Ukrainians in Baltimore

Haggadah Section: Rachtzah

Article from Baltimore Sun, Friday, April 15th:

“This time we’ll be focusing on our brothers and sisters in Ukraine, including those who are trying to escape from the horrors of this war, and on those large numbers of us who have friends and family there.” says Belinsky, 45, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, who helped establish the Orthodox community center and synagogue in Pikesville 17 years ago.

“The theme on Passover, like on many Jewish holidays, is, ‘They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s drink,’” says Gene Drubetskoy, a native of Kyiv, Ukraine, who came to Maryland with his family as a child and grew up here. “It’s about beating the odds, surviving, keeping our religion alive.”

Drubetskoy, 41, is one of about 15,000 people in Greater Baltimore on the rolls of the American-Russian Institute for the Enrichment of Life, as the ARIEL Jewish Center is formally known. Most members are Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants from the 15 states of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine, or their children or grandchildre

For many, the theme of emancipation from oppression had a personal resonance long before Vladimir Putin ordered tanks to roll across Russia’s southwestern border.

Russia has a history of antisemitism, from laws that discriminated against Jews starting in the 1790s through government-approved pogroms, or bloody anti-Jewish riots, that took place during the 19th and 20th centuries. During World War II in Ukraine, Nazi death squads killed an estimated 1.5 million Jews, often with the help of local collaborators.

Ukraine is home today to 150,000 to 300,000 Jewish people, according to most recent surveys, making the group a minority in a nation of about 41 million.

Visitors to Russia and Ukraine over the past decade or so say antisemitism is a less severe problem now. But Jews who emigrated to the U.S. during the two most recent waves — first in the 1970s, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed — recall a postwar world in which Judaism was effectively banned and discrimination was the norm.

Steve Ashkenazi, a painting contractor who lives in Pikesville, grew up in Kyiv in the 1960s, where the Soviet government allowed only one synagogue to remain open, older Jewish people feared teaching their children the faith, and becoming known as Jewish could lead to beatings.

His mother decided to move the family to America after being called “a stinking Jew” in public one too many times. The journey took Ashkenazi, then 29, and his family through refugee camps in Austria and Italy, and involved bribing several KGB agents.

Like many Soviet émigrés, he knew little about Judaism until he arrived in the U.S. Members of the ARIEL Center — a branch of Chabad-Lubavitch, an international movement that emphasizes teaching the faith to secular Jews — helped his family get settled and offered educational and worship services.

“When you don’t know about your own faith, it’s like walking in a corridor without lights,” he says. “When you learn it, you can see where you want to go. It really opens your eyes.”

Vladimir Podaritch, 52, a onetime star on the Ukrainian national junior soccer team, remembers growing up in a country with “an anti-Jewish government,” where Jews who wanted to attend college were required to do so away from the big cities, and where few knew anything about the faith’s holidays.

He moved from Kyiv to Baltimore with his family 30 years ago, met and married a Ukrainian woman, found himself welcomed by the local Russian Jewish community, and spent years building a general contracting company.

Now he’s proud to say his children have attended Hebrew school, love the faith’s rituals and traditions, and keep him apprised of what they’ve learned. They’ll be attending a Jewish day school in the fall.

“Here, everything is available,” Podaritch says. “You don’t have to be afraid to be Jewish.”

Source:  
Baltimore Sun

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