8 | The Jewish Press | March 11, 2022
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Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole.
A Day of Distress
ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT Jewish Press Editor “We write the Holocaust with a capital H,” a Times of Israel editorial read on March 1, “to emphasize its eternally incomprehensible dimensions—the staggering scale of the killings, the relentlessness of the effort to wipe out our entire people. We protest attempted comparisons, even to other genocides, that would trivialize or minimize its dimensions and impact. But when Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky asks, as he did last night, ‘What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?’ His is no cynical, cheap invocation of our abandoned people’s tragedy eight decades ago. It is a heartfelt, legitimate plea for help to put an end to the new tragedy that has so symbolically now engulfed Babyn Yar.” With the news being bad, tragic, hard-to-comprehend in recent weeks, the bombing near Babyn Yar was a flashpoint for many of us. We know this name, intimately, more so than any other part of Ukraine. It brings instant sadness. We don’t talk about Babyn Yar without being weighed down, without pausing to think about the victims buried there, 90% of whom were never identified. I have been asking myself, is it worse when a rocket lands near one place, versus another? Why does the news of this bombing so close to Babyn Yar hit so hard? Shouldn’t we be equally horrified no matter where the missiles land? I’m not sure I know the answer to that. It proba-
bly has to do with the symbolic meaning we attach to a place. In the case of Babyn Yar, that symbolism is undeniably tied to the fact that it took so long for
A missile strikes the main TV tower in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 1, 2022. Credit: Illia Ponomarenko/Twitter
the world to acknowledge what happened there. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union collapsed that the first monuments appeared at Babyn Yar. “The memorial is meant to preserve historical memory following decades of Soviet suppression of historical truth,” Natan Sharansky said, “so that
the evils of the past can never be repeated.” Sharansky is the former head to the Jewish Agency and current chairman of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Advisory Board. He’s right, of course; we’ve waited a long time for the Babyn Yar massacre to be acknowledged, for the victims to be given their rightful place in the history books. For Putin to specifically target the area is not just attacking a place on the map. He’s attacking its place in our collective consciousness and memory. I don’t believe Vladimir Putin orders any missile strikes without attaching meaning to where these missiles land. Breaking history, breaking memories, all while creating new and fresh pain for the current citizens of Ukraine. We have to ask: will today’s victims have to fight to be remembered as well? When you disregard history, what does it say about how you will treat today’s events in the future? In other words, does Putin believe he will get away with it because the world at large has proven again and again that memory is short and unreliable? “We must not allow the truth to, once again, become the victim of war,” Sharansky said. It is a reminder: we can watch things happen in real time while we worry about how the world will remember it all when the dust settles. If the dust settles. Editor’s note: The situation in Ukraine is fluid and changes by the hour. Stories included in the print edition may be outdated once they land in your mail. Please check our website at www.omahajewishpress.com for the latest news.
My Jewish family fled Kyiv in 1989. My heart breaks for the city today. MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN JTA I was born in Kyiv. I shy away from calling myself Ukrainian because at the time it was the USSR. And as Jews who eventually fled as refugees, my family didn’t have any ethnonational attachments to the place. Still, it’s where I learned to sort of smile. It’s where my favorite photo of my mom and me was taken, just three years before cancer killed her. I remember the large city park by our apartment and its train for tots in the summer. I remember begging my sister to pull me on a sled in winter despite there being little snow. That I had been born there at all was a function of knowing when to leave — and when to come back. My babushka, my grandmother, fled Kyiv the day before the Nazis came in 1941. Her own grandparents stayed. They were murdered at Babyn Yar. After the war, the antisemitism in Ukraine under the Soviets was intense and repugnant. My father remembers seeing KGB officers snapping photos of men lined up by the synagogue to purchase matzah for Passover — a crime of Jewish expression. Men identified in those photos would be fired from their jobs or worse, my dad and his close relatives would recall years later as we sat in our new home in the United States around a dining room table spread with homemade gefilte fish, salat olivier and chopped herring salad. A mention of a pogrom, the killing of Jewish doctors or total Soviet amnesia that Jews were specifically targeted by the millions in Germany’s invasion of the USSR — all of these would get a knowing and exhausted nod. And so we left again. I still have all the papers that tell our departure story, familiar to so many Jews who left in the 1980s. Our exit visa to Israel. Our United States refugee papers. Our refugee ID numbers. Leaving for Israel, with an official exit visa, was the only way for Jews to get out the USSR. But because Israel and Moscow had no diplomatic ties, all Jews first flew to Vienna. While other families bound for Israel pivoted straight to their flights to Tel Aviv, we remained in Vienna waiting for our permission to enter the U.S. Our tri-national spread of exit and entry visas are stamped by the Dutch (Israel’s representatives in
Moscow), the Austrians and the Soviets. After sev- photo I once took on a return visit, our old neigheral months in Vienna, the Hebrew International borhood was festooned with placards that read Aid Society secured our flight to New York City. “patrolled by private police” — an alleged reference We arrived in the United States as refugees on to the organized crime figures who kept watch. Feb. 7, 1989. My mom died of an aggressive breast Despite the trauma of this journey, I regard Kyiv cancer months after our arrival in New York. My with fondness. My heart breaks for the other chilfamily long suspected her cancer was fueled by our dren at risk of displacement, the families who may proximity to Chernobyl when its nuclear reactor have to flee because of Moscow’s misdeeds. blew. That assumption is scientifically unfounded I didn’t think Putin would commit to a full-scale but played a huge role in my family’s story. invasion, that he’d instead try to destabilize UkrainBecause I was a child in Kyiv when Chernobyl’s core melted and spewed radioactive waste into the sky, my dad feared I was contaminated, too. For my entire childhood, he’d limit my play outside to when the sun was setting and have me in long sleeves and a hat if we were out in Mikhail Zinshteyn's family's exit visa from the USSR, and a favorite picture of him with the day — so his mother and sister taken in Kyiv. Credit: Zinshteyn strong was his fear that the sun could trigger some- ian democracy with less force. I had also assumed thing in me unknown to doctors that Chernobyl that, considering both lands are united by the horleft behind. I’d like to think that’s why I’m so pale ror of Hitler’s invasion, a Russian blitzkrieg of today. Ukraine would be beyond the pale. Alas. We first lived in Midtown Manhattan for a few I quiver that a city that has endured genocidal weeks, in what I believe was a halfway home for re- occupation, nuclear fallout and civil unrest all in covering addicts (the last time I checked, in the the past 80 years must now endure this. 2000s, it was a hotel). My dad recalls speaking to It’s not my place to offer solutions. It is my place doctors in a hallway payphone about my mom’s to say a city’s tragedy 6,000 miles away feels very worsening state, his broken English competing for present and raw. clarity over the commotion in the public space. Mikhail Zinshteyn is an education reporter Once in Brooklyn, I attended a Jewish camp with for CalMatters. He has a master's degree in my older sister — experiences organized for us by comparative politics from the London School of a rabbi my dad befriended, in part to distract us Economics. from our mom’s demise. Months later, we’d move The views and opinions expressed in this article are to Los Angeles, where I remained for most of my those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the life and now live again. According to my dad and a views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
