Last week marked exactly forty years since Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant detonated at 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986, scattering radioactive caesium across Europe and permanently altering our understanding of catastrophic risk. The explosion killed one worker instantly and a second within hours; twenty-eight more died within weeks from acute radiation syndrome. Long-term death estimates range from 4,000 to tens of thousands, depending on methodology. The cost — environmental, social, medical — has been reckoned at over $700 billion. Yet what is less widely appreciated is the deep, multi-layered connection between Chernobyl and the State of Israel, a connection stretching from eighteenth-century mysticism to twenty-first-century missile strikes.

Long before Chernobyl became synonymous with nuclear catastrophe, it was a cradle of Jewish civilisation. The town hosted one of Ukraine’s oldest Jewish settlements, dating to the sixteenth century. By 1897, Jews constituted over half of Chernobyl’s population. It was here in the 1770s that Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky, disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, established what would become the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty, authoring the foundational mystical text Me’or Einayim — “Light of the Eyes.” His son Mordechai’s eight sons each founded their own courts, spawning the Skver, Rachmastrivka, Trisk, and Tolna dynasties, whose descendants today number in the tens of thousands across Israel and the United States. The central........

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