Why my trip to Moldova made me think of the Purim story of survival
By Rafi Cooper
I was in Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, a few weeks ago with a group of Bar / Bat Mitzvah kids and their parents, showing them the work of World Jewish Relief where as well as my role as Director of Communications for the organisation, I was suddenly thrust into the roles of babysitter/food monitor – ‘why have we been given too many snacks… again’ – as well as a kind of uber-parent ‘no, the cemetery is not the best place to take selfies’.
I took one group of young people to meet Alexandra – Sasha – Garbuzova. Sasha does not know where or when she was born. Her earliest memories are of hiding in a forest during the war with her mother and sisters. Her family were eventually caught by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz. She described in vivid detail her time in the concentration camp. She told us about how a number was tattooed on her arm with a needle fixed on a stick. Women had five-digit numbers, men – six-digit ones. She remembers how painful it was. Sasha remembers seeing her mother undressed, noticing huge cuts across her body. She asked her mother what had happened. It was the guards’ entertainment, she was told, setting dogs on people.
Sasha is the last Auschwitz survivor alive in Moldova today. But Sasha is not downbeat. Sasha is positively chirpy, considering her story. Her roof has recently been fixed by World Jewish Relief and despite the temperatures dropping to as low as minus 10 degrees when we were there – I was freezing – she was able to keep warm in her house for the first time in years. In addition, we support her to attend the community centre so that she feels an emotional as well as physical warmth previously unknown to her.
When we left Sacha’s house, one of the Bar / Bat Mitzvah kids, Nicky, the grandson of Ben Helfgott, a Holocaust survivor, suddenly lurched desperately back towards her house…’oh no’ Nicky exclaimed ‘I should have asked her if she knew granddad.’
She wouldn’t have – they were in different camps – but I thought that there was something touching about that personal connection that he inherently felt.
Sacha and Nicky
It would have been even more touching if he had known then that World Jewish Relief (in its previous incarnation as the ‘Central British Fund for German Jewry’) was the charity which not only helped his grandfather to come over to the UK – as we did with 65,000 other Jewish people before, during and after World War 2 including those who came on the Kindertransport – but helped him to settle here and find work and make a life for himself in the UK where he went on to represent Great Britain as an Olympic weightlifter.
And that touches on the work World Jewish Relief does today. Firstly, we support older Jewish people – we will help more than 50,000 older people like Sacha between 2015 and 2020. Secondly, we support people to find work as a route out of poverty giving people who would otherwise not have had the opportunity to feed their families, the chance to change that in a long-term sustainable way, much like we did for Ben Helfgott and his contemporaries when they arrived in England in the mid 1940s. And thirdly, we are the UK Jewish community’s response to international disasters. We respond to the natural disasters like the Nepal earthquake in 2015 and man-made emergencies like the on-going refugee crisis, which carries more than an echo of our own community’s history.
But if you’re old and poor in Moldova and have to choose between food and heating your home, every day is an emergency.
Going to that country and witnessing a small, fragile but vibrant Jewish community – like so many in that part of the world – has made me reflect on the notion of Jewish continuity and survival, especially as we celebrate Purim. We all know the story; Haman set about destroying the Jewish people – our community – until Mordechai intervened. Mordechai asked his niece Esther, the queen, to go to the King and ask that the Jewish community be spared, which ultimately they were. But why… why were they spared?
Why is it that the Purim story turns out as it does, that Mordechai leads the Jewish people to survival? Is it pure chance – the King just happens to have a sleepless night and asks to be read from the exact book which reminds him that Mordechai the Jew had saved his life which he had completely forgotten about? Maybe – the fact that the festival is named ‘Purim’ after the ‘lots’ cast by Haman to determine which day to destroy the Jewish people – suggests a randomness at the festival’s very core.
But it feels like more than that. Chance is such a difficult thing to get to grips with. To cede control to a force of randomness is both incredibly psychologically challenging but also within this context, I believe unsatisfying. The Purim story feels to me to describe a group of different characters taking positive, affirmative action leading to the happy outcome at the end of the story. It needed Mordechai to don his sackcloth and ashes, mourning for the Jewish people and begging Esther to intervene… it needed the entire Jewish community to come together to pray… it needed Esther to summon the bravery to go to the King with the knowledge that if he doesn’t raise his sceptre at the correct moment then she would have been killed.. and ultimately it needed the King to overturn his own decree to get rid of the entirety of the Jewish population. Without these decisive, positive interventions the story would not have ended as it did.
One of the most powerful moments of my trip to Moldova was seeing the British Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids mix with their Moldovan counterparts. Young Jewish people from the UK making new friends, language no barrier. By the end of the session many of them had become Facebook friends without being able to speak a word to one another. Which in itself is extraordinary.
For the Jewish community of a country like Moldova – by chance almost the same size, around 20,000, as the Jewish community of Shushan in the Purim story – it really is a story of survival. At the turn of the 19th century, Jews made up around half of the 125,000 population of the capital city, Kishinev, before pogroms, the Holocaust, communism and now Aliyah and old age have caught up with the community, as it has with so many communities in the Former Soviet Union. It’s worth noting at this stage that neighbouring Ukraine still has a Jewish population larger than the UKs.
But size isn’t everything. The Ruach, the spirit, that this Moldova community exudes is amazing to witness. Being there and singing Hinai Matov with older people in the community centre and then seeing those younger people play together, I felt inspired by the strength and resolution of that community. Without God in the Purim story, its central protagonists have to take the role traditionally ascribed to God – saving the Jewish people – into their own hands. The Purim story is a very modern religious text, human-centred, empowering and ultimately inspirational in that they take on that responsibility to keep the Jewish community alive. That’s exactly what World Jewish Relief is enabling to happen in our extended Jewish family only a couple of hours flight away in Moldova.. For Sacha and for the future generations of Moldovan Jews, the Purim story is happening every day of the year.