The Golden Rose synagogue in Dnipro has endured the paroxysms of history since 1868. Now it shelters Ukrainain Jews fleeing Putin’s invasion. Anthony Galloway and Kate Geraghty report from Dnipro.
Igor Frogel remembers 1941 all too well, and he fears history is being repeated. As an 11-year-old child, Frogel, now 92, escaped from the Nazis to the Ural Mountains in Russia. It was many years before he returned to his home town, Dnipro.
Sitting in the synagogue in the central Ukraine city, he says he cannot bear to see so many people fleeing another war.
There are scores of people – Jews and non-Jews – taking refuge in the synagogue. Most have just arrived from Kharkiv, 217 kilometres to the north, which has been shelled relentlessly since the invasion started.
“Now, again, Jewish people, but not only Jewish people, have to escape from a war,” Frogel tells us. “I feel almost the same feeling as I felt in 1941.”
As war rages just a few hours drive away in the bombed-out wasteland of Kharkiv and the besieged port of Mariupol, the snow-covered city of Dnipro is eerily quiet.
Residents in Ukraine’s fourth-largest city have opened their homes to displaced compatriots who’ve fled the country’s north and south, while also preparing for the worst. The Golden Rose Synagogue – a stark white city landmark that has endured history’s paroxysms since 1868 – has become a refuge.
Read the article by Anthony Galloway and Kate Geraghty in The Sydney Morning Herald.