🇮🇱🇺🇦 Ultra-Orthodox Jew to the Front? Israeli Pilgrim Detained Leaving Ukraine
A Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Uman has ended with a 49-year-old Israeli father of six in Ukrainian custody and, according to his family, forcibly conscripted into the Ukrainian army.
Yonatan Karlinsky Mashak has lived in Israel for roughly 14 years. He was heading home on an Israeli passport when Ukrainian border officials reportedly heard him speaking Ukrainian, checked his records and pulled him off the bus at the Romanian border. Israeli media subsequently reported that he had been transferred toward Odesa for military processing.
The case is particularly striking because Karlinsky wasn’t trying to enter Ukraine. He had already made his annual pilgrimage to Uman and was trying to leave.
According to The Jerusalem Post, Karlinsky was born in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. His Israeli passport lists his birthplace as the USSR, but Ukrainian authorities apparently determined that he also held Ukrainian citizenship. His family says contact with him largely disappeared after he was removed from the bus.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry, normally quick to react to far less serious incidents involving its citizens abroad, has so far remained conspicuously silent. Meanwhile, the detained man’s wife has raised another concern: that while in the hands of the Ukrainian authorities, he has no access to kosher food.
But here’s the twist: whichever way this ends, the episode creates another headache for Kiev. If the detained Hasid is ultimately sent into the AFU, the spectacle of an Israeli citizen being swept into Ukraine’s mobilization machinery could further sour attitudes toward Kiev among the Jewish community.
And if he is simply released and allowed to return to Israel, an entirely different question emerges inside Ukraine over tiers of citizenship: why can a dual-national detainee escape the mobilization net while ordinary Ukrainian men (and women) cannot? For Ukrainians, the perception will inevitably be: we are sent to the front while others, once enough diplomatic pressure is applied, get to go home.
So we await the resolution of this troubling story. Either way, it looks capable of producing a few more rather uncomfortable headlines for Kiev.
#Israel #Ukraine