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He circumcised men between the ages of eight and 80. He took his kit to synagogues and hospitals, made nervous mothers feel at ease, and geriatric men felt spiritual.
He is the Mohel of the Dnieper, also known as Dr. Jakob Gaisinovich, a 46-year-old Ukrainian Jew and ritual circumciser. Since 1998, he has performed exactly 8,302 such procedures – an average of almost one a day. Passing through Ukraine in its compact Nissan SUV, The Mohel is known to be a familiar sight and an unlikely beacon, spreading the idea that connecting to your heritage isn’t really that difficult; all you need is a knife and a little know-how.
But the sharpest incision Mohel felt was six weeks ago when he became a refugee. Again.
He and his family were forced to leave their home in Donetsk in 2014 when the war broke out. Last month, with helicopters circling and sirens blasting near their apartment in the Dnieper, Mohel, his wife Lisa and their three young children set off again, like the Israelis, crossing dangerously to unknown points.
And this is how Mohel found himself this week, a few days before Easter, sitting in the second quarter of Vienna, in a Spartan apartment inhabited mainly by inflatable mattresses and his circumcision kit.
Mohel in exile, he said sadly, checking his phone periodically to see which young men might need his services.
Gaisinovich’s story is both part of a folk tale and emblematic of many middle-class Ukrainians, who this spring have been uprooted, deprived and promising in a foreign land. But which, perhaps more important than all this, will be free.
In the case of Mohel, free in the nation of Hitler’s birth.
As early as the 1940s, his good friend’s grandmother fled east of the Dnieper, hoping the Russians would save her from the Germans and Austrians. In 2022, he fled west of the Dnieper, hoping the Germans and Austrians would save him from the Russians. Historical irony. Or maybe divine providence?
“What is this line of gratitude we give to God in The Haggadah this weekend,” Mohel said, quoting the canonical text that Jews around the world will recite to Seder. “From darkness to light, from slavery to liberation?”
When Easter begins on Friday night, millions of Jews will indeed gather around the table to offer thanks for the incredible redemption of warlike tyrants – “and the Lord saves us from their [destructive] hands, ”as the signature lines read. Few will say the words with as much feeling as Ukrainian refugees. And maybe no one will say them like the Mohel of the Dnieper.
At first they didn’t want to leave.
Lisa and Mohel had spent years in their adopted city, the Dnieper, learning to embrace it after fleeing Donetsk 150 miles east. The work was hard – she was a business analyst – and the land was foreign. But they had made it familiar, even spiritual.
The couple belonged to the Chabad movement, an outreach Hasidic sect whose modern ideology was shaped by the Rebbe, the great rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. The slaves grew up in the Dnieper. It was Bashart, destiny.
Mohel and Lisa, 37, became key members of the Dnieper Jewish community, one of the largest in Ukraine (which had more than 200,000 Jews before the invasion), including the country’s president. In the summer of 2021, Mohel and Lisa even moved into a new apartment with their three children, all under the age of 12. Eastern European Jews may feel like a relic for many in the 21st century, imposing a history class. For them it was a topical, lively, real life.
So when the invasion began in February, there was no doubt where they should be.
Mohel’s mission was to bring in a certified urologist Brit Mila, circumcision throughout Ukraine – a particularly touching act, as it was banned by Russian authorities during the Soviet Union. They could not leave.
They paid attention every day as the sirens grew louder and the prospects bleak. The first week, then the second, every shelling with a new plague. One morning, while military helicopters were circling, their four-year-old son approached the window. The window is to Ukraine in 2022, as was the closed supermarket for covid in 2020: If you get close to it, you can die. Mohel grabbed him in panic. “Then we knew we had to leave,” Lisa said.
The couple wanted to reach Chisinau, Moldova; an acquaintance owned a hotel and promised the five rooms. Mohel knew the back roads of Ukraine as Moses knew the Nile; he had been driving them for decades. So he drew a small route to Chisinau, 400 miles away. (As a father of three, he was released from the ban on military men leaving the country.) But the checkpoints were numerous. The shells fell. And the traffic was unimaginable. Five hours passed, then 10, then 15.
It was Friday and Saturday was approaching. No observant Jew would ever drive on a Saturday unless life was at stake. They could hear the air raid sirens through the car windows. The sunset. They continued to drive. Their 11-year-old daughter, Adele, began quietly singing “L’cha Dodi,” the traditional Friday night tune designed to be carried in warmly lit synagogues rather than putting Nissan on the brink of war. Soon the whole family quietly joined.
“We all had tears, happy because we could be saved, but sad because we had to,” Lisa said.
The car was moving slowly and the gas pressure gauge approached empty. There were few stations to see, and when they finally found one, there was no gas, only hundreds of cars waiting for miles in the 15-degree cold. Maybe there will be a delivery tomorrow. Or the next day. It seemed that their escape would have to wait; the hearts of destinies were hardened.
There were rumors on the line of a secret gas station a few miles away. Mohel and Lisa put everyone back in the car and started driving as far as they knew. They saw him a little later. It seemed completely closed with lids on, the lights off, no activity. They entered. There are no signs of life. Then a man jumped out of the shadows. “Turn off your headlights,” he said urgently. The gas station was on the flight route of the Russian Air Force; if the pilots see it from the sky, they will immediately bomb it, burning everyone to ashes.
The Mohel turned off the headlights. “There are no phones,” the man said. They turned them off. The man brought a pump. They filled their car in the dark. They continued to stare nervously at the sky for the bomb that would fall from nowhere and destroy them.
They drove more, approaching the 20-hour, then approaching 25. Just enough gasoline to get to Moldova. Near the border, they caught rumors on their phones about hours of archiving. This will deplete their gas and their ability to escape. “And then we get there, to the big border checkpoint,” Mohel said, “and all the cars start to thin out and we pass in 15 minutes, like a miracle.” Sometimes the sea just splits.
In Chisinau, the situation was difficult. Mattresses were pulled into a local synagogue and the refugees slept almost on top of each other. These were the lucky ones. Rows of tents were set up in the synagogue courtyard, and refugees also slept in groups. It was gloomy enough that the family decided to keep up the pressure. The Mohel knew of a Ukrainian Jew, an emissary of Chabad in 800 miles, named Kolomoytsev. According to Providence, Kolomoytsev once lived in the Dnieper and knew about Gaisinovich. Brit variety skills. A call was made. “Yes, there is a place here,” Kolomoytsev said. There is always room for Mohel.
Before they left, a woman approached. “I heard about what you’re doing,” she said. Her son was three. They were Jews. He was not circumcised. Can he, you know, possibly? The next day he went to the hospital and performed the circumcision.
Vienna is unlikely to be a promised land. About 200,000 Jews lived in the city before World War II – scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, all making up almost 10 percent of the population. Then came the Anschluss in March 1938. Jewish businesses were closed, property confiscated, and rights denied. About half of them managed to leave, turned into moneyless refugees overnight.
The other half saw the Nazis and local authorities begin systematically destroying their community, beginning with the Crystal Night pogrom in November 1938 and culminating in the next few years with the vast majority sent to ghettos and concentration camps where few survived. Society remained microscopic for decades after the war.
But the tide has turned dramatically in recent years, under the rule of a charismatic Chabad rabbi named Jacob Biedermann; a highly active non-profit Jewish organization known as the IKG; and public and private support. The community was boosted by the influx of Jews from the late Soviet Union from places such as Georgia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There are now 8,000 Jews in the city. Twenty-five synagogues. Dozens of beehive restaurants. Two Jewish primary schools. Hebrew University. As it turns out, the community had room for more than the Mohel.
When he and his family arrived (six days after leaving the Dnieper), other Jews from Ukraine also began to flock, many also from the Dnieper, dizzy and stressed but relieved. Neighbors of residential buildings or families of the same class – a total of over 800, one of the highest amounts of any city in Europe.
Much of the migration was organized by Kolomoytsev, a Jew from the Dnieper in Vienna, and a business partner named Maxim Sluzki. Their teams would sort out the documents and send buses to the border to pick up refugees. Instantly, the community grew by 10 percent.
“I didn’t think we could make 100, let alone 800,” Kolomoitsev said. “But I think we can do more.”
Even by the standards of a stable European refugee response, there are a staggering number of services available …
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