KYIV, Ukraine — It was a hanging picture: a bearded rabbi with a flak jacket over his tallit, hitting the bottom to take cowl as shells boomed round him.
Video footage of the second Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman got here beneath hearth whereas on a humanitarian mission to flooded southern Ukraine on June 8 has been seen greater than 1.5 million instances on Twitter. It put a contemporary highlight on the chief rabbi of Ukraine, whose renown predates each that second and his humanitarian efforts since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“Folks acknowledge me,” the rabbi stated, eyes twinkling, from his workplace in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, on a current afternoon.
Rabbi Azman, 57, sprang into motion when Russia invaded in February 2022, working to assist evacuate Jewish Ukrainians and recording appeals for assist and a halt to the warfare. The mattress that’s nonetheless arrange in his workplace at Kyiv’s Brodsky synagogue is a testomony to the depth of these early days, he stated. The rabbi initially labored even by means of Shabbat, the standard day of relaxation, and began filming video messages that went far and huge.
His function as chief rabbi has explicit resonance in a warfare that President Vladimir V. Putin has falsely claimed is about “denazifying” Ukraine, a rustic whose present president is Jewish and whose Jewish group has traditionally suffered persecution.
Born in Leningrad, the rabbi emigrated to Israel within the Nineteen Eighties to flee the previous Soviet Union. After marrying a Ukrainian girl, he got here to Ukraine within the early Nineties to assist kids affected by the Chernobyl catastrophe and later led the rehabilitation of Kyiv’s essential synagogue.
When Russian-backed fighters launched a warfare in jap Ukraine in 2014, Rabbi Azman helped evacuate civilians from the preventing. He later arrange a village on the outskirts of Kyiv that he named Anatevka — just like the fictional shtetl within the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” — for displaced Jewish households.
The rabbi’s work earned him nationwide honors. Images of him shaking fingers with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and different notable folks cowl a wall in his workplace.
However a few of his distinguished connections have at instances solid a shadow over his work.
He was a vocal supporter of Donald J. Trump and has a longstanding relationship with Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose makes an attempt to steer Ukraine’s authorities to launch investigations that he believed would profit Mr. Trump had been key to the impeachment inquiry in opposition to the previous president. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — associates of Mr. Giuliani who had been convicted on marketing campaign finance violations — had been at one level board members for the rabbi’s U.S.-based Mates of Anatevka charity.
When requested in regards to the saga, Rabbi Azman turns into animated, insisting he has little interest in politics.
“I don’t vote in America,” he stated, including: “I work for Ukraine.”
The rabbi emphasised that he’s merely a “quiet man” attempting to achieve a large viewers to help his humanitarian efforts, which he says have price tens of millions. He considers his work much less a calling than “obligation,” one which took him to Kherson to assist with the flood response and to attract consideration to the devastation.
Though he not works on Shabbat, the rabbi maintains a packed schedule and posts frequent social media updates about his support efforts and Russian atrocities. On a current afternoon, he greeted an evacuee introduced by ambulance to Anatevka.
Many individuals ask why he stays in Ukraine regardless of the hazards, he stated.
“I thank God that he put me in the fitting time and the fitting place that I can save folks, assist folks, 24/7,” he stated.