Victoria Astakhova, a 66-year-old construction engineer from Kyiv, grew up in the Soviet era, when the stamp on her identity card subjected her to antisemitism from neighbors and limits on how high she could advance at work. “In college,” she recalled, “when my dorm mate discovered my card was stamped ‘Jew,’ she didn’t even want me as a roommate.”

I met Astakhova earlier this month at the Ramada Parc Hotel in Bucharest, where she was among around 500 Ukrainian refugees whose aspirations to make aliyah were being reviewed by the Jewish Agency for Israel. She was there with her daughter, Olga Marshavka, a lawyer in Odessa before the war, and Olga’s two children, 3-year-old Anastasia and Zachar, who will soon turn 1.

“Now,” said Marshavka, “Jewish blood helps me make a future for my family.”

I heard these sentiments and saw these realities repeatedly during my week-long visit to Romania, where I shadowed workers for the Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency as they worked along the Ukrainian border to support a steady stream of refugees.

Ukraine may be a country bloodstained in the imagination of American Jews by a succession of pogroms and centuries of anti-Jewish prejudice.

But with more than 10 million Ukrainians displaced by Russian aggression over the past month, those who are Jewish are finding they have advantages over their neighbors...read more