In the middle of relaying the story of his family’s 32-hour escape from war-torn Ukraine on a Romanian roadside Tuesday, Rabbi Yechiel Shlomo Levitansky paused to roll down his window for a passing motorist.
“My license plate is Ukrainian,” Levitansky translated after speaking briefly with the man. “He’s asking me, ‘Is everything OK? Do you need a place to stay? Do you need food?’”
A journey of at least 500 miles from Sumy, a city near Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, to Moldova and on to Romania was scheduled to end later that day with Levitansky and his wife and children taking a flight to Israel. Levitansky, who’s been living and building a Jewish congregation in Sumy for the past 17 years, said on a video call from the driver’s seat of his car that he’d not stopped to reflect completely on the decision to leave.
“I haven’t cried so much in a long time,” said Levitansky, who was born in America. “The most emotional part of it is that we left our community behind. It was a very, very difficult decision.”