Pesach 2023

Why this Passover is different from all others?
By Dame Melinda Simmons - Ambassador of the UK in Ukraine - a member of Finchley Reform Synagogue.

A few weeks ago I visited Kharkiv. Kharkiv lost many of its citizens in the Russian invasion. Thousands fled to safety either in Western Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, thousands from the East of Ukraine made their way to Kharkiv for relative sanctuary.

That really made me pause. You see, to me, Kharkiv was a bit of a shock. Though Kyiv, where I live, is subject to bombardment, the centre is - at least at the time of writing – untouched, due mostly to the effectiveness of air defence systems.

Kharkiv tells a different story. Its iconic Freedom Square, normally bustling with workers and students, is largely empty. Every building in the square has boarded-up windows where all the glass has been blown out by missile explosions. A hospital I visited not far away pointed to a crater where a missile had landed, fragments still sticking up out of the earth. Trenches and checkpoints were everywhere. Kharkiv continued to be targeted by missile strikes. And yet, it was a city of displaced people.

Passover is a story about displaced people, who run from slavery and find themselves wandering in the desert. It’s not as if they knew they were running to anything safer. Knowing that makes me wonder how bad things were in Egypt that they were prepared to run from it into uncertainty. Similarly, as I stared at the boarded-up buildings, I thought about how bad it must be in the Donbas for people to run to a city they knew was also not safe.

The answer, I concluded, comes down to community. We find safety in each other.

In Kharkiv, I was moved beyond words by the conversations I had with small organisations and help groups that had been set up purely to help people who found themselves displaced. People helping others to find food, homes, to create jobs, and to organise community security.

That hospital I visited? A community brought their spades and pick-axes and dug out a basement so that an underground ward and operating theatre could be created, enabling care to continue even as missiles hurtled overhead in the sky.

A lot of what the UK does to help people defend themselves in Ukraine is about community. Military supplies are incredibly important and inevitably they take up most of the column inches. But Ukrainians are defending themselves in every possible way, not just militarily, and the UK puts its support towards enabling that as much as possible.

We know that a country survives after such a catastrophe when communities come together. The more we help that happen, the stronger Ukraine becomes. I’m proud to be a part of that. I’m proud to see these heroes, civilian defenders of their country, reaching out to people in their society and helping them feel they can rebuild their lives. That is what will be in my mind, this Passover.