This Russian mob attack, I feel it deep in my bones.
My DNA is stirring. Maybe screaming.
One of my grandfathers was born in America. The other three were born during the time of the Russian Empire, under Czar Nicholas II. Actually one grandmother was born in Mielic, Poland (
@Dotta) when it had a large but poor Jewish population.
My maternal grandparents were born in Kyiv (now Ukraine) and the other in a town that is now part of Belarus.
All three came over by different boats in 1915, to escape persecution in Russia by Cossacks, and oppression of the Jews in Poland.
They met and married in NYC.
A great-grandfather I never met was hung from a tree in Russia, hung by his Tallis, which is a kind of prayer shawl worn by orthodox Jewish men.
This savagery, to hunt the Jews wherever they may be, this time by a Russian ethinic group of Muslims, makes me hyper aware of what my grandparents lived through, over a century ago.
The Jewish part of Mielic in Poland was destroyed by the Nazis, long after my grandmother had left.
I was born in Manhattan and still live in NYC, and never did I think that in my lifetime, I as a Jew would be unsafe in my city, and witness the wholesale murder of Jewish civilians in Israel, PLUS mobs in countries in the former Soviet Union, AGAIN attacking the Jewish people.
@Charlot123 i had one student from the Caucasus, a Jewish boy, and he had a very different upbringing from any former Soviet Union Jew I’d ever met…they have a hardscrabble lifestyle and a warrior spirit.
These are torturous times.
