Family members, friends, comrades in arms and members of the Jewish community of kyiv, on Thursday, at the Brodski Central Synagogue in the Ukrainian capital, said goodbye to Anton Matitiahu Samborski, adopted son of Ukraine's most famous rabbi, Moshe Azman.
Samborski, 33, died fighting Russian forces with the Ukrainian Army on the Pokrovsk front (east), a few weeks after being mobilized.
According to the rabbi, his son - whom he adopted in 2022 at the age of 11 due to the difficulties his biological family, also of Jewish origin, had in supporting and educating him - was recruited this spring a week after his first son was born, and lost his life on July 24 after being sent to the front with the little military training he had received from the Army.
The Denazification of Putin
In an emotional speech to the rest of the family, Azman highlighted the irony that another Jewish soldier had died as a result of an invasion that Russian President Vladimir Putin had has partially justified this by the need to free Ukraine from an alleged Nazi regime that is subjugating the population.
According to Rabbi Mayer Stambler, chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, the institution has been caring for 43 fallen Jewish soldiers since the beginning of the war, whose families have requested that they be buried according to Jewish law.
Stambler explains that the Federation offers material and spiritual support to some 1.200 Jewish fighters and estimates the total number of Jewish soldiers killed in the hundreds.
At the ceremony at the Central Synagogue, the rabbi's wife and Samborski's adoptive mother, Jana Azman, said through tears at the coffin that she hoped the family was able to convey to the fallen soldier during the decade he spent with them all the love they felt for him.
All kinds of support for the rabbi
“I have been following the rabbi on social media for a long time and I wanted to come and express my support at this tragic time for the family.”, said before the ceremony Mikhail, a resident of kyiv who worked as a restorer in the synagogue building when it was used by the Soviet authorities as a puppet theatre during the communist era.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1966, when the Russian city was called Leningrad, Azman is one of two Jewish religious leaders who claim to be Ukraine's chief rabbi.
Azman arrived in kyiv from Israel in the early 1990s with a mission to revitalize Jewish life in Ukraine after more than seven decades of Soviet religious persecution.
The rabbi began holding religious services in one of the rooms of the puppet theatre, until the authorities returned the building to its original religious purpose.
“When I was wounded in the war, the rabbi helped me a lot, and I want to be with him now,” said a Jewish university professor who volunteered for the army at the start of the invasion and had to return to civilian life because of the wounds he suffered at the front.
Azman became arguably Ukraine’s most popular rabbi by staying in kyiv in the early days of the Russian invasion and pledging to help displaced people, wounded, soldiers and vulnerable people affected by the war, with constant trips to the front and meetings with foreign leaders and dignitaries to seek help.
His frenetic public activity has made him clearly more popular and popular than the other religious leader who declares himself chief rabbi of Ukraine, the American Yaakov Dov Bleich.
Despite the rivalry over the nominal leadership of Ukraine's Jewish communities, Azman maintains a cordial relationship with Bleich, with whom he was photographed smiling at a recent event.
Azov and the Rabbi
Also present at Samborski's farewell ceremony was Olena Tolkachova, a representative of the Azov Regiment, which has been accused of being Nazis due to the far-right tendencies of some of its founders and the use of symbols reminiscent of National Socialism.
"We have come to pay tribute to this hero and to offer our condolences to the Rabbi's family because we remember how he helped us during the siege of Azovstal.“How he appealed to the Israeli government for help in evacuating the seriously wounded, and also for all his sincere and constant support for the Ukrainian cause,” Tolkachova said of the close relationship between Azov and the rabbi.
Marcel Gascón from Efe contributed to this article from Aurora.
The article says "the one who was adopted in 2022 at 11 years of age." If he was 11 years old when he was adopted, it was in 2002 and not 2022. That's what happens when you copy the article from another website without analyzing it.