school is operating. True, there aren’t twenty children in every class anymore, but there is—

52:06 Speaker 3 But there is a class, so there’s a teacher and there are expenses.

52:09 Speaker 2 Exactly, and there’s transportation. True, we used to have twelve bus routes and now we have six, but six routes are still six routes. Fuel is getting more expensive, and life there has become more expensive because everything is getting more expensive. Everything that reaches Odessa now no longer comes by sea; it comes by truck. Fuel comes by truck, not the way it used to. Everything, absolutely everything, has become more expensive. But we have to do it, especially now. Before every holiday... I remember the first Purim. My husband accompanied us, and as soon as he saw that our documents had been accepted, he turned back to the community from the middle of the journey. I crossed the last border on my own, because once we’d crossed two borders, we weren’t worried anymore.

52:49 Speaker 3 Wow, so you were still there on Purim?

52:51 Speaker 2 No. We had left, but my husband went back in time for Purim.

52:55 Speaker 3 Ah.

52:55 Speaker 2 And I remember organizing the event over the phone. What do you do for Purim? On the one hand you want to celebrate; on the other hand there’s a war, chaos, fear. People didn’t even know how to conduct themselves yet. I remember saying, “Let’s set a table for seventy people.” Then, on the Shabbos before Purim, my husband said, “I think there were seventy people in shul just this Shabbos, so maybe we should plan for more on Purim.” So I told the kitchen, “Let’s prepare for 120 people.” Then we raised it to 150. In the end, more than 200 people came.

53:28 Speaker 3 Wow.

53:29 Speaker 2 The shul was full. Two hundred people. Who could have imagined it? Some were people coming to shul for the first time. Others came only very occasionally. You know, people who come on Yom Kippur?

53:42 Speaker 3 Yes.

53:43 Speaker 2 Suddenly they came to shul on Purim. And the same thing happened on Pesach. There was a curfew from six or seven in the evening until five in the morning. You ask yourself, “How are we going to celebrate the Seder?” So we took a hotel and invited people to spend the whole Yom Tov with us, including the Seder, of course. We thought we’d have a hotel for eighty people. There were 180 people in that hotel throughout Yom Tov. At the same time, our son, a Tomim, came with a friend and held a Seder for people there. We held an early Seder before Yom Tov began, because they had to be home by seven. People wanted to feel the Yom Tov. They wanted to drink the four cups and eat the matzah and the maror. There was already more than enough bitterness, but—

54:27 Speaker 3 Yes.

54:27 Speaker 2 They wanted to feel it, because they’d been celebrating the Seder with the community for thirty years. So we really had to keep all the activities going. Humanitarian aid grew enormously during that period, and it was truly a breath of fresh air for people. There was the warmth, too: they came and were greeted with a smile and personal attention. Bochurim shluchim arrived that summer, and at every food distribution we helped men put on tefillin and offered Shabbos candles to the women. That personal attention, speaking with each and every person, was something they were truly thirsty for. It was very important. We help with medication, we—whatever we could do. We took children to camps outside Ukraine and held camps inside Ukraine. We also ran a day camp. Even amid all that chaos, I said, “Let’s run a day camp too.” The principal and the teaching staff looked at me as if to say, “Where did you come from?” They were thinking maybe something had gone a little wrong with me in Berlin. I told them, “No, it’s possible. It’s realistic.” I brought in a woman from the community who organizes our Sunday programs. She said, “Okay, if you want, I’ll do it. But let’s keep it small—just ten days, not three weeks like always.” I said, “However many children there are, we’re doing this day camp.” It was amazing: twenty-five children registered, trusting that—

55:52 Speaker 3 Wow.

55:52 Speaker 2 We held it specifically in the kindergarten building, because we already had a shelter ready there. Then I said, “We’re opening the school.” We received permission. The municipality said that if we prepared some kind of shelter, they would approve it. They really wanted a little more normalcy in the city too, with schools opening. Then the principal asked, “Which classes are we opening? How do we decide?” I said, “If there’s one student, we open a class.” She said, “One student? A whole class, with every subject, for one student?” I said, “Yes, absolutely. One student, and we open the class.” People were so happy, because the children had been wanting so badly to get out. March, April, May, June, July—all that time—

56:34 Speaker 4 Almost half a year.

56:35 Speaker 2 Half a year of children sitting at home. We kept teaching on Zoom the whole time. The day after the war began, on February 25, we were on Zoom. We never stopped, not even for an hour. But everyone wanted to see each other and get out. Some parents were still afraid, of course, but gradually everyone who was in the city began coming. People also started returning. They understood that we were opening the school, that the school really was operating, so they came back to the city.

57:03 Speaker 4 Did people consult you about whether to come back or not? What did you tell them?

57:07 Speaker 2 All the time. All the time.

57:09 Speaker 4 Could you take responsibility for telling people...

57:12 Speaker 2 We never told people what to do.

57:13 Speaker 4 Right, that’s very—

57:14 Speaker 2 But we did tell them what we were doing.

57:16 Speaker 4 “This is what we’re doing; this is the situation.”

57:18 Speaker 2 “This is the situation. You decide what you want. We’re here in the city. We’ve opened the school and the kindergarten. We have a shelter here and a shelter there. We have water and food in every institution, in case there’s a situation like the one we had, when for two days we couldn’t drive and deliver food.” We have a central kitchen, and we’d prepared everything and stocked up on food. But we hadn’t thought we needed to distribute those supplies among the institutions. Then suddenly there were two days when driving was forbidden.

57:47 Speaker 4 Wow.

57:47 Speaker 2 And you say, “How are we going to feed them?” We have a nursing home with elderly people, Holocaust survivors, staying with us, and we have to feed them, but there’s no kitchen there. We had always brought food over to them. So you start thinking about what to do. You get an ambulance, which is allowed to travel, and you start requesting permits and talking to the police, because you have to feed them. And the boarding school is in another building. I mean, we kept thinking we were ready. We thought we’d bought sleeping bags and that would be enough for the shelter. It isn’t enough. You also need proper ventilation. And we were sure we’d prepared everything and bought a few emergency lights, and suddenly everything shuts down, you have no electricity, and you need a generator. And not just one generator, like we had before the war. We said, “There, we bought a generator,” but then you realize you have seven buildings in use. You need seven generators.

58:37 Speaker 4 And each generator costs, oh...

58:40 Speaker 2 Each generator costs money, and in each place you need a different electrical capacity. Because where we put in a weak generator and there was a lot of electrical demand, it didn’t help us at all. The kitchens couldn’t operate, because suddenly we realized that a seven-kilowatt generator just wasn’t enough. On the other hand, when we put the eighty-kilowatt one we’d bought in a small building, then when the kitchen shut down, everything went off. Even the secretary’s computers went off, because the generator needs a minimum load to start working, and we didn’t have that minimum load in the building except when the kitchen was running. When the kitchen stops working in the afternoon, everything goes off.

59:21 Speaker 4 It’s like dealing with problems you didn’t even know existed.

59:23 Speaker 2 Right. And every time we thought, “Now we’re ready, now we’ve organized things properly,” there was another surprise. It was a hard winter, a hard winter with power cuts. There was no heat, no hot water, no water at all. I mean, it’s been a year—a year and three months already. It hasn’t been an easy time at all. People think that what they see on Facebook is what’s happening. We try to post things and lift everyone’s spirits, and genuinely to give thanks. Because truly, every bit of help, every generator we bought, was paid for with donations from organizations and from private individuals, truly righteous people who made it possible. Even living in Berlin for a year with so many people cost millions and millions of dollars, which were, of course, raised from around the world. That really is a tremendous credit to the Jewish people. You hear it from people in the city, from the government—how much they appreciate the Jewish communities and the way they support people. There are many charitable organizations in the world, including ones helping Ukraine; entire countries send humanitarian aid and everything. But there’s nothing comparable to the support the Jewish communities gave. And nobody sees what goes on behind the scenes. You post pictures of the Seder night, for example, and nobody dreams what problems you had to solve to get to those tables. You couldn’t even find anywhere to buy disposable dishes in the quantities you needed. Wow. Everything had closed. Nothing was being imported. The most basic things you need—even potatoes and onions—you had nowhere to buy them. It’s crazy. Because in Odessa, so many things used to come from Kherson. Most of the vegetables and fruit, for example, came from Kherson. Kherson was occupied by the Russians, so no produce was coming from there, and they couldn’t bring it from Kyiv because the roads were dangerous.

1:01:18 Speaker 2 And everyone had to rethink their plans. Not just us—all the suppliers, the whole... the government, the municipality. It was on a national, global scale. Crazy. It was like, you’d come through COVID and thought you’d been through the worst of it. That’s it, life is slowly getting back to normal. Because in the year before the war—I mean, the year the war began—COVID was already fading away. You know, when the first people left, they were asked for COVID tests in Moldova? Until the authorities gave up and realized there were going to be millions. By the way, in Israel... When they saw the line, when they saw the line. In Israel there were COVID tests on entry. Yes, yes. Terrible. Yes, just think. But when they saw the lines of people who had been waiting for five days, they realized they couldn’t deal with it—not even with doing COVID tests on the spot, or with the fact that people didn’t have the money with them. What were they supposed to do? They had groups of people, hundreds and thousands of people, with no COVID tests, no way to pay for COVID tests, and no time to do it. So they opened the gates. And that was the end of COVID. The war replaced COVID. Yes. Really. Wow. But that’s how it is for us. We’re the Rebbe’s shluchim, and we’re where we need to be. Hakadosh Boruch Hu sends us opportunities, and when something happens, we don’t choose what happens; we choose how to respond to it. We choose how to behave. So we have to choose what... The only thing on our minds is what the Rebbe would want. If the Rebbe were with us now, how would he tell us to act? And I think that in any case, the Rebbe would want us to look after every ordinary Jew, wherever they are, and give them the opportunity. We don’t get involved in politics, we don’t get involved in the war, we have no position on

1:03:05 Speaker 2 that. Of course, we pray for the welfare of the government, as every Jew should pray for the welfare of the government in the place where they live. But the situation is very difficult, and there’s no way we can influence it at all. Yes. So the only way is simply to help people. Right now it’s about the welfare of the Jews. A lot of people here in Israel talk about the war in Ukraine, if they talk about it at all—whether the Ukrainians will win or not. Wait a second. There are huge numbers of Jews there right now... Yes, yes. Under fire. And it’s not... A lot of people ask, “Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t they leave?” Where would they go? And why should they leave? They have their homes, their relatives, their loved ones buried there. What do you mean, why didn’t they leave? There are people who think they can still save their businesses, people who still have hope, people who can’t see themselves anywhere else. It’s all they have. I see it now, after a year and three months: the families who left because they were afraid, because they felt pressured, for all sorts of reasons. Each person has their own reason, their own emotional makeup, their own level of... On the one hand, you might say their level of trust in Hashem, or their level of confidence in themselves, their own psychological makeup. And they came here, and at first there really was a great deal of help, from the state and from everyone. But little by little, people go back to their routines and don’t have the energy to keep hearing about it... Of course. “Work it out, get yourselves organized, you’ve had enough help.” And I hear from so many women who were educated women—what do I mean, “were”? They are educated women, women who had their own businesses in Odessa and have become caregivers here. And the men leave at five in the morning for factories, folding cardboard boxes and doing the...

1:04:58 Speaker 2 They work the most basic jobs and earn minimum wage, and now they have to rent apartments on that income. For the first year, the government helped pay the rent. A year went by, and that was it. Now they have to manage on their own. These are families with children, and everyone here knows what the standard of living is like in Israel and how high the cost of living is. They have to face that alone now, and many are asking, “Maybe we should go back?” Back there, they have an apartment, furnished and equipped. And some did go back. Many went back. But look, in the overall numbers, most of those who left haven’t returned. Nine million people left Ukraine. No, but that’s from the whole country. From the whole country. Odessa... Because honestly, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, “Wow, I’d go back too,” you know? I mean, if the security situation is reasonable—I don’t know. Even in Odessa. That’s what comes to mind. Yes, that’s why I’m saying nine million is from all of Ukraine. Right, right. In Odessa too, many fled. Many really did return. But look, in our institutions—our school, our kindergarten—sixty percent of the students haven’t returned. It’s true that we have new students who came from Mykolaiv and Kherson, a few from Mariupol, a few from Zaporizhzhia, from the border towns. So they moved farther away. They wanted to get away from the border but didn’t want to leave Ukraine; they wanted to stay home. Move closer to the other border. Yes, but it hasn’t made up the difference. Right. Not even close. Yes, but I can really understand those who went back. I mean... Yes, what I’m saying is, I saw people flee, but you don’t know what’s waiting for you on the other side. Then a few months go by, and you see that... you—

1:06:46 Speaker 2 In the end, you choose which hardship you want to face. Right. It isn’t easy anywhere. And when someone says, “Oh, you’re heroes,” she thinks to herself, “We’re heroes too. We’re dealing with things here too.” And she’s one hundred percent right. Absolutely. It’s a struggle every single day. So if someone listening now has a neighbor who’s a refugee—though they don’t even call them refugees these days. Exactly. They call them olim, but that isn’t right. They didn’t choose this. They didn’t choose it; they’re refugees too. So invite them for a Shabbos meal, bring them something, reach out, try to help however you can. Sometimes a kind word... Absolutely. That’s a very, very big help. First of all, understand that there’s someone here who really needs help. Don’t assume everything’s fine because they arrived over a year ago. Understand that, and then see how you can actually help. Yes. Not all the children have settled into the schools. There are many divorces; families have broken apart. Every family really has its own personal journey. It isn’t simple. Not at all. Let’s start wrapping up. I have to go back for a moment to what you said about being fifteen and visiting your sister. Yes. When I was about eighteen, I spent Pesach with you. Wow. Eighteen? Yes. And I felt exactly what you described. I remember being there for the big Seder night in the hall. Yes. And I said, “Wow, this is incredible.” There were about five hundred people there, could that be right? Something like that. With those round tables. We were off to the side on the stage. There was no room, so they squeezed us onto the stage. We were the extras, and I said, “Wow, I have to do this too.” It was incredible. That was really one of the things I had in mind when I said, “One day I’m going to go on shlichus.” Odessa, in general, is

1:08:27 Speaker 2 an empire. I’ve been there quite a few times. Yes, we hadn’t met—just so everyone understands. I was there as a young woman, and afterward we— You came later as a couple. By train, a full fourteen hours, for bar mitzvahs, bas mitzvahs and things like that. It’s just an empire. And I think one of the things that stands out most about you is what you said earlier about wanting to reopen the school: “Even if there’s only one child, I’m opening it.” All the time, no matter what happens, you act. You look for how you can do it, not why you can’t. Often, people say, “Well, given the situation, let’s see. Open a school? No, because of this and this and this.” But you look for the yes: how can we do it, how can we succeed, how can we open? Despite everything. And you’ve kept that fire burning for thirty years. Yes. It’s amazing. You really come to Odessa and feel this vitality and energy of a young couple. I want to tell you that two days ago I came here for a wedding. My sister, Azimov, married off her son to the daughter of the Gottlieb shluchim from Mykolaiv. So we felt connected to both sides. Yes, because— The family of shluchim. The family of shluchim, and our neighbors too. Yes. It was only about a two-hour drive from Odessa. And there I met the shlucha Mrs. Matusof from Toulouse, France, who is Azimov’s aunt. I asked her, “When did you arrive?” She told me, “This afternoon.” I said, “You arrived this afternoon and came straight to the wedding? Why didn’t you let yourself come yesterday?” She said, “I couldn’t.” I asked, “What do you mean, you couldn’t? At what age can you finally do that?” How old is she? I don’t know how old she is, but I told her, “Look, I keep

1:10:09 Speaker 2 saying that soon I’ll hand things over to the children, and then that’ll be it. Then I’ll be able to. But when I look at you, you’re not giving me much hope.” There’s no retirement. So there’s no retirement on shlichus, and no such thing as “I can’t.” If something needs to be done, it needs to be done. She said, “How could I leave? Last week I was here too, at the wedding of some of our baalei teshuvah. We had to come.” And she said, “Yes, my daughter runs the school. She does everything; she’s the official principal and all. But she was sick for a week. So of course I had to be at the school.” I said to her, “But when does it end? When do you stop being needed?” It doesn’t end. So it’s like we say: when we go out on shlichus, we ask for the Rebbe’s brachah and receive the Rebbe’s brachah. It’s a one-way ticket. We receive a one-way ticket, and we stay at our post. And you know, as you say, only a war could do this. Only a catastrophe like this could bring people back. And the shluchim too, as you said, didn’t leave willingly and are constantly trying to return. But there are cities they can’t return to, where there’s fighting. It’s right on the border. There are battles there every day, every hour. The front line. It’s the front line, completely. So, baruch Hashem, we’re in a city we can return to and live in, more or less. You know, people say, “What, you still don’t have flights from Ukraine? Why aren’t there flights from Ukraine?” There are flights from Ukraine—it’s a war. Flights of missiles. Yes, it isn’t simple. That’s how it is. The Rebbe gives us strength, and we know we’re on the Rebbe’s shlichus. That’s what gets us up every morning to do something new, something good. When you do good for another person, it makes you feel good, and that’s the prayer

1:11:56 Speaker 2 Ours, so that we can keep doing good things, helping others, and being there wherever they need us. That’s it. We just need to pray for Moshiach to come, because really—amen. Enough. We’ve had enough. We really can’t anymore. Do you have a tip? Actually, everything you just said could be a tip, but in the end, each woman has her own shlichus. One hundred percent. In her workplace, with the people around her. Absolutely. How do you keep that fire burning without getting worn down? I mean, everyone’s worn down already, everyone’s under... How is it that after years of work, you’re still as if you’d just set out yesterday? I think—I’m definitely in favor of bringing in young couples. Now our children are getting married, and with every child who gets married, we get so excited and beg them to come join us. And Mendy really did return to shlichus, and he came with the wonderful Mushky. They’ve arrived and are doing simply wonderful things. I keep saying that whatever we do, they do a hundred times better, because they’re a generation that grew up on shlichus, speaking a language that’s their mother tongue. It’s funny for me to call it a mother tongue when I don’t speak that language—Yes. But it’s a language they grew up with—Mother Earth. They grew up with Hebrew and Russian side by side, and sometimes they even learn Ukrainian really well. They know how people think. They grew up in that environment, so a Torah class Mendy gives is a thousand times more interesting and engaging than one I give. And my husband will forgive me, but what my husband—But you have a stake in all of it. No, that’s not true. I’m not taking credit. I’m happy about their success, and I’m proud of him and of my children, and I want them all to come, because what they can do is so much more, so much greater, and so much...

1:13:46 Speaker 2 stronger. So I believe in a younger generation coming in with new ideas and fresh energy and everything. But I’ll say it again: it’s the Rebbe’s blessing. And you know, as long as you’re focused on your purpose, you do what needs to be done. Exactly. Like with anything. You don’t always do the things you love. You do the things you need to do, so you try to do them with vitality and joy. Of course, there are things you connect with more, and you do those better. There are things you may do a little less well, but you do them, and I’m happy with everything I do. I’ll say it again: there are things I really don’t like doing, and I do them because that’s what needs to be done. Part of the shlichus. Yes. Yes. Remember why you went out. Completely. It’s... Listen, we’re here only because of the strength the Rebbe gives us, and only because the Rebbe sent us. The Rebbe left us a directive to help every Jew: first, to tell them they’re Jewish; then to tell them what it means to be Jewish; then to help them choose the right path, choose to live as a Jew, observe the mitzvos, and live a Jewish life. That’s what we do. Wow. Well. Chaya Wolf, shlucha to Odessa. Yes. Wishing you continued... success going forward. You’re heading back very soon? Yes, with Hashem’s help, in about a week. Have a good, safe trip, and take care of yourselves. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Chani. I wish you success, and truly, your shlichus in this medium is so important, because there’s an enormous audience of women and girls who aren’t familiar with the world of shlichus, or with this way of life at all, and... Absolutely. You know? And they really enjoy it. I very much hope so.

1:15:26 Speaker 2 Thank you so much. Bye. Have a good week.