Air-raid sirens in Ukraine are not very loud for the same reason there are so few bomb shelters—no one ever expected to need them. In most parts of the country, the most reliable way to stay abreast of deadly bombing raids is via Google alerts, which is why Dubi Ehrentreu and Mendel Bleich didn’t notice Zaporizhzhia’s Red Alert go off late Purim morning. Dubi was reading the Megillah for 80 people at Chabad-Lubavitch’s central Zaporizhzhia synagogue, while Mendel was pointing along.
“When we finished the Megillah,I took out my phone and saw that there’d been a siren,” said Bleich, 22. Over the six days that he and Ehrentreu, also 22, spent in Zaporizhzhia—an important industrial city in Ukraine’s southeast that saw heavy fighting in the first week of war, when Russia captured the city’s massive nuclear power plant—there were about six air-raid sirens. “You stop everything and run into the basement of whatever building you’re in,” said Bleich. “There’s not much else to do. There aren’t any actual bomb shelters.”
The two young men are rabbinical students at the Central Lubavitch Yeshivah in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Bleich is the son of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and grew up in the Boston area, and Ehrentreu hails from Zaporizhzhia, where his parents, Rabbi Nachum and Dina Ehrentreu, established Chabad of Zaporizhzhia in 1997. A week before Purim, the younger Ehrentreu made the decision that he could not allow the many Jews still in Zaporizhzhia to be alone on the joyous holiday, and drafted his friend Bleich to join him for Purim in his hometown. It wasn’t just about the Megillah, either.
“The goal was to strengthen the people here,” said Bleich. “They’re in such a depressed state, just to be able to bring some joy and Purim spirit was vital.”
Ehrentreu’s parents had left Zaporizhzhia on March 3-4 during the dangerous battle at the nuclear plant—Europe’s largest, with the fighting sparking global fears of nuclear disaster—taking along with them 100 members of the Jewish community. “I didn’t want to leave Zaporizhzhia, we’ve been there 25 years,” Rabbi Ehrentreu said. “We built a beautiful synagogue, a Jewish preschool and school, a whole Jewish infrastructure, but here I was spending all my time sitting in the dark, in a basement, and I realized that I’d be able to do far more to help my community from outside Ukraine than from a basement.”
Indeed, every day since, aside from distributing aid, Ehrentreu arranges for buses to evacuate people from Zaporizhzhia. They leave from outside the synagogue, bringing hundreds of refugees straight to the Polish border. He also continues to be in touch with people every day by phone.
The younger Ehrentreu likewise spent the first weeks of the war volunteering for the cause. As a native Russian speaker, he’d helped man the emergency call center set up in Crown Heights, working the phones for hours on end to help those within Ukraine get out of their cities to safety.
Still, he couldn’t bear the thought of the Jews of Zaporizhzhia without a proper Purim. He and Bleich packed up four suitcases with some kosher food and a lot of difficult-to-get-in-Ukraine medicines, such as blood-pressure medication, and on March 13 flew from New York to Warsaw.
Bleich and Ehrentreu arrived in Warsaw on Monday evening and took a car straight towards Ukraine, crossing the border on foot. Aside from them and some aid workers, everyone else was heading in the other direction. They stayed overnight in Lviv before boarding a 23-hour train to Zaporizhzhia, where they arrived on Wednesday morning, the eve of Purim, March 16.
Certain complications arose almost immediately. The Megillah is supposed to be read after nightfall (6:17 p.m. in Zaporizhzhia on that evening), but Zaporizhzhia’s curfew is at 7 p.m. Even if they’d have sped through the reading, that wouldn’t give people enough time to get home on time, especially in Zaporizhzhia, a vastly spread-out city that sits on both sides of the Dnieper River. After consulting with rabbis, they read it after 4:36 p.m. (Plag Haminchah).
“About 30 people came to hear the Megillah on the night of Purim,” said the younger Ehrentreu. “We usually have a few hundred community members gather on Purim, but this was beautiful.”
The next day 80 people showed up, and aside from the missed air-raid siren, everything went as planned. Prayers—Zaporizhzhia’s synagogue otherwise also continues to hold regular prayer services every day—the reading of the Megillah, the mitzvot of the holiday, followed by a big and joyous Purim celebration. Ehrentreu said that today, some of the staunchest Jewish community volunteers and activists are people who until recently would only drop by once or twice a year, for Yom Kippur or the like.
“You’re seeing the Jewish spark within each soul come out during these times of war,” he said.
The day-long farbrengen gathering was spirited, but difficult.
“It’s truly scary there,” said Ehrentreu. “On Purim, we’re supposed to be joyous, happy, but how can you be happy hearing sirens? Amidst panic? What reason is there to be happy? So we spoke about the fact that when you bring joy to others, you experience it yourself. All of us need to strengthen each other.”
After Purim came Shabbat, on the morning of which the pair found out that the city would soon descend into a 36-hour military lockdown. They led the gathered Jews through a fast prayer service and Shabbat kiddush before heading back to the Ehrentreu’s family home to wait out the lockdown.
On Monday afternoon, March 21, the young rabbis boarded the day’s Chabad evacuation bus leaving Zaporizhzhia and began the long trek back to safety.
What the two yeshiva students had seen and heard in Zaporizhzhia would pale in comparison to the stories they heard from the survivors of Mariupol sitting next to them on the bus.
“They left with just their passports, and that’s it,” said Ehrentreu. “They had no food, no water, no electricity. To get out of Mariupol, they went through dangers none of us could dream of. There was an elderly Jewish man sitting in the front of the bus just crying. That’s all he was doing. It was painful to watch.”
As the bus headed west, Bleich and Ehrentreu went up and down the aisle donning tefillin with the Jewish men, helping them recite the Shema. Ehrentreu approached an elderly man whom he recognized from the community.
“I’m Gregory Rivkin,” the man reminded Ehrentreu as they wrapped tefillin. “My grandfather was a Chasid. He was the last shochet of Zaporizhzhia.”
Gregory Rivkin’s grandfather, Rabbi Meir Shlomo Malkin, was born around 1888 elsewhere in Ukraine, and in his early teens set out for the yeshiva in Lubavitch, where he studied until 1909. After marrying a woman from Zaporizhzhia, he settled there, and when his father-in-law passed away inherited his position as shochet of the city, also working as a mohel. After surviving World War II in Central Asia, he returned to his hometown and his position.
Forty-six years later, Malkin’s grandson sat on a bus, together with his family, wearing tefillin and heading out of the city whose Jewish spiritual survival ran in his blood.
“When I was a yeshiva student, I saw the great love with which the Rebbe spoke about Soviet Jews, the way he looked at them,” said the elder Rabbi Ehrentreu. “That’s what made me want to move to serve the Jews of Ukraine, and what reminds me of the awesome responsibility we have towards each and every one of them.”
By Dovid Margolin/Chabad.org
