By mid-March, nearly 500 Jewish refugees from Ukraine had already arrived in Vienna, among them many young children and schoolchildren. Hundreds more were expected. At both the Zwi Perez Chajes (ZPC) and Chabad schools, sleeves were immediately rolled up: every child who wants to attend a Jewish school should be able to do so.
wina: das jüdische Stadtmagazin, April 2022
German original: https://www.wina-magazin.at/wir-muessen-alles-zur-seite-legen-und-helfen/
"How are we going to do that? I don't have an answer yet," says Rabbi Jacob Biderman, head of the Lauder Chabad campus in Augarten. "But we have to accept every child; we won't turn anyone away." Natalie Neubauer, chairwoman of the Zwi Perez Chajes (ZPC) School Association in Prater, feels the same way. If there is a long-term need for kindergarten and school places, she says, they will be created - "to the best of our ability, with resources that are running low, but with all the strength we have at our disposal."
The ZPC school was designed so that a floor could be added if necessary. In an emergency, however, containers in the garden could be used as a temporary solution, as was the case at the previous location in Castellezgasse. Biderman is already in the process of looking for rooms near the campus that can be rented. The first Ukrainian children and young people are already learning at both schools. How many more there will be and how many of them will stay in Vienna in the long term, however, remains to be seen. Even those affected do not yet know what their future will look like.
Oleg Vaikhonskyi and his wife Oksana Vaikhonska left for Vienna from near Kiev with their five-year-old son Simon and their 13-year-old Labrador. Early in the morning, they packed up the bare necessities and set off in their car. Left behind was the house they had built over the past two and a half years and had just moved into. "The only thing that was important for us at that moment was to get our son to safety," Oksana says. She worked in Kiev as a lifestyle journalist. Her husband studied international relations and worked for an agricultural company. Ukraine is her home, she says, and even if everything there is not perfect and as clean as in Vienna, she wants to go back someday, Oksana says. "We are also ready to rebuild our country."
Her husband is more reserved. Even if the war were over soon, there would be nothing to eat in Ukraine. Through his job, he knows there will be no harvest this year. "If the fuel is needed by the army, how can we cultivate the fields? And if tanks drive over the fields, what is left to be harvested?" So the family will definitely stay in Austria for one or two years, he said. Or even longer." When we saw the school, I was overcome with the feeling that my son will graduate here."
Currently, the preschooler attends a welcome class at the ZPC school. Here, there is care for the children by educators who also speak Russian and Ukrainian. "This is an opportunity to get into a daily routine here," explains Daniela Davidovits-Nagy, who is on the ZPC school's board of directors to help refugee children from Ukraine. "The children can speak in their language, relax a bit, but they can also come into contact with other students - at breaks, at meals, at parties." Purim has already been celebrated together. In the long term, those whose families have decided to stay will be integrated into the classes. For older ones, intensive German courses are planned at the beginning in cooperation with the Jewish Vocational Training Center (JBBZ), Davidovits tells us.
"We have to accept every child, we won't turn anyone down."
-Rabbi Jacob Biderman, head of the Lauder Chabad campus.
We want to stay here. One of them is Michael. He is 16 years old and fled to Vienna from Kharkiv with his mother and grandparents. He no longer has a father; he was murdered a few years ago during a raid on the family home. He already knew Vienna from a trip here three years ago. And if you listen to him, he has come to stay. "All that matters now is whether my mother can find a job."
Michael wants to learn German quickly, take his Matura and then study at a university here. He knows that this will mean a lot of learning in the near future. His resolve falters somewhat when he recounts: "I had big plans in Kharkiv. I was going to finish school and then go to a university in Europe. Now I have to make new plans." That he could ever go back to Kharkiv, he doesn't see that possibility. "1.5 million people lived there, now only 300,000 remain. Most of them are elderly and those who were too poor to flee." The city is broken, he said, "my school is also no longer standing."
"Very many say that even when the war will be over, they want to stay here," Rabbi Jacob Biderman knows. Cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv were destroyed, he said. The Jewish infrastructure in Ukraine has been built up by Chabad in recent decades - more than 40 schools and kindergartens are or were operated nationwide, some of them in Dnipro, where 40,000 Jews used to live and where the Menorah Center is located. Shmuel Kaminetsky is rabbi in Dnipro - and a school friend of the Viennese rabbi. Since March, families from Dnipro have been arriving in Vienna through this connection; in some cases, groups of children even come with their elementary teachers. Rabbi Biderman immediately provided space at the Chabad campus so that the students could continue to be taught. About 200 children and teenagers already arrived here during March.
"What touched me very much: I went with a mother to a kindergarten group, and when she saw the elementary teacher and started crying, and the two women hugged each other and cried; it turned out that the teacher had previously been the daughter's teacher in Ukraine." What else moved the rabbi: "The community is coming together. A shochet came along, a sojfer, a mohel. A community that had to flee is re-forming here." As at the ZPC school, which served about a dozen children in mid-March, the long-term goal at the Chabad campus is to educate Ukrainian students together with Austrian students. Because of the Chabad network, there are currently more
“…and both women hug each other and cry, and it turns out that the teacher has already been the daughter’s teacher in Ukraine.”
– Rabbi Biderman
If there are more students knocking on the door of the Augarten school, it will be necessary to open new classes there more quickly. Rabbi Biderman wants to quickly teach all the newly admitted children together with the students who already attend the school. This is also what the parents of the Ukrainian boys and girls would like to see. German classes are already held at the Chabad school for the refugee children.
Both the ZPC and Chabad schools emphasize that it is the parents' decision which school their children will eventually attend. Rabbi Biderman emphasizes that many of the children who attended a Chabad school in Ukraine and now come here are not religious; only a third speak Hebrew. In contrast, he says, 20 percent of the newcomers are even Hasidic. At both schools, therefore, it will be necessary to provide not only intensive German but also Hebrew instruction.
However, things like concrete curricula are still dreams of the future. People are making new arrangements from day to day and focusing on one main goal: to do justice to the current situation and to welcome children. "Yes," says Rabbi Biderman, "it can also be that this disrupts the school day a bit and is inconvenient for the teaching team. But helping these families and children is the most important thing right now." In doing so, he tells of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who immediately launched an airlift for children to Israel in 1986 after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The Chabad organization was overwhelmed, he says, and people asked where they were now going to house so many children so quickly. "For all I care, close yeshivot and girls' schools to free up boarding schools for the children," the Rebbe had said at the time. "At certain times, you have to prioritize," Rabbi Biderman stresses. Davidovits agrees. "The most important thing is that every child who needs a place finds one."