Odessa (Ukraine) (AFP) - Forced yet again into exile, [Ron: HOW and by whom?!].as so many times in their tormented history, Jews are leaving in droves from the Ukrainian city of Odessa, threatening the last traces of a once-vibrant culture.
The Black Sea port, a place steeped in Jewish history, now sees many joining the throngs as they pack buses and trains heading for Moldova or Romania.
Some will go on to Germany, the United States, or Israel.
Many are old, knowing that they may well never return.
Some have already experienced exile, like Gallina Dimievitch, 87, "a child of war" who fled the Nazis with her parents in 1942, and who is now returning to Israel to one of her sons.
Her husband died on February 24, the day of the Russian invasion.
"I thank God that he didn't see this," sighs the former engineer in a small and seedy Odessa hotel where departing Jews are gathered.
"Today I have to leave the land of my husband and my parents, leave their graves behind me," she says.
There was little choice: her town of Mykolaiev, 100 kilometres east, has been under heavy Russian bombardment.
"I remember my mother telling me about having to flee from the Nazis. I guess I feel like her today," says 72-year-old Clara.
‘Disintegration'
For Russia, Odessa has strategic and symbolic importance.
It is Ukraine's largest port and a commercial hub, but also holds a powerful place in Russian history, from its founding by Catherine the Great to its resistance against the Nazis to violent clashes between Ukrainian nationalist and pro-Russian protesters in 2014.
Odessa was home to a very large Jewish community until the 1940s, when it was decimated by massacres and deportations during World War II.
Some 40,000 Jews still lived there before the latest invasion, out of a million inhabitants, according to Rabbi Avraham Wolff, head of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad community in Odessa.
[Ron: WHY are we being publicly treated to yet more kvetching about the alleged plight of Jews; in this case 40,000 Jews in Odessa? WHO is oppressing them? WHY aren't we being encouraged to get emotional about the situation of the hundreds of thousands of Russians; or the large numbers of people of Greek origin in Odessa who have been actually oppressed by neo-Nazi military formations and their Jewish bosses in the Ukrainian government for the last EIGHT YEARS?!
A Jewish faithful prays in the Chabad Synagogue in Odessa on March 9, 2022, 14 days after Russia launched a military invasion on Ukraine.Forced yet again into exile, [Ron: HOW and by whom?] as so many times in their tormented history, Jews are leaving in droves from the Ukrainian city of Odessa,threatening the last traces of a once-vibrant culture.(BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images)
[Ron: WHY are Jews leaving Odessa? And WHY is it assumed that their leaving is "threatening the last traces of a once-vibrant culture.?! WHY can't the remaining MILLION residents of Odessa revive their 'once vibrant culture' once the Russian military incursion eliminates the Talmudically COUP created Kiev regime and its bio-warfare laboritories?].
Since the start of the war,[Ron: The Russian military incursion is NOT an invasion. It is a Policing action designed to eliminate the demonic Ukraine regimes' bio-warfare laboratories and its genocidal military assaults on Russians in Ukraine mounted by the regime installed by the Fascist COUP in 2014.] around 20 percent have already left, the rabbi told AFP by phone from Germany where he has gone to oversee evacuations.
"It's one of the most difficult times of my life, seeing this disintegration of the Jewish community.
"It has happened just as the community was starting to grow again, with nurseries, schools, orphanages, a university...
"The pain is very great, but now the only thing that matters is to get out and save Ukraine's Jews."
[Ron: From what?!].
‘Sick'
The century-old Chabad Synagogue in Odessa, closed during the Soviet period, used to serve up to 150 worshippers a day before the war.
Now only two or three come to pray.
Olexsander Klimanov, 64, retired, with a grey cap on his head, is one of them.
His family was evacuated, but he has decided to stay.
"My whole life is in Odessa, I'm old, I can't adapt like young people, learn a new language," he says.
"This is not the first time that we have seen Jews take the road to exile," he adds, recalling the discrimination and mass emigration faced by Jews during the period of Soviet rule.
But to leave is to abandon a history, roots, a Jewish heritage that makes this city and its region "invaluable" for the community.
Important figures were born or lived here, such as the poet Haim Bialik and Israeli Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, and it is home to a huge Jewish cemetery.
"We must preserve the heritage," says Anna Bartaret, a young mother about to be evacuated with her two girls aged eight and 10.
A marketing manager, she was very involved in the Jewish community of Mykolaiev.
Her great-grandfather was a rabbi and she fears for the old books of the synagogue, including an 18th century Torah that she kept at her home.
Her face hardens at the mention of Russian President Vladimir Putinand his desire to "de-nazify" Ukraine whose president,Volodymyr Zelensky, is himself Jewish.
The current criminal regime in Kiev is the result of a Jewish organised COUP which used Nazi thugs as "muscle" because, unlike the Bolshevik COUP in Imperial Russia in 1917 ( which was organised, funded, controlled and led by Jews using millions of Jewish thugs as "muscle"), there were far too few Jews in Ukraine to man the death squads needed to mount the COUP let alone dominate and control 46 million Russians and Ukrainians. See eg: Dnepropetrovsk could be renamed - Jerusalem-on-the-Dnieper http://abundanthope.net/pages/Political_Information_43/Dnepropetrovsk-could-be-renamed---Jerusalem-on-the-Dnieper.shtml
The Israeli regime epitomises the Fascist ethnic genre today with its constant genocide of Palestinians and Syrians et al.
The term "Nazi" is merely a label for thugish and genocidal FASCIST attitudes and behaviours. This Jewess wants you to think that Jews cannot be thugish, genocidal FASCISTS. The joke is that Jews and Jewish Israel typify the genre. As regards its societal gangster aspects, see eg. The Jewish Mafia is the "Mafia" http://abundanthope.net/pages/True_US_History_108/The-Jewish-Mafia-is-the-Mafia_printer.shtml
The reason Jews are fleeing the Ukraine is that their criminal activities in relation to bio-warfare labs, money laundering, child and drug trafficking and other nefarious activities are being terminated by Russia's military incursion; and culprits that are apprehended will be prosecuted.
For instance didya know that the HQ's for Pfizer and other globalist drug corporations are in Kiev?].
