At a synagogue in central Chisinau on Monday, an Israeli social worker, Omer Hod, had a flash of historical vertigo. Hod’s 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 to the Moldovan capital — this time not as a victim, but as a rescuer.

“It’s like closure for me,” said Hod, a 26-year-old from Jerusalem who had come to Chisinau to help with the evacuation to Israel of thousands of Jewish refugees from Ukraine.

“Back then, it was almost a shame to be Jewish,” Hod said. “Now, people want to show they are Jewish so that they can be evacuated.”

Today, as in the early 1900s, Jews are once again escaping violence in southeast Europe. But the context is radically different — cathartically so for the many Israelis who have come here to join the relief effort.

A century ago, Jews fled widespread antisemitic attacks in cities like Chisinau and Odessa — pogroms that helped spur early Zionists to emigrate independently to Palestine. Today, the violence is not antisemitic. And this time around, representatives of the Jewish state, as well as an unusually high number of independent Israeli aid organisations, are now waiting at Ukraine’s borders to shepherd Ukrainian Jews to Israel.

The pogrom in Chisinau, also known as Kishinev, “was a very central event that drove modern Zionism”, the Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, said in a phone interview on Monday. “In the same Kishinev, right now, we’re saving Jews,” Bennett added.

“The raison d’être of Israel is to be a safe haven for every Jew in danger. We didn’t have it in 1903. We have it now.”

The Israeli government expects 20,000 Ukrainian Jews to emigrate to Israel, 10 per cent of the estimated Jewish population in Ukraine, and says it is also seeing a rise in applications from Russian Jews. More than 2,000 Ukrainians have already been flown to Israel since the start of the war.

New York Times News Service