Judith Amzalak is keeping an anxious vigil by her phone in Bondi. Never straying too far, lest she miss the next message from her daughter Miriam Moskovitz who is bunkered in the basement of her Ukraine home, 40 kilometres from the Russian border.
Mrs Moskovitz and her husband Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz have spent more than 30 years building a life and a thriving Jewish community in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
The two were posted to the city in 1990 after the fall of communism as emissaries of the Chabad movement, the largest Orthodox outreach organisation in the world.
Russia’s long-threatened invasion of Ukraine this week only affirmed their life mission to be pillars of the Ukrainian Jewish community.
“Wednesday was a totally normal day. We celebrated 30 years of our Jewish Day School. We had 400 kids with balloons and flowers celebrating, and then on Thursday we were at war,” Mrs Moskovitz said from her Kharkiv home.
“I have 12 children and my oldest son is married with four children. We basically turned the basement into a bomb shelter with sandbags by the window.
“At the synagogue on Thursday we had people streaming in the whole day, to stay, to pray, to eat, people too scared to be home on their own.”
Read the article by Lucy Cormack and Lucy Carroll in The Sydney Morning Herald.