The rabbi looks out of the window at a half-finished building site, drums his fingers against his desk, then begins to sing. “If I were a rich man!” he sings in a deep baritone worthy of a great synagogue – or the Broadway scene. “Ya-da Dee-dee Ya-da Dee-dee Da-da-dumb!” I would build a big tall house. . . Right in the middle of one. . . field!”
The site, in a 15-acre pasture about an hour’s drive from Kiev, is where Moshe Reuven Azman, one of Ukraine’s most prominent rabbis, built his dream: Anatevka, a modern built village to house Jewish refugees displaced by fighting in the eastern part of the country between government forces and Russian-backed separatists.
Anatevka has come a long way in five years. It includes a school, a dormitory, apartments for about 150 inhabitants, a rustic synagogue built of pine logs, a carpentry workshop, a football field and an almost finished rehabilitation center for the disabled. Yellow American school buses donated by Brooklyn are parked on the ground.
Mr. Azman, the Chief Rabbi of Kiev – and perhaps of Ukraine, depending on who you ask – borrowed the name of Anatevka in the vicinity shtetl, or village, portrayed a century ago by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem in his stories about the trials of Tevye, a Jewish milkman from the Pale of Settlement in imperial Russia. This was the basis of the musical Fiddler on the Roof. The Ukrainian village, Hnativka, is just across the road.
“It’s my dream! We are in a dream!” Rabbi Azman said, showing Anatevka half-finished, which features a logo borrowed from violin on the roof.
But Anatevka’s dream recently turned into a nightmare, thanks to Rabbi Azman’s close ties to Rudy Giuliani and what he calls “the American scandal”. That is to say, the recent US presidential removal procedure in which Mr. Giuliani – in his capacity as personal attorney for President Donald Trump – has crisscrossed Ukraine in search of possible evidence of corruption involving the rival policy of his boss, former US Vice President Joe Biden.
Giuliani has not faced any charges, but has been the subject of scrutiny for conduct which, according to Democratic lawmakers, was part of a plan to take unfair advantage of US foreign policy in the United States. profit from the political fortune of the president.
The 53-year-old rabbi met with Mr. Giuliani years earlier, during his first visit to Ukraine. He later made him honorary mayor of Anatevka, even presenting him with a symbolic key to the size of a tennis racket. The two Soviet emigrants, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who acted as repairers of Mr. Giuliani in Ukraine – and have since been charged with violations of the funding of American campaigns – are listed as members of the charity’s board of directors American Friends of Anatevka. His registered address is the window of an accountant in Brooklyn.
Their familiarity with the rabbi was captured in a video that emerged at the height of the removal saga and has since gone viral. It shows Mr. Giuliani and his friends in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, in 2018. Mr. Fruman, holding out a phone, urges Mr. Giuliani, to wish his friend “Moshe” a happy birthday. “Moshe, how are you baby?” Asked Mr. Giuliani in his Brooklyn twang.
Then, last May, while Mr. Giuliani was pressing – without success – for a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly elected Ukrainian president, he met Rabbi Azman for two hours in Paris.
Azman insists that the men have a real friendship and suggests that he courted Mr. Giuliani because he thought it would boost fundraising. But even with new donations of $ 1.5 million – which the rabbi touted on Facebook – the flow of money he relied on to build Anatevka was limited, as wealthy philanthropists, particularly The United States is increasingly afraid of being drawn into controversy. .
“They are afraid,” complains Rabbi Azman. “If you have a big business – it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican – you don’t want to be involved in a scandal.”
To some extent, the rabbi believes he is also being punished for his shameless support for Mr. Trump. “No president has helped and loved Israel like Donald Trump,” he told an Israeli publication in August. “I pray for him every Saturday.”
The Anatevka saga is a reminder of the powerful but heavy role that a handful of rabbis came to play in Ukraine, a place which was one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Holocaust but which is currently experiencing a Jewish revival.
Its territory is home to some 5,000 mass graves from the Second World War. One is Babyn Yar, a ravine in Kiev where some 34,000 Jews were massacred by the Nazis and their local helpers in just two days in September 1941 during one of the most horrific events in the so-called “The Holocaust of bullets”. Later, the Nazis would move to the gas chamber, a more industrial method of murder.
Jewish life is unlikely to have returned to Ukraine, with thriving communities with tens of thousands of members in cities such as Kiev, the capital and central city of Dnipro. The country is also the only one outside Israel to briefly claim two Jewish heads of state after Mr. Zelensky, a comedian and actor, was elected president last year with 73% support while Volodymr Groysman was Prime Minister. “I think God wanted to laugh!” Rabbi Azman quipped.
The community was rebuilt, in part, with the generosity of a select group of Jewish businessmen, or oligarchs, who took control of Ukrainian industry after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their patronage and political connections have helped the work of rabbis such as Mr. Azman, but also pose risks in a country caught in a whirlwind of political intrigue known for corruption and money laundering.
One of the main donors to Menorah, a magnificent Jewish cultural and community center of Dnipro which is one of the largest in the world, is Igor Kolomoisky, an oligarch whose PrivatBank was taken over by the state in 2016 after the regulators found a $ 5.5 billion hole in its balance sheet. . Mr. Kolomoisky and his colleagues denied any fault. However, it complicates the life of a rabbi seeking funding.
“A rabbi who needs to raise funds is a bit [of a] zombie, “says a Jewish official from Ukraine who, like others, describes Rabbi Azman as being generous and charismatic but also a bit naive.
According to a longtime observer of Ukrainian politics, the community itself is even more confused, with factions, rivalries and sometimes competing interests.
“What you need to understand about the Ukrainian Jewish community is [that the power struggles within it] are vicious, ”said this person. “You have five different people claiming to speak for the community at any given time.”
Rabbi Azman has a playful manner that belies the difficulties of his youth. He grew up in the Soviet Union and studied Torah in an underground religious school whose older members first suspected that he might be a KGB informer. This experience makes him laugh at speculations that he could somehow nurture sympathy for the authoritarian government of Russia or act as an intermediary for the Trump administration.
He left Leningrad for Israel in 1987, then spent time in Toronto before moving to Kiev in 1995. One of his greatest achievements was the reconstruction of the historic Brodsky Synagogue in the city center. It was closed by the Soviets in 1926, ransacked by the Nazis and then transformed into a puppet theater until it was reborn as a synagogue in 2000. Much of the funding came from Vadim Rabinovich, an oligarch with political ambitions who welcomed the first of M. Giuliani. trip to Ukraine in 2003.
During the visit, Mr. Giuliani commemorated a memorial in Kiev for the victims of terrorism, sponsored by Mr. Rabinovich, who had forged close ties with the New York Orthodox Jewish community during his two terms as mayor of the city visiting the synagogue.
“He was young and I was young,” said Rabbi Azman, “I blessed him.”
He declined to say much about the relationship, but added that visitors from all political walks of life paid tribute to Brodsky, including Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former American president. A word of thanks that she wrote to Rabbi Azman is one of the many boxes on her wall.
The Anatevka project began in 2014 when fighting ravaged eastern Ukraine, a region of approximately 20,000 Jews. Many have fled violence. “One day the rabbi [the city of] Lugansk called me and said: some buses are coming to you, ”recalls Rabbi Azman.
He has successfully resettled some in Israel and others in Kiev. 300 others were accommodated in a Jewish summer camp in the town of Shpola. “I didn’t know what to do with them – it was the middle of the forest,” says Rabbi Azman.
He wanted something more permanent. While searching the Internet, he found an empty parcel of land that was close to the real shtetl who inspired Sholem Aleichem. It also included a destroyed Jewish cemetery, the headstones of which were used as building materials in a nearby town, and a grave for a renowned Hasidic rabbi, the Chornobyl tzadik.
“I had renovated the [Brodsky] temple, but I had never built from scratch before, “says Rabbi Azman. “I gave the contractor the deposit and I said,” Build! “And I prayed.”
First came a dormitory, then a school and finally a synagogue, whose Torah crowns – a decorative piece that adorns the parchment – were provided by Marcy Kaptur, member of the Congress of Ohio. “She is a Democrat!” jokes the rabbi. “I have checked!”
He refused to discuss Anatevka’s finances or reveal his donors – except to say that it had been easy before the scandal to find people to support the cause of Ukrainian refugees.
One of the benefactors was Mr. Fruman, whose name adorns a plaque outside one of the Anatevka buildings. Before being caught in the dismissal scandal, he was considered in Ukraine as a businessman of average importance – the owner of a car dealership and the Buddha Bar, a club in Kiev.
Some suggest that Rabbi Azman may have viewed Mr. Fruman, who also lived in Florida, as a way to raise funds in America – while for Mr. Fruman, his association with the Rabbi was another way to try. to strengthen its commercial and political relations.
Whatever the source of Anatevka’s funding, it appears to have been used wisely. During a recent afternoon, dozens of students visited bright and well-equipped classrooms, each decorated on a different theme – nature, Britain, etc.
“I found it on Ukrainian Monster.com,” said Noah Lloyd, a former member of the Los Angeles Peace Corps, who took a job at Anatevka in September to teach English. Far from fleeing Anatevka, some local non-Jews sent their children to his school, according to the rabbi.
On leaving, the rabbi points to a half-built music school and the foundations that have been poured for three additional apartment buildings. “It will be an orphanage,” he said, in the midst of a buzz of scroll saws, adding, “I would buy all the land around here… If I were a wealthy man!”
Anatevka is expected to one day become self-sufficient as a tourist destination and producer of handicrafts. His wooden workshop is run by two craftsmen who fled the bombings in eastern Ukraine in 2014. “It is difficult to understand how scary it is,” recalls Sergey Yarelchenko, 56, explaining how his religious faith has been revived since his arrival in Anatevka – and how he did not intend to return.
In addition to working on the Anatevka Synagogue, Mr. Yarelchenko also helped reveal the oversized “key to the city” that Rabbi Azman presented to Mr. Giuliani. “We did not know that we were going to create the key that led to an international scandal,” added his colleague, Slava, 52, with a smile.
Rabbi Azman said the recent fundraiser would only help cover tuition fees for next year. Then he said, “We have to finish Anatevka. . . We need millions of dollars. We have to build! “For now, the Anatevkans will have to do it with their rabbi – but not the mayor.