Free Republic

At a synagogue.. Israeli social worker.. had a flash of historic vertigo.. ancestors had lived in Chisinau more than a century ago, surviving a devastating pogrom in 1903 before emigrating to what became Israel. Now their descendant had returned .. this time not as a victim, but as a rescuer. “It’s like a closure for me,” .. from Jerusalem who had come to help evacuate thousands of Jewish refugees from Ukraine to Israel. “At the time, it was almost a shame to be Jewish.. Now people want to show they are Jewish so they can be evacuated.” Today.. the context...

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. [...] If we wanted to eat, we learned at a very young age that we had to stand in long lines every day, often in bitter cold at 4 a.m. in hopes that the store would not run out of bread or milk by the time we made it to the...