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Why More Ukrainian Jews Are Fleeing to Israel

(Vice News) Katie Engelhart - A woman, accompanied by her elderly mother and young daughter, had come from Mariupol, on the southern edge of Ukraine's war-ravaged Donetsk Oblast, to Dnepropetrovsk to take a one-way flight to Israel, where they plan to live forever more. "Sure, we are very sad to go and leave our friends behind. It's all very sad," the woman said. "It's fear and thinking about the future of our children." In 2015, 7,500 Jewish people left Ukraine for Israel, up from 6,000 in 2014. None of the Ukrainians I spoke to at the Jewish Agency shelter in Dnepropetrovsk so much as mentioned anti-Semitism. Rather, they told me that life is bad in Ukraine - and that they are moving to Israel because it's their only viable way out. It's not that anti-Semitism is absent from the Ukraine war. This is Eastern Europe, after all.
2016-04-01 00:00:00
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