Posted on 08/04/2023 2:31:10 AM PDT by Cronos
There was a time when Odesa, a coastal city in Ukraine, was a bastion of Jewish culture. In the 19th century, it was home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world, behind only Warsaw. Until the Holocaust, a full third of its residents were Jews. It was a place where Jewish intellectuals, poets, artisans and musicians flourished.
While many now assume that the city’s Jewish heritage is a relic of the past, Odesa’s resilient Jewish community has withstood the onlsaught of Russian troops and is persevering amid Moscow’s nearly year-old invasion of Ukraine.
It’s generally assumed that Odesa’s remaining Jewish community mostly left during the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, marking the end of the city’s Jewish heritage. It’s a rational assumption to make, given that Ukraine’s last census, which was conducted in 2001, claimed that there were only 12,000 Jews left in Odesa.
However, local Jewish leaders strongly dispute this narrative and say that official statistics grossly undercount Odesan Jews. They claim that, prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine this year, the city’s Jewish community numbered closer to 50,000 – or 5% of the total population.
To back this claim, they cite the fact that the city’s main Jewish newspaper, Shomrei Shabbos, had a pre-invasion circulation of 20,000 households. As a household often has more than one inhabitant, and not all Jewish households were subscribed to the newspaper, it stands to reason that the number of actual Jews is much higher than the newspaper’s circulation numbers.
According to Avraham Wolff, chief rabbi of Odesa and southern Ukraine, local Jewish leaders imported 14tons of matzah to distribute to local Jewish families during a recent Passover. As each family received 1 kilogram of matzah, this suggests that Odesa had, at the very least, 12,500 Jewish families.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
“A Jew can live in Odesa in a warm and embracing community – to have their first haircut, bar mitzvah and Jewish wedding; to celebrate all the Jewish holidays in the community, with holiday prayers and festival meals; to be buried properly in a Jewish cemetery,” said Wolff.
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How do you level a city by throwing shovels?
“Since the start of the so-called ‘offensive,’ the Ukrainian armed forces lost over 43,000 soldiers in June-July. This number does not include the injured, who were evacuated to hospitals in Ukraine and abroad, foreign mercenaries as well as the soldiers that were neutralized in long-range high-precision strikes in rear areas,” the Russian Ministry of Defence claimed. Gateway had estimated Ukrainian losses at 46.800, based on previous MoD figures.
“Over four thousand nine hundred units of various AFU weapons have been destroyed on the line of contact, including 26 aircraft, 9 helicopters, 1,831 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, including 25 German-manufactured Leopard tanks, 7 French AMX wheeled tanks and 21 U.S.-manufactured Bradley IFVs. In addition, the enemy losses were 747 field artillery pieces and mortars, including 76 U.S.-manufactured M777 artillery systems, as well as 84 self-propelled artillery systems from Poland, the United States, France and Germany”, the Russian ministry claimed.
Israel repeatedly condemned Ukraine's embrace of Bandera.
If Jews are more welcome in Odessa, it is because it is city with high ethnic Russian population.
Everything you post is propaganda and bullsh#t.
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