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Jewish orphans evacuated from Odessa to Berlin at Ukraine war’s start are headed home again
ODESSA, Ukraine (JTA) – A year after Rabbi Mendy Wolff spirited 120 children and staff away from the Mishpacha Orphanage in this war-torn country to the safety of Berlin, he is preparing to bring them home.
That’s not because the war is over — far from it. One year after Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, fighting grinds on and much of Ukraine has been plunged into austerity conditions.
Instead, the children of Mishpacha are headed back to Odessa because of the high cost of keeping them fed, housed and educated in Germany. Chaya Wolff, Mendy’s mother and the wife of Odessa’s chief rabbi, Avraham Wolff, said the price tag was 750,000 euros — close to $800,000 — a month. They’ll join other Ukrainians who have returned to their homeland as it became clear that the war would not end quickly.
“We could have bought seven buildings for the [Jewish] community in Odessa with that money,” she said from Odessa, where she stayed along with her husband after the Russian invasion to care for remaining Jews in the city, where the Wolff family operates Chabad of Odessa. “But now the money is finished and it’s time to bring our children home.”
Mendy Wolff said that when he first headed to Berlin several days after Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, he expected to return home in a matter of days. He had become the orphanage’s director overnight, when his parents tasked him with getting the children out of Ukraine. He and his wife, Mushky, had instructed their charges to pack two of each item of clothing.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier talks with refugee children from the Jewish community in Odessa at a Chabad center in Berlin two days after their arrival as refugees, March 7, 2022. (Clemens Bilan – Pool/Getty Images)
“As I was packing, I remember spotting my Megillat Esther on the shelf and thinking I won’t be needing that because Purim is two weeks from now and we’ll be back by then,” Wolff told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, referring to the biblical book traditionally read on Purim.
The journey to Berlin took 53 hours and traversed five international borders, but Wolff and his wife tried to make the atmosphere as fun as possible for the children.
“We sang songs all the way and even though most of the children knew what was happening, we made it feel like summer camp — only in the winter,” Wolff said.
Getting the children out of Ukraine meant pulling strings of all kinds, since most did not have passports or even original birth certificates. Most of the children in the orphanage have parents who are unable to care for them; Wolff got the parents’ permission to take the children out of the country, a challenging task in the chaos after the invasion. “That is why we didn’t escape on the first day of the war,” he told JTA from Berlin at the time.
For 40 children for whom no living relatives could be found, Rabbi Avraham Wolff and his wife, Chaya, signed on as legal guardians. The Chabad emissaries in Berlin managed to secure VIP status for the young refugees to bring them across EU borders as personal guests of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who greeted them on their arrival in the German capital.
The Wolff family operates Chabad of Odessa. Rabbi Avraham and Chaya Wolff are sitting. Rabbi Mendy Wolff, who has overseen the children relocated from the group’s orphange to Berlin, is at the center in the back row. (Courtesy Chabad Odessa)
The children and orphanage staff were joined by other Odessians: university students, single mothers and their own offspring. Their flight and warm welcome in Berlin captured international headlines.
“Everyone knew there was an orphanage coming,” Mendy Wolff told JTA in Berlin shortly after the group’s arrival. “It was an unbelievable hug. It made us feel good in our hearts.”
But even then, the high cost of caring for the children in Berlin was weighing on the volunteers who leapt to help them. “We’ve received an outpouring of support from the community and beyond, lots of clothes and other supplies, but what we really need now are financial donations — only the food for all the children costs about 5,000 euros every day,” one told the Associated Press at the time.
Over the course of the next 11 months, the Hotel Müggelsee, on the banks of Berlin’s largest lake of the same name, would become home to some 300 Jewish refugees. In that time, the group celebrated not just Purim but a full year of Jewish holidays, as well as the gamut of Jewish lifecycle events, from bar mitzvahs to births and brisses. The group recently celebrated the first birthday of the youngest child to make the trek from Odessa, Tuvia, who was just 5 weeks old when he arrived in Berlin.
Jewish children from Odessa in war-torn Ukraine celebrate Purim 2022 with members of the Chabad Berlin Jewish community, March 17, 2022. (Omer Messinger/Getty Images)
For Wolff, the hardest part was grappling with the unknown. “It was very similar to what people experienced at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. You don’t know who it will infect or how many people will die or how long you’ll need to live like this.”
Like many others, Wolff was certain that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army would crush Ukraine in a matter of days. “With each passing day we saw that the Ukrainians were far more resilient than we had given them credit for and that the Russians weren’t as much as superheroes as we thought.”
The irony that Germany, and not Israel, became the host country for Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe is not lost on the Wolffs. While Mendy is reluctant to express political opinions of any kind, his mother, Chaya, is more forthright, saying that Israel had refused them entry.
Mark Dovev, the regional director of Nativ, the Israeli government office that facilitates immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, later told JTA that taking in a minor from another country is “tantamount to kidnapping.” Brushing off Dovev’s objections, Chaya Wolff said, “Just as Germany turned a blind eye, Israel could have also taken them in temporarily as refugees.”
The children and staff of Mishpacha Orphanage in Odessa pose outside the Hotel Mugglesee in Berlin, their home for nearly a year since fleeing war in Ukraine. (Courtesy Chabad Odessa)
Since German law bans homeschooling, the children were required to enroll in a local school as well as to learn German. German authorities allowed the student body to largely adhere to the Ukrainian curriculum, however, and they were taught by a handful of the women refugees who happened to be teachers. The hotel, which functioned as a dormitory, doubled as a branch of the local Chabad school — replete with classrooms and a schoolyard.
But keeping the refugees in Berlin came at a steep price, footed by various donors such as the International Fellowship for Christians and Jews as well as private donations. An online fundraiser netted $685,500 in small gifts from more than 5,000 donors — a significant tally, but far short of its $1 million goal. So it was mostly out of economic considerations, then, that the Wolffs decided to close up shop in Berlin and bring the refugees home later this month.
While some Ukrainians who fled the country say they have no intention of returning while the war rages, the Wolffs and their charges are hardly the first Ukrainians to make their way back home. Many of them have cited the high cost of life abroad, along with separation from family and guilt about abandoning their country, for coming back to a warzone. So many Ukrainians were returning last fall that the country’s leaders urged them to wait until this spring to return, lest they tax fragile infrastructure.
Ukrainians queue at the railway station in Przemysl, Poland, to depart for Ukraine, amid a reversal in migration patterns as the Ukraine war ground on, Dec. 20, 2022. (Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
According to Mendy Wolff, his group would be staying in Berlin were it not for budgetary concerns. Still, he said, there were many positive aspects about the decision to return home.
“Psychologically, it’s not easy being here. You’re not living like a human. It’s like living on borrowed time and in a refugee camp, albeit a luxury refugee camp,” he said. “I’m very excited to be in my own bed and my own blankets.”
For both mother and son, the responsibility of bringing the refugees back to a country that is still very much at war weighs heavily. Odessa is faring better than many other southern Ukrainian cities like Mykolaiv and Kherson to the east, which have suffered daily shelling. Still, air raid sirens sound multiple times a day and there is no electricity for 20+ hours. But as long as residents have access to bomb shelters and generators — including the kind made from car batteries that Avraham Wolff recently held a fundraiser to buy — Chaya Wolff describes it as “livable.”
“It’s not an easy decision and we hope it’s the right one,” Chaya Wolff said. “At the end of it all, we’re ‘believers, the children of believers,’” she added, quoting the Talmud.
Toby Axelrod contributed reporting from Berlin.
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Trump’s assault on democracy, echoes of Nazi Germany but new glimmers of hope that America will be different
In the final, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, a succession of arch-conservative chancellors ruled by emergency decree rather than go through the Reichstag, the German parliament. Germany had become a democracy in name only, as reactionary power brokers steered the nation deeper into totalitarian waters, ultimately opening the door for Hitler.
As we approach our mid-term elections, America too is at a pivot point — with the burning question being whether Donald Trump’s grip on MAGA lawmakers can be broken so that Congress, feckless like the Reichstag of the late Weimar Republic, can resume its constitutional role as a check on the executive.
It’s a matter of life or death for American democracy as it nears its 250th birthday.
As Trump’s poll numbers tank while GOP lawmakers’ support for him endures, I find myself musing about the Weimar Republic and the self-immolation of its national legislature.
In the final months before they came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were actually on the ropes. After they had become the largest party in the Reichstag in July elections a year earlier, two million Germans abandoned the Nazis in an election that November. Many Germans were less enamored of the Nazi leader, fatigued by a sense that the Nazis thrived on disorder. The spell seemed to be breaking. Does this ring a bell? Economics also played a role: Germany was finally emerging from the Great Depression.
But the German republic had already been brought to a breaking point by street fighting, political chaos, the Great Depression, and a coterie of arch-conservative power brokers who schemed and maneuvered to scrap Germany’s first democracy. They included Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Papen was unable to form a majority coalition after the July 1932 election because of huge gains by the Nazis and losses by other key parties, so he continued to govern by emergency decree with the consent of President Paul von Hindenburg, relying on the broad emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution that had already hollowed out parliamentary rule.
More internal scheming resulted in Papen’s ouster after the November 1932 election. He was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, a master of intrigue. But Schleicher lasted only two months, as disagreements raged over whether to give Hitler a role in the government, and what that role should be. The reactionary schemers eventually reached a consensus: Let Hitler have the chancellorship but keep him in check by loading the cabinet with archconservatives like Papen. Once Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, it didn’t take him long to outmaneuver all of the other schemers, who became puppets of the Nazi leader instead of the puppet masters.
Germany’s political establishment — all but the Social Democrats and the banned Communists — ceremoniously handed the keys over to Hitler on March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, dismantling parliamentary democracy and giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
Which brings us to the question: Whither American democracy?
Under Trump, our Congress has been reduced to a shell of its former self, an American analog of the toothless Reichstag. As Trump has launched assault after assault on the pillars of American democracy — on the judiciary, on higher education, on free speech, our election system, the rule of law, and even on unflattering but true chapters in American history — Republicans have kept quiet, fearing Trump’s wrath and retribution.
But now there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s broken promises, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, corruption, utter indifference to everyday Americans’ economic suffering, and relentless catering to the country’s wealthiest are finally catching up with him. New polls put his approval rating at a dismal 37%. In a New York Times/Siena poll, just 28% of voters approved of how Trump is handling the cost of living, while only 31% approved of his war with Iran. Even Fox News had him at 39% approval. That same poll showed GOP support for Trump weakening considerably on his handling of the economy.
Economic pain is driving the collapse. The soaring costs of the war in Iran, Trump’s vanity projects, and his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, coupled with his push for lifetime immunity for himself and his family to commit tax fraud, have incensed voters who are already struggling to afford groceries, gas, housing and health care.
As Americans make impossible choices, the 47th president touts the glitzy White House ballroom he wants to build and his plans for an arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe, all while prosecuting a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and driven up prices worldwide. The widening gap between Trump’s self-indulgence and the country’s hardship is finally producing something late Weimar never managed: a meaningful break in the habit of submission to an aspiring strongman.
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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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