She has been circumcised in men aged eight days to 80 years. He has released his set in synagogues and hospitals, he has made nervous mothers feel calm and older men feel spiritual. He is the Mohel of Dnipro, also known as Dr Jacob Gaissinovitch, a 46-year-old Ukrainian Jew and circumcision ritualist. Since 1998, he has performed just 8,302 such surgeries – an average of almost one a day. Crossing Ukraine in its compact Nissan SUV, the “The Mohel”, as it is known, is a familiar sight and an incredible lighthouse, a carrier of the idea that connecting with your heritage is not really that difficult. all you need is a knife and a little know-how. But the most severe cut Mohel felt was six weeks ago, when he became a refugee. Again. He and his family were forced to flee their home in Donetsk in 2014 when the war broke out. Last month, with helicopters circling and sirens pounding near their Dnipro apartment, The Mohel, Lisa’s wife and three young children took to the streets again, like the Israelis, hiking dangerously in unknown places. And so The Mohel was found this week, a few days before Easter, sitting in the second district of Vienna, in a spartan apartment inhabited mainly by inflatable mattresses and its circumcision set. “A mohawk in exile,” he said sadly, periodically checking his phone to see which young males might need his services. Gaisinovich’s story is on the one hand a popular narrative and on the other an emblematic of the many middle-class Ukrainians who this spring find themselves uprooted, without occupation and free prospects, in a foreign country. But who, perhaps most important of all, are free. In the case of Mohel, free in the nation where Hitler was born. Back in the 1940s, his good friend’s grandmother had taken refuge east of Dnipro, hoping the Russians would save her from the Germans and Austrians. In 2022, he fled west of Dnipro, hoping that the Germans and the Austrians would save him from the Russians. Historical irony. Or, perhaps, divine providence? “What is this line of gratitude we are giving to God in The Hague this weekend,” The Mohel said, referring to the regular text that Jews around the world will recite in Seder. “From darkness to light, from slavery to liberation?” When Passover begins on Friday night, millions of Jews will actually gather around a meal to offer thanksgiving for an incredible redemption from the warlike tyrants – “and the Lord saves us from [destructive] hands “, as do the signature lines. Few will say the words with as much emotion as the Ukrainian refugees. And perhaps no one will say it like Dnipro’s Mohel. At first they did not want to leave. Lisa and Mohel had spent years in their adopted city of Dnipro, learning to hug her after leaving Donetsk 150 miles east. The job was hard — she was a business analyst — and the land was foreign. But they had made it familiar, even spiritual. The couple belonged to the Chabad movement, the spread-oriented Hasidic sect whose modern ideology is shaped by “The Rebbe”, the great rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. And the rebbe grew up – where else? – Dnipro. It was basert, DESTINY. Mohel and Lisa, 37, became key members of the Jewish community in Dnipro, one of the largest in Ukraine (which before the invasion boasted more than 200,000 Jews, including the country’s president). In the summer of 2021, Mohel and Lisa moved into a new apartment with their three children, all under 12 years old. The Jew of Eastern Europe may feel like a relic to many in the 21st century, an imposition of the order of history. For them it was topical, vital, real life. So when the invasion began in February, there was no doubt where they were. A certified urologist, The Mohel’s mission was to bring British Speaking, circumcision, throughout Ukraine – a particularly painful act after being banned by the Russian authorities during the Soviet era. They could not leave. They paid attention every day as the sirens grew louder and the prospects gloomier. A first week, then a second, each round of bombing a new plague. One morning, as military helicopters hovered, their four-year-old son approached the window. The window is on Ukraine in 2022 what was a closed supermarket for Covid in 2020: You approach it, you can die. Mohel picked him up in a panic. “We knew we had to leave then,” Lisa said. The couple wanted to arrive in Chisinau, Moldova. an acquaintance had a hotel and promised five of them a room. The Mohel knew the backwardness of Ukraine like Moses the Nile. he drove them for decades. So he made a short trip to Chisinau, 400 miles away. (As a father of three, he was exempt from the military ban on leaving the country.) But there were many checkpoints. The shells were falling. And the move was unthinkable. Five hours passed, then 10 and then 15. It was Friday and Saturday was approaching. No observant Jew would ever drive on the Sabbath unless life was at stake. They could hear the sirens of the air raid through the car windows. The sunset. They continued to drive. Their 11-year-old daughter, Adel, began to sing softly “L’cha Dodi”, the traditional Friday night tune intended for transport to warm-lit synagogues rather than putting Nissan on the edge of a war zone. Soon the whole family was quietly involved. “We all had tears, happy because we could be saved but we were sad because we had to do it,” Lisa said. The car started moving slowly and the gas meter approached empty. There were few stations in sight, and when they finally found one, there was no gas, only hundreds of cars waiting for miles in the 15 degree cold. Maybe delivery will be made tomorrow. Or the next day. It seemed that their escape would have to wait. the hearts of fate had hardened. There were rumors on the line of a secret gas station a few kilometers away. Mohel and Lisa got back in the car and started driving where they did not know. A little while later they saw it. It seemed completely closed – the lights off, no activity. They pulled in. No sign of life. Then a man jumped out of the shadows. “Turn off your headlights,” he said urgently. The gas station was on a flight route of the Russian air force. if the pilots saw it from the sky, they would bomb it immediately, incinerating everyone. Mohel turned off the headlights. “No phones,” said the man. They turned them off. The man brought around a pump. In the dark, they filled their car. They kept looking nervously at the sky for the bomb that would fall out of nowhere and disappear. They drove further, approaching the 20-hour mark and then approaching 25. Just enough gas to get to Moldova. Near the border, rumors surfaced on their phones of a multi-hour backup. This would deplete their gases and their ability to escape. “And then we get there, to the big border checkpoint,” said The Mohel, “and the cars all start to thin out and we pass in 15 minutes, like a miracle.” Sometimes the sea just splits. The situation in Chisinau was tragic. The mattresses had been taken to a local synagogue and the refugees were sleeping almost on top of each other. These were the lucky ones. Rows of tents were set up in the courtyard of the synagogue and the refugees slept in groups there as well. It was gloomy enough that the family decided to keep pushing west. Mohel knew about a Ukrainian Jew, a Hamad envoy to Vienna, 800 miles away, named Kolomoychev. As a precaution, Kolomoitsev once lived in the Dnipro and knew about Gaissinovitch brit-sort skills. A call was made. “Yes, there is room here,” Kolomoitsev said. “There is always room for The Mohel.” Before they left, a woman approached. “I heard about what you do,” he said. Her son was three. They were Jews. He had not been circumcised. Could you, you know, probably? He went to the hospital the next day and underwent circumcision. Vienna is an incredible land of promise. About 200,000 Jews lived in the city before World War II – academics, businessmen, doctors – all made up almost 10 percent of the population. Then came the Anschluss in March 1938. Jewish businesses closed, property was confiscated and rights were denied. About half were able to leave, turning into penniless refugees overnight. The other half saw the Nazis and local authorities begin a systematic destruction of their community, beginning with the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 and culminating in the following years with the vast majority being sent to ghettos and concentration camps, where few survived. . The community remained tiny for decades after the war. But the tide has changed dramatically in recent years, under Chabad’s charismatic rabbi Jacob Biderman. a highly active Jewish non-profit umbrella known as the IKG. and state and private support. The community was strengthened by the recent influx of Soviet Union Jews from places such as Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There are now 8,000 Jews in the city. Twenty-five synagogues. A dozen kosher restaurants. Two Jewish primary schools. Jewish University. As it turns out, the community had room for more than just The Mohel. As he and his family arrived (six days after his departure from Dnipro), other Jews from Ukraine also began to flow, many also from Dnipro, dizzy and depressed but relieved. Neighborhoods or families of the same class – more than 800, one of the tallest ensembles of any city in Europe. Much of the migration was orchestrated by Kolomoitsev, the Jewish Dnipro in Vienna, and a fellow entrepreneur named Maxim Sluzki. Their teams would arrange paperwork and send buses to the border to pick up the refugees. Immediately, the community grew by 10 percent. “I did not think we could make 100, let alone 800,” said Kolomoitsev. “But I think we can do even more.” Even with the standards of a strong European response to refugees, there is a dizzying number …
