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(RNS) — Kyiv’s Brodsky Synagogue was packed with mourners Thursday (Sept. 12) for the funeral of Anton Samborskyi, who was killed in action in Russia in August after being drafted to the Ukrainian Army.
“Since the beginning of this terrible war, trouble knocked in the home of almost every Ukrainian — someone has lost a loved one, someone is fighting injuries,” said Samborskyi’s adoptive father, Rabbi Reuven Moshe Azman, in a memorial post on Facebook after learning that Samborskyi had been declared missing. His death was confirmed the following week.
Azman, one of two men who claim the title of Ukraine’s chief rabbi, is a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Chabad has risen to become the largest single Jewish organization operating in Eastern Europe, with hundreds of rabbis and centers serving Jewish communities across the former Soviet bloc, including 35 centers in Ukraine.
In the instability of the post-Soviet years, it was not uncommon for Chabad rabbis to adopt or foster Jewish orphans, as Azman and his wife did Samborskyi. “In 2002, my wife and I adopted an 11-year-old boy who had become an orphan,” said Azman Thursday. “His name was Anton Samborskyi, but we gave him the Jewish name Matityahu in honor of the heroic leader of the Maccabees’ uprising against the colonized empire more than 2,200 years ago — events that underlined the Hanukkah holiday,” Azman said in his August post.
Matityahu (Anton) Samborskyi. (Courtesy photo)
“Moty lived in our family for about 10 years,” said the rabbi, using the nickname for Matityahu, “and when he became an adult, he decided to live on his own. He got married and had a daughter in May this year. But a week after the birth of his child, Moty was called to the army. After a crash course, the young fighter was immediately sent to the front.”
Azman said he had last spoken to Samborskyi on July 17 and lost contact with him July 24th. It is believed he was killed soon afterward. He is survived by his wife and child.
On Friday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy mentioned Samborskyi in a speech to a gathering of world leaders’ spouses held in Kyiv this week, offering condolences to Azman.
More than 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in action since the advent of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. But Samborskyi’s funeral became something of a media spectacle in Ukraine, with dozens of journalists in attendance, in part because Azman has become somewhat of a folk hero in Ukraine since the outbreak of the war.
Last year, Azman made waves when a video of him sheltering from rocket fire while volunteering at the front went viral.
“Rabbi Azman became a symbol of the resistance of Ukrainian Jewry, because he’s just this tough guy. He’s running around the front lines, he’s on TV. He’s recording videos,” Vladislav Davidzon, a Ukrainian Jewish scholar and author of “Jewish-Ukrainian Relations and the Birth of a Political Nation,” told RNS. “The entire population has seen him on TV, and he has this remarkable eloquence, which he has been articulating his position and the position of Ukrainian Jewry. So he’s become a folk hero in this way that he’s a fighting monk — a fighting rabbi.”
But the funeral has also garnered the spotlight of Ukrainian media because it so starkly challenged Putin’s claims of “de-nazifying” Ukraine.
Zelenskyy’s comments about Azman’s loss came in a part of his speech in which he asked, “How long will the world accept the story that Putin fights against Nazism in Ukraine. What Nazis?”
“The government understands very well that this is just one more point to counteract the pervasive propaganda that comes from the Russians, that this some sort of Nazi regime,” Davidzon said.
Rabbi Azman made similar points in his eulogy, as did Rabbi Mayer Stambler, rabbi of the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro. In comments to RNS referring to Putin, Stambler asked: “What does it mean to say the war is about fighting Nazism, when the Nazi himself of the world goes and kills a rabbi’s son?”
At the funeral, Olena Tolkachova, a fundraiser for the Ukrainian military’s Azov Brigade, told the Associated Press, “This is very important for Ukraine, because not only Ukrainians from the mainstream are fighting for our country, but different ethnicities and different religious groups — Orthodox and Catholics, Jews, and representatives of the Islamic faith.”
The Azov Brigade faced accusations of antisemitism and association with neo-Nazi groups when it was founded as a volunteer militia in 2014, but today is thought to have moderated into a regular military unit since being brought under Ukrainian military commanders.
Relatives and Ukraine’s chief rabbi, Moshe Reuven Azman, right, mourn at the coffin of Azman’s adopted son, Matityahu (Anton) Samborskyi, who was killed in the war with Russia, during a mourning service in the Brodsky Synagogue in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Samborskyi’s story also resonates with Ukrainians who have growing concerns about the recently increased rate of conscription. Despite significant strategic gains and opening a front inside Russia’s borders, the army is suffering a shortage of troops. In April, Zelenskyy signed a bill lowering the minimum recruitment age from 27 to 25. The age was initially set high to avoid depleting the population of working-age men, something the Soviet Union faced at the end of the Second World War.
In the early days of the war, Ukraine had a surplus of volunteers, but as the conflict has ground on, waning morale has slowed recruitment, as have allegations of corruption lodged against the army’s recruitment departments that led Zelenskyy to dismiss several officials. The low recruitment has meant draftees receive only abbreviated training before being sent to the front.
Reports of roving recruiters have put a chill on community life across Ukraine, including religious life. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, synagogues are seeing fewer and fewer men at prayers and community events, as military-age men are limiting non-essential outings.
Ukraine’s rabbis have shown support for the cause, especially Chabad’s.
In the early days of the war, many Chabad rabbis made a point of staying with their communities, even as some towns and cities fell under Russian occupation. “At the beginning of the war, many people escaped the country, but we, the rabbis, the rabbis of Chabad especially, stayed,” Stambler said. “This is actually what it says in the Torah, that every Jewish community must be as patriotic as we can and pray for the success of the country.”
Stambler said that their presence has only increased Chabad’s profile in the country. “People appreciate it very highly, we feel it from the local community, from the local people and the government, and it is one more strong statement that we are an important part of the population for the good, and in tragedy,” Stambler added.
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