In a moment of calm, my wife, two children and I got in a car and “jumped out” of our hometown like a bullet.
Art historian and Jewish heritage researcher Dr. Eugeny Kotlyar, a professor at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, was forced to flee from Kharkiv to Lviv after Russian forces bombarded the city, Jewish Heritage Europe reports.
In this powerful personal essay he describes his journey through Ukraine, which took him and his family through favorite Jewish places he had researched and written about for years — former shtetls which had been home to historic Tzaddikim.
He reflects on how he somehow felt safe in these places, redolent of Jewish history and heritage, and the prevailing power of the sages.
For a man who has devoted 30 years of his life to studying the Jewish heritage of Ukraine, salvation in his favorite shtetls has become an existential dialogue with the past.
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