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In My Grandfather’s Ancestral Home, A Window to Ukraine’s Jewish Future

10 30
monday
As news of a possible ceasefire in Ukraine continues to make the headlines, I feel a rush of hope and caution. It’s the same uneasy swirl of emotions I confronted weeks ago in Lutsk, when I finally let myself cry after five trips to Ukraine since the start of the conflict. In that sleepy provincial capital in northwestern Ukraine, just a short drive from the Polish border, I was huddled with a group of social workers, volunteers, and internally displaced people in the local Jewish community center — documenting their work and learning how this ragtag group of humanitarian aid workers continues to make an impact under impossible circumstances. Over kompot and cognac, stuffed mushrooms and borsch, we traded stories of the brutal conflict that has now entered its fourth year — tales of loss, displacement, and finding home. Funny, that word “home”; it’s neither a guarantee nor a physical dwelling. As I have learned during my time in crisis zones, it’s something less concrete and more precious — home is a whispered prayer, a spark of hope to keep kindling even during life’s darkest moments. Ukraine is a kind of home for me, too. My trip to Lutsk and nearby Rivne was my 11th time in Ukraine — travels that have taken me from cobblestoned Lviv to seaside Odesa, defiant Kyiv to gentle Poltava, resilient Chernihiv to snowy Sumy. But in Lutsk, I wept at last. I’d found my place in the story. In 1941, my grandfather, Samuel Kagan, fled the small village of Shatsk — about a two-hour drive from Lutsk — under cover of night. The Germans were approaching, and the village elders imagined they were looking to conscript young men, just as they had a few decades earlier during World War I. My zayde and his generation’s exodus, they hoped, would protect the most vulnerable women, children, and seniors. But this was a different time, with different cruelty — more than 1,000 Jews in the Shatsk area were shot into a pit by Chorne Velyke Lake, nestled in one of Ukraine’s national parks and now a top summer tourist attraction. My mother and I traveled to Shatsk on a bleak December day in 2011. We said kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, over the mass grave by the lake. We also found wizened village residents who could still recall our family — the general store run by our cousins, the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)