What Putin’s ‘Denazification’ of Ukraine Really Looks Like
Fleeing Russia’s onslaught, a rabbi leads children from Odessa’s Jewish community through the Carpathian Mountains.
by Yair Rosenberg
Mar 02, 2022
4 minutes
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“I once thought that I was a freak,” says Rabbi Refael Kruskal, the vice president of the Jewish community in Odessa, a port city in Ukraine. While many others in the country doubted the prospect of a Russian invasion, Kruskal—the son of a Holocaust survivor—took his cues not from the headlines but from Jewish history. “I had supplies on trucks. I had generators prepared. I said there’s gonna be a rush on gas stations, so I had gas prepared for the buses on the way.”
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