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Odessa Jewish Community Leader Had Prepared for the Russian Invasion
(Atlantic) Yair Rosenberg - While many others in Ukraine doubted the prospect of a Russian invasion, Rabbi Refael Kruskal, vice president of the Jewish community in Odessa, took his cues from Jewish history. "I had supplies on trucks. I had generators prepared....I had gas prepared for the buses on the way," he said. Kruskal oversees Tikva Odessa, a network of Jewish schools, orphanages, and community-care programs that encompasses 1,000 people. When Russian bombs began to fall, Kruskal and his team decided it was time to leave and headed for prearranged shelter beyond the Carpathian Mountains with hundreds of orphans. "There were people in the Second World War who didn't believe, and they and their communities were wiped out," he said. "We prefer to be cautious and make sure that our communities are safe." While religious Jews like Kruskal normally do not travel on the Jewish sabbath, Jewish law permitted them to do so in order to preserve human life. Odessa was once home to the third-largest Jewish population in the world. At its height, the city was half Jewish. But after the pogroms, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges, that percentage dropped to just 6%.