The Ukraine Diaries - Entry #3

30 October 2025

Lviv, Ukraine

The day begins with an air raid. In my jet lagged stupor, I fail to hear the siren. I am woken instead by a text message from Leonid saying there is an attack and I need to come down to the basement shelter. My only experience with air raids is from being in Israel where the tiny geographic area means that from siren to detonation you have at most 90 seconds, so I essentially leap out of bed and hustle down to the basement, seven floors down.

When I get there I find out some of the details. Russia is air striking a power plant outside Lviv so the entire city is ordered to shelter. Lviv, being so far West, is often spared from such attacks, as opposed to Kyiv and regions further East, but the city is not immune; a few weeks ago a Russian attack on Lviv hit a residential building and killed a family of four.

The basement shelter is currently doubling as a meeting hall for a conference on poultry farming. There are chairs set up as if for a lecture or presentation, and images of chickens, pasture, and types of feed are rather hilariously displayed all around the room. People sleep in the chairs, pace with their babies bundled in their arms, and a group of Limmud and Project Kesher folks sit in a circle chatting. I join them and try to pick up some Ukrainian words. I get “yes,” “no,” and “hello.” I try for “thank you” which makes the group laugh. If there’s one thing living in Israel will give you, it’s the ability to hang out in a bomb shelter. The all clear comes and it’s time for breakfast.

In the afternoon we rehearse in a studio attached to the Lviv Puppet Theatre. Afterwards I’m back at the hotel to meet Vlada from Project Kesher, and Sergey, our sound and video guy, both of whom just arrived on the train from their town further East. Russia’s attack made it a 26 hour trip for them. Their train was stalled and had to be pushed by a locomotive.

Sergey and I go to eat at what is likely the coolest burger place in the world. We talk about music and concerts and our mutual desire to create something outside the box. Walking back through the city center, crowded and buzzing with streetlight, he tells me about the war, the time a missile strike fell two hundred yards from where his son was playing soccer, and how the army sometimes grabs guys off the street to draft them. He’s been picked up before. It happens to many. War needs armies and armies need soldiers. The war has created a void of intellectual and artistic leaders, he says. They’re fighting, and many have died. In Ukraine, he says, you always say “travel safe” and “peaceful night” and everyone hopes it will be true, but it can always go bad. This war takes no vacations. Talking to him reminds me too much of Israel after the 7th. If there are two types of people in this world, then there are those who have had war land on their doorsteps and those who haven’t.

Back at the hotel, the lobby is packed as more members of Limmud and other Jewish organizations have arrived for our conference. It occurs to me that a conference like this, a big gathering of Jews, in New York or Chicago or LA or London or Paris or Berlin, would need security to rival a politicians entourage. Just last week, the annual Jewish film festival in Sweden was cancelled because not a single movie theatre would agree to a screening due to the magnitude of threats and their inability to provide adequate security. The ever increasing list of Jewish targeted attacks all over Europe and North America is too devastating and exhausting to contemplate. As a result, Jewish events all over the world have stepped up security to an astounding degree. Yet here in Lviv, we apparently need none of that. A city once infamous for centuries of pogroms culminating in the complete eradication of its Jewish population is now a safer place to be Jewish than Brooklyn. The world is on its head.