You can't make this stuff up!
The two men arrested at Dulles Airport with one-way airline tickets in their hands, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The guys who had lunch with Guiliani at the Trump hotel in Washington. Let us hope they are the equivalent of the Watergate burglars, the little stones that start the avalanche that will finally bring down this nightmare Presidency.
But their names! Parnas, synagogue president or big-wig. Fruman, observant and holy. Names are definitely not destiny for those two. And the organization they run to launder money so that donors can take tax deductions: The Friends of Anatevka. Yes, the setting of Fiddler on the Roof.
Like the Velveteen Rabbit, it's becoming a real place. They did not found Friends of Anatevka, which was the creation of a politically connected Ukraine rabbi, Moshe Azman who broke away from Chabad. There is a legitimate need for the thousands of Jews caught in the wars of Eastern Ukraine. Reading the articles brought back memories of these towns, these vanished shtetls I learned of from my grandmother who fled them in 1906.
for more of the story, see this 2015 article: https://forward.com/culture/312338/ukrainian-jewish-refugees-can-now-escape-to-anatevka/
And Parnas and Fruman were honored by an Orthodox organization, Young Israel, who gave them an award last March and took them to Israel with a delegation of Trump-supporting Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians--strange bedfellows. https://www.jta.org/2019/10/11/united-states/orthodox-synagogue-association-honored-2-giuliani-associates-months-before-they-were-arrested
But their names! Parnas, synagogue president or big-wig. Fruman, observant and holy. Names are definitely not destiny for those two. And the organization they run to launder money so that donors can take tax deductions: The Friends of Anatevka. Yes, the setting of Fiddler on the Roof.
Like the Velveteen Rabbit, it's becoming a real place. They did not found Friends of Anatevka, which was the creation of a politically connected Ukraine rabbi, Moshe Azman who broke away from Chabad. There is a legitimate need for the thousands of Jews caught in the wars of Eastern Ukraine. Reading the articles brought back memories of these towns, these vanished shtetls I learned of from my grandmother who fled them in 1906.
for more of the story, see this 2015 article: https://forward.com/culture/312338/ukrainian-jewish-refugees-can-now-escape-to-anatevka/
And Parnas and Fruman were honored by an Orthodox organization, Young Israel, who gave them an award last March and took them to Israel with a delegation of Trump-supporting Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Christians--strange bedfellows. https://www.jta.org/2019/10/11/united-states/orthodox-synagogue-association-honored-2-giuliani-associates-months-before-they-were-arrested