Historic temple in Kyiv has spent $2 million evacuating Ukrainians from war's hot spots

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The evacuees from Chernihiv, many of whom had lived underground to avoid an aggressive Russian shelling and bombing campaign, are among the tens of thousands of people Azman said he has helped to move from dangerous areas in the past month. On Friday night, they shuffled through the synagogue, passing by a large silver menorah before settling in the prayer hall, where they rested and warmed up before being relocated to the train station or nearby hotels for the night.

Azman is financing these lifesaving treks for civilians mainly through donations to the synagogue, which he uses to procure buses and pay drivers to deliver them out of the country’s front-line areas, including the devastated southern city of Mariupol. On Saturday at the synagogue, many people who evacuated from Chernihiv, about 90 miles north of Kyiv, boarded buses that took them over the border to Moldova.

Azman estimated that the effort has cost an average of about $100,000 a day since the war began, with a single bus costing upward of $20,000 because of current shortages. In all, he said, the humanitarian effort has cost nearly $2 million. Ukraine’s Jewish community has long faced violent discrimination — including pogroms and the horrors of the Holocaust — that prompted many Jewish Ukrainians to emigrate out of the country.

Azman had a brief moment in the international spotlight during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment drama. Igor Fruman, an associate of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, knew Azman from the Brodsky Synagogue and raised money for Anatevka, the village in Ukraine linked to Azman that was established to house Jewish refugees fleeing the war in the country’s east. At one point in 2019, Giuliani traveled to Europe, met Azman and became an “honorary mayor” of the town.