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    'In darkness we find light': As missiles fall, Jews in Ukraine mark Rosh Hashana

    by Laura King, Los Angeles Times Sep 17, 2023 5 minutes
    Anya Ludchenko, with her daughter, Sofiya, at a Jewish community event teaching members of Kharkiv's Jewish community how to make traditional foods for the Rosh Hashana holiday, Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023. Ludchenko is Jewish, but did not learn holiday customs and traditions as a child. She and others are making rounds of challah, a sweet yeast bread.

    The tables were laid, the candles were lighted, and the last rainy-day light was dying as prayerful voices rose toward the synagogue's ornate domed ceiling. The Jewish New Year was beginning.

    In Ukraine's battered second city, Kharkiv, the Rosh Hashana holiday, which started Friday at sundown and ends Sunday evening, holds special meaning in this second grinding year of Russian President Vladimir Putin's war.

    "In darkness we find light," said Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz, the city's 59-year-old chief rabbi, who presides over Kharkiv's landmark synagogue, the largest in the country.

    Only 25 miles from the Russian frontier and seconds away from Russian missile range, Kharkiv was vulnerable from the war's first moments. In months that followed, bombs rained down on the northeastern metropolis almost daily, wrecking hundreds of buildings, killing and maiming civilians and scattering much of the prewar population of 1.4 million people.

    The pattern still recurs.

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