If you had asked Esther Wilhelm just eight days ago where she thought she would be today, she probably would have answered Antwerp.
After all, the Detroit-born and Belgium-raised rebbetzin had a flight booked from Kyiv for the morning of Feb. 24 so she could be in Antwerp for the one-month anniversary of the passing of her father, the city’s former chief rabbi. Instead, today the Chabad shlicha is ensconced at an evacuation site somewhere in the snow-covered mountains Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has prompted more than 600,000 people to flee into neighboring countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Moldova – or farther destinations, like Israel – according to statistics from the United Nations’ refugee agency from Tuesday morning. The number of internally displaced persons (IDPs), however, is even higher: an estimated 1.5 million. IDPs are people who are remaining in the country but leaving their homes to seek safety from bombardment and encroaching Russian troops.
Jewish leaders in some communities, like Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich in Kyiv and Rabbi Refael Kruskal in Odessa, were evacuating or preparing to evacuate vulnerable populations while Russia was still amassing troops on Ukraine’s borders. In other cities, like Kharkiv, leaders took more of a wait-and-see approach until the invasion began. Now many of these cities are surrounded by Russian forces and civilian areas are under fire.
But while military installations near the city of Zhytomyr in western Ukraine have been targeted by Russians, the city itself, home to 3,000 Jews before the conflict, is not on the front line – at least not yet. Before it became too late for them to leave, Esther Wilhelm and hundreds of Jews from her city joined the 1.5 million IDPs on the move across the country. Her journey to safety has ended for now, but what will happen next for her family and other members of her community remains to be seen.
This is her story.
The Attack Begins
Everyone in the Kyiv airport terminal where Esther was waiting to board her flight to Antwerp was abruptly instructed to get as far away from the building as fast as possible. It was around 6 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 24, the morning Russia began the military assault currently battering cities across Ukraine. “At that moment there was an attack over the other airport in Kyiv, so they were afraid that there was going to be one there, too,” Esther said.
Even after returning to Zhytomyr – sans her suitcase that she didn’t have a chance to retrieve – Esther was among the many Ukrainians skeptical that this was the start of a full-out war. “It sounded more like, you know, a few explosions here and there – nothing serious, but tense enough,” she said. “Airspace was closed, so there was no leaving. It was very much unknown what exactly was happening.”
Esther and her husband Rabbi Shlomo Wilhelm (who is originally from Israel) have served as Chabad emissaries in this western Ukrainian city since 1994. The Wilhelms oversee religious and educational institutions as well as community services for not only the 3,000 Jews in Zhytomyr but also those in the area’s peripheral towns and villages as well.
A military installation near Zhytomyr was among the sites attacked by Russian forces Thursday morning. “The children’s home in Zhytomyr is right near the airforce base, and they were woken up at 5 a.m. from the blasts,” said Esther. By Thursday afternoon, Rabbi Wilhelm had already arranged for a bus of children from the Alumim Children’s Home and the families of the three rabbis who live with them to be evacuated deeper into western Ukraine where the fighting was less likely to spread.
“Slowly we started realizing that this is real war – that there are ground invasions, that there are bombings, and that it’s getting more tense and scarier – so my husband started working really hard on just helping people leave,” Esther said. Each transport involved finding a driver with a bus who was ready to make the trip, compiling a list of people from the community who wanted to leave – “It was first-come, first-serve, whoever gets on the list” – and shipping them out as soon as possible. Spots on the transports were open to anyone in the region’s Jewish communities, which in Zhytomyr includes many interfaith families with a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father.
On Tuesday morning Rabbi Wilhelm, who was still in Zhytomyr, said eight or nine buses with a total of 300 people have been dispatched so far. “Twenty people just left on the latest bus, and there is a bus scheduled for tomorrow. I believe that every day more and more people will want to go,” he said. “People want to believe that things will be good, but in the meantime, to our eyes, it doesn’t look that way.”
His expectation is that some people will want to remain in Ukraine – or are too old or infirm to leave – while others will be treating the evacuation site as a waystation on the longer journey to neighboring countries or Israel. As people leave, it will free up space to bring more people, he said.
The base of the financial support for this endeavor is coming from the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States, according to Rabbi Wilhelm. Beyond that, “the Jewish nation lives and is showing its love and embrace to help everyone,” he said. “People are calling all the time wanting to help, and of course they do.”
Evacuating the City
Esther evacuated Zhytomyr on Sunday with the youngest of the 12 Wilhelm children: her 11-year-old daughter and eight- and six-year-old sons. The nine-hour trip to the evacuation site included many stops at makeshift checkpoints, where visibly armed police and soldiers checked everyone’s passports. Another sign of the war was that “the road signs have either been destroyed or covered up or painted out so that if the Russian soldiers come they shouldn’t have the signs to help them figure out where they are and where they’re going,” she said.
As with any journey involving families, multiple pit stops were a necessity along the way. “There was one time that we stopped for a pit stop at a gas station and a siren went on,” she said, “so we ran back to the bus and got out of there as quickly as possible because it was also next to an air base. Air bases in general are very popular targets.”
There is a supermarket 2.5 kilometers away from where they are tucked into the mountains, but when people went to check it out on Monday they reported finding only empty shelves, Esther said. Thankfully there is a man from the Jewish community in Ivano-Frankivsk, an approximately two-and-half hour drive away, who has taken it upon himself to bring food to the evacuees and serve as their cook every few days.
“In the mountains there are a lot of resort areas, and I think a lot of them are probably filled with refugees right now, both Jewish and non-Jewish,” she said. There are also many people who are passing through to cross the border into countries such as Poland, Hungary, Moldova, and Romania.
On Tuesday morning, for instance, Rabbi Wilhelm received a phone call from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., seeking assistance for an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor whose family abroad was trying to find a way to get her out of Ukraine. Thankfully she is a healthy woman who could get around, the rabbi said. “We were able to obtain a car for her and take her to the border, and family members will have a car waiting for her on the other side.”
He was also in touch with a woman who had fled with her three children from their home 30 kilometers from the border with Belarus and was attempting the drive to join the evacuees from Zhytomyr. She was still another six hours away.
There was no longer room for additional evacuees at the first site with Zhytomyr residents when Esther’s bus arrived, so the rest of the community members are staying at nearby locations. It’s not near enough from the perspective of her children, however: at this point the children’s biggest complaint is that their friends are at the other evacuation site and not theirs. “They’re upset that they’re not at home – they’re bored, that’s really the main issue,” she said.
Esther said she is trying to find a balance between not hiding information from her children but not giving them the full picture of what is going on, either. “I’m working very hard on keeping up an upbeat and positive atmosphere. I haven’t really spoken to them about danger because I was trying not to get that into their heads too much. It was more like ‘We don’t want to stay home because we don’t want to have to go into a shelter every time the sirens go off’ and less about the danger itself.”
“We are thinking of eventually within the next few days crossing the border and going to Israel [temporarily] somehow within the next few days, but I haven’t told them yet.” She paused, searching for her next words. “I think, let them at the moment try to settle in where they are, and then when the time comes for us to leave, then we’ll leave and get used to what the next situation is.”
“Twenty-seven years ago when we moved to Zhytomyr my husband said that ‘when the last Jew leaves Zhytomyr, I’ll be the one to turn off the light.’ I never expected this saying to be put to the test as it is now; but at the moment he is in Zhytomyr as long as he feels he can do something for other people. If at some point he sees he can’t help anyone else, then he’ll leave.”
