“And when the people saw him, they praised their god: for they said, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.” – Judges 16:24
There’s one figure, one star, one man who had some dazzling moments, brilliant opportunities, once-in-a-lift-time, Churchillian occasions in the last two weeks since fighting Vladimir Putin to a standstill in his war against Ukraine.
It’s, without a doubt, Volodymyr Zelensky.
He’s probably the most popular president since Donald Trump and would win reelection by 90% or more in Ukraine, if Russia doesn’t get to rig it, instead of the impressive 72% of the votes he got in 2019. Of course, Zelensky could be dead tomorrow – or the day after.
He’s got one more thing going for him – he’s Jewish. He’s one of the chosen, the few, the selected, proud – you know, one of Abraham’s children.
One of his great quotes, addressed to Putin, was: “No bunker can protect you from God.”
Zelensky told the Russian tyrant that Thursday after Russian forces targeted the Cathedral of the Assumption in its assault on Kharkiv, according to Ukrayinska Pravda.
“It is a holy place,” Zelensky said. “Now, wrecked by the war. Even this does not deter them! They count on the fact that God’s retribution isn’t instant. But He sees. And answers. You cannot hide from His answers. No bunker can protect you from God’s answers.”
President Zelensky is the real deal for this moment, a charismatic wordsmith when too many are trying NOT to tell it like it is. He’s got courage with a capital C.
Zelensky escaped assassination three times last week – all foiled by “antiwar elements within Russia’s Federal Security Service” who gave intel about the plans to Ukrainian officials, says the president.
Zelensky is becoming a modern-day folk hero, a rock star and a guy at the right place at the right time – providing hope for his 40 million Ukrainian people – not to mention the whole world.
The U.S. had offered to evacuate the Ukrainian president but it was flatly declined, with Zelensky saying that he needed “ammunition, not a ride,” multiple sources reported, affirming that his fight “is here.”
He’s funny, quotable, young and a Hebrew warrior – just what we needed for a time such as this.
On Friday, he said this: “The invaders, they could turn off our television to Ukrainians, our connection. They thought they could take away products, shut off the electricity. They thought it would force Ukrainians to submit. But even if you deprive of us oxygen, we will breathe deeply to say, ‘Get off our land.'”
He had an “ordinary Soviet Jewish upbringing.” Zelensky told The Times of Israel in early 2020, on the eve of visiting Israel to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that his family was typical of Soviet Jews in the 1980s when he was growing up. That meant, he said, that they were not religious, because “religion didn’t exist in the Soviet state as such.”
Indeed, Jewish observance was illegal, and Jews were routinely spied upon, although many did preserve some elements of their Jewish identity as acts of resistance. If that was the case in Zelensky’s family, he hasn’t said so.
“I never speak about religion, and I never speak about God because I have my own personal opinion about it,” he said in the interview. “Of course, I believe in God. But I speak with him only in those moments which are personal for me.”
As with most Ukrainian Jews, the Holocaust is part of his story. Zelensky has said that his great-grandfather and three of his grandfather’s brothers died as a result of the Nazi invasion of Ukrainian territory. His grandfather and his grandfather’s brothers took up arms against the Nazis in the Red Army. His grandfather was the only one to survive. He did not specify whether they died in combat or in the extended massacre of more than 1 million Ukrainian Jews that the Nazis carried out, often with local collaboration. His grandmother survived because she left Kryvyi Rih for Kazakhstan. Almost all of the Jews who remained were murdered. A Holocaust memorial not far from his parents’ home in Kryvyi Rih was defaced in January 2020.
Where did Zelensky get his moral compass? He credits his Jewish parents. Zelensky’s father, Oleksander, is a mathematician who heads a university computer science department; his mother, Rimma, was an engineer for many years. He said in a 2018 interview, shortly before officially running for president, that because of them, he is unable to accept lies.
“I always react painfully to lies,” he said. “This is the main feature that my parents gave me.”
He has many personal ties to Israel. Zelensky has said he has relatives who moved to Israel in the 1990s, during the wave of Jewish emigration from the newly dissolved Soviet Union. He has also conducted business there as an actor and comedian and performed in venues throughout the country. As Ukrainian president, he has visited just once, for the Holocaust commemoration shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
“I know Israel,” he said in The Times of Israel interview. “I know people there.”
He’s a family man, married for nearly 20 years, he’s the father of two children. Zelensky dated his wife, Olena, for eight years before they married in September 2003. Their daughter, Oleksandra, was born the following year, and they had a son, Kyrylo, in 2013.
Zelensky got a scholarship to study in Israel but didn’t go. He studied law in Ukraine instead.
He became an acting star on the political satire TV show “Servant of the People,” playing a history teacher so outraged by government corruption that he runs for president — and stuns the country and himself by winning. The show aired on Ukrainian television from 2015 to 2019, its final episode launching just weeks before Zelensky was himself elected president.
“I’m such a guy that if I get involved in a battle, I usually don’t get out of it. I can lose, but go out in the middle of it … no,” he said. “The white flag is not our flag!”
“I’ve always thought he is a person who has a profound sense of right and wrong,” said a senior adviser to Zelensky. “He will never acquiesce when he thinks something is wrong.” When asked by the reporter for a Washington Post whether he believed Zelensky was prepared to die. “The adviser answered without hesitation: ‘Yes.'”
Now Israel may take a hand in negotiating with Russia – or Gog and Magog.
Zelensky is one for the history books – or maybe the Bible.
Don’t count him out! A sterling resume – just 44 years old. A game-changer – like David, Joshua, Joseph, Gideon, Samson, Nehemiah. It all depends whether you bet on Putin of the Ukrainian kid.
God bless him – a true super-hero overnight … and from the lost house of Israel!
Pray for him. Pray for his wife – his children. Pray for Ukraine.
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