At a Chanukah candle lighting ceremony in Kyiv last week, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence apparatus and the Australian ambassador to Ukraine lit a large menorah as the city’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Markovitch, recited a holiday prayer.
“Officials come every year, but this time we had more diplomats and dignitaries than usual, partly because of the terror attack in Australia,” Rabbi Ariel Markovitch, the chief rabbi’s son and the Chabad point person for Israelis and youth in Kyiv, told JNS about the Dec. 16 event.
The intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Oleksiiovych Budanov, head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense, stood on a platform behind the large menorah at the Beit Menachem JCC.
Australia’s ambassador to Kyiv, Paul Lehmann, said that “this is a particularly difficult time for the Jewish community in Australia and for the whole Australian nation,” referencing the murder of 15 people by two Islamists at a Chanukah party in Sydney on Dec. 14. Quoting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, he said: “We are meeting the darkness with light.”
Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch, who was born in Ukraine, left for Israel as a child and returned to his native country as an emissary of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, said: “We are sending a clear and unequivocal message to all who hate us and seek our harm; the light will ultimately prevail.”
Despite the terrorist attack in Sydney, which was “on everybody’s mind,” the atmosphere at the Chanukah party was jovial, said Rabbi Ariel Markovitch.
“In Ukraine right now, there are people dying from war almost every day and life is full of insecurity,” he said. “We celebrate the holidays and life itself despite this, so this combination of joy punctuated by grief is, sadly, natural around here.”
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, triggering a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers. Ariel Markovitch moved his family to his native Israel following the war’s outbreak and began dividing his life between the two countries.
His father, Jonathan, was born in Ukraine and made aliyah in the early 1970s, as a child. Jonathan Markovitch’s wife, Elka Inna, was born in Russia. The couple moved to Kyiv in 2000, when Ariel was a child, to serve as Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries. Jonathan and Elka Inna have stayed in Ukraine throughout the war, organizing relief efforts for Jews and non-Jews to help them deal with the realities of the war.
