Baking matzah and defying blackouts, Dnipro’s Jews press on despite the grind of Russia’s war on Ukraine
The giant, Chabad-run Menorah Center anchors a community that is facing rolling blackouts, departures of essential figures and threats of forced military conscription
The Golden Rose Synagogue and the Menorah Center are pictured in Dnipro, in east-central Ukraine, in May 2024. (Yurii Rylchuk / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
(JTA) — DNIPRO, Ukraine — It is a sultry Sunday evening in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and a dozen men are preparing for the evening prayer at the Golden Rose Synagogue of the Menorah Center.
In another space of what’s often deemed the largest Jewish communal structure in the world, a group of boys and girls in their early teens sing Eyal Golan’s “Am Israel Chai” at the top of their voices, filling the room with joyous excitement.
Sitting with other adults nearby, at a table piled high with kosher Israeli food, is Rabbi Mayer Stambler, whose daughter’s bat mitzvah is being celebrated.
The placid and festive scene takes place less than 125 miles away from the front line, not far away from the raging hostilities and amid a backdrop of constant air alerts and daily blackouts caused by repeated Russian attacks on the city’s power infrastructure. But that has been par for the course for the Jews of Dnipro, the historic center of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, since Ukraine’s war against Russia began two and a half years ago.
Unlike some areas of Ukraine that have remained insulated from Russian bombing, Dnipro has been relatively vulnerable throughout the war. Yet operations at the Menorah Center have continued unabated, allowing local Jews to live a full Jewish life in the city even during the hardest and most hopeless periods of the war and serving as a bulwark against alienation for thousands of Jews who have been displaced from towns and cities further east and south.
“We have a lot of challenges and the financial situation is getting more and more difficult, but thank God we still have everything we need here,” Stambler, a Brooklyn-born Chabad rabbi who is the head of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Despite mass emigration and losing many of the sources of income that allowed it to be fully self-sufficient before the conflict, the Jewish community of Dnipro keeps running its own educational institutions, clinics, museum, conference hall, restaurant, shops, synagogue, mikvah and a school for ritual scribes.
Apart from spiritual solace and massive and sustained humanitarian campaigns, the community helps many of its members by offering them employment. One of its largest endeavors is Tiferet Matzot, the only Ukrainian factory that produces handmade matzah. It employs more than 70 people and exports unleavened bread to several countries.
Situated in an out-of-town industrial area that endured a Russian drone attack days before Passover last year, Tiferet Matzot keeps working despite the war and recently increased its its payroll, according to its director, Daniel Ovcharenko. The factory produces around 100 tons of matzah each year and caters to Ukrainian Jewish communities and around the world. The exports are now entirely made by road after Russia’s invasion severely hindered navigation through the Black Sea, Ovcharenko said.
Since March, Russia has launched eight major volleys of missiles and Iranian kamikaze drones targeting Ukraine’s power infrastructure. Some of Ukraine’s largest power plants have been severely damaged or totally destroyed, including Dnipro’s thermal plant that is visible from the top of the seven towers that form the Menorah Center.
Ukraine has lost a substantial part of its generation capacity in these attacks. In order to make up for the resulting deficit, authorities have been imposing up to half-day long blackouts throughout the country. But the Jewish community’s buildings in Dnipro stay lit without interruption thanks to a vast network of fuel-run generators donated by the Jewish community of Boston and other partners.
“Every community building, from the kindergarten to the clinics, the Menorah Center and the old age home, are energy-independent,” said the director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, Alina Teplitskaya.
Teplitskaya also notes that this body run by Chabad — which has its headquarters in Dnipro and has affiliated communities in every region of Ukraine — has acquired Starlink satellite technology to make sure its educational institutions have access to the internet at all times.
Yet some low-tech needs are harder to meet. One of the most challenging tasks for the community is ensuring that ritual circumcision can be performed on newborn boys. Prior to the war, the mohel in charge of the whole of Ukraine used to live in Dnipro.
“He traveled everywhere, he made over 10,000 circumcisions since the 1990s,” says Stambler. But with the start of the hostilities, the mohel and his family moved to Vienna, from which he periodically goes back to Ukraine to perform his services.
A similar situation has occurred with ritual slaughter required to produce kosher meat. Up to three kosher slaughterers, known as schochets, were based in Dnipro in the pre-conflict era. One of them has taken refuge in Vienna, while another crossed the Atlantic Ocean to establish himself in Argentina.
Due to the threat of Russian missiles and drones, all commercial flights have been canceled in Ukraine. Every journey inside or out of the country must be made by train or by road, making each trip time-consuming and costly.
Another challenge for communal life is increasingly stringent rules meant to draft and train soldiers for Ukraine’s deplenished military. Jews across Ukraine have enlisted in the army to defend their country, and Jewish communities have been supporting them. But as the war grinds on, and Ukraine has begun waging a counteroffensive inside Russian territory, Ukraine is experiencing shortages of willing and able soldiers and now dispatches military patrols to ensure that all adult men are registered for service. Many men between 25 and 60 of all backgrounds have begun limiting non-essential outings to minimize the risk of bumping into the recruiters — including within Jewish communities. May worry they will be sent to the bloody front with inadequate training or will be rounded up despite legal exemptions.
“We are obviously part of Ukrainian society and are affected in no different way than other Ukrainians,” said a Jewish Dnipro resident who requested anonymity to discuss an issue seen as sensitive by many in Ukraine.
As they choose to stay at home most of the time, many Jews of military age who are not prepared to join the army attend synagogue and community activities less frequently, according to the resident.
The departure of some local mainstays and growing anxiety about participating in communal life for some brings painful echoes of another time in Ukrainian Jewish history when it was difficult to carry out essential ritual acts. Under communism, Jews in the Soviet Union were barred from practicing their religion — and the situation in Dnipro was even more intense than in other cities and towns where some Jewish influences made their way in.
That’s because Dnipro was home to several highly strategic industrial sites, including the factory where intercontinental ballistic missiles were produced. To keep away potential spies, Soviet authorities declared Dnipro a “closed city,” banning any foreigners from visiting it. This reduced to almost zero the chances that a Jew from Dnipro encountered a fellow American or Israeli Jew who could enlighten him or her about the religion they were barred from practicing.
“I grew up in ignorance,” Zelig Brez, the Dnipro Jewish community’s executive director, recently recalled over a meal at the kosher restaurant of the Menorah Center.
“The only Jewish thing we did was eating matzah for Passover because my grandparents brought it, but they couldn’t explain what matzah symbolizes, they didn’t know who Moses was, about the Exodus from Egypt, about slavery,” he recalled.
Brez said he became aware of his Jewish identity only through the “severe form of antisemitism” at school, where he was the only Jew in his class and a constant target of peers and teachers alike.
“I was once stabbed with a knife by a classmate, and sometimes teachers could downgrade and humiliate you,” he said. “I grew up with an inferiority complex, I knew I was Jewish from basically hatred.”
Brez remembers feeling a moment of pride as child when he say how many scientists and artists featured in Soviet magazines had Jewish names and looked like his family and himself. But he did not connect with Judaism until 1991, when as a first-year university student in the newly independent Ukraine he was invited for Shabbat dinner by a young Chabad emissary who had just arrived in the city where the movement’s then-rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, lived as a child.
“I started crying,” says Brez, who would over time become observant, about his reaction upon seeing a kiddush for the first time. “I had the feeling that this was the heritage of my grandparents that the Soviet Union took away from me.”
That emissary was Shmuel Kaminetsky, now the chief rabbi of Dnipro and the Dnipropetrovsk region. Like other Chabad rabbis, he has remained in Ukraine throughout the war, even in the scary early days when the overwhelming majority of expats and foreign diplomats exited.
In a region with a rich and recent history of political cataclysms, Jews can sometimes been seen as a barometer of danger, Brez said. He recalled an incident more than a decade ago, even before Russian-sponsored separatists started a war in the east of Ukraine, when the sight of a large group of bearded Jewish men wearing tzitzit boarding a train at the Dnipro railway station caused a “big panic” in town. “We had just rented a train for people to go to a family Jewish retreat in the Black Sea, but people thought that the Jews were leaving,” Brez said, laughing.
After the Russians invaded, non-Jewish neighbors and friends constantly asked Brez whether “the rabbi” was still “in town,” he recalled.
“Rabbi Kaminetsky did not leave the city for a single day,” said Brez. “The fact that he is here has provided tremendous determination and confidence and lowered the level of anxiety.”
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