About an hour’s drive southwest of the Belarusian capital of Minsk sits Stolbtsy. A town of about 15,000 people, it is rich in Jewish history and is no stranger to warfare.
According to the Belarus Holocaust Memorials Project, the town dealt with both the anti-Jewish pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as massacres during the Holocaust a generation later.
Given this history of violence and bloodshed, one could assume that there would be an underswell of anti-war sentiment against the violence in Ukraine. But at least in one family, this is not the case.
Yuri Pavlov is a 33-year-old doctoral candidate at Syracuse University’s School of Education. A Jewish native of Stolbtsy, he is disheartened by both the repression of his country under Alexander Lukashenko as well as the propaganda war being waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pavlov says his family is deeply divided over the war in Ukraine. Both he and his brother are in support of the Ukrainian cause. Meanwhile, their father, who is from the Smolensk region in Russia, is on the other side. Pavlov says this makes conversations about the war hard to get through.
“He would kind of try to dismiss what I would say and then would try and switch the topic,” Pavlov said.
Pavlov says that his father, 61, gets his news exclusively from Russia’s Channel One, which is Russia’s state-sponsored news station. Since the war in Ukraine began, Channel One has been putting out Russian talking points and propaganda.
“My problem with Channel One is that it doesn’t show the atrocities, or it shows that the Ukrainians did it themselves like the Bucha case or in Mariupol,” Pavlov said.
Pavlov has been studying in the United States since 2015. He last visited Belarus in 2019, just before the coronavirus pandemic.
Although Belarus is not officially a participant in Russia’s war in Ukraine, the country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko remains a fervent ally of Vladimir Putin. Russia even launched part of their invasion of Ukraine from bases in the country.
Alan Chelnitsky, 28, says his extended family has a similar political divide. Chelnitsky works for a non-profit based out of LaFayette, N.Y., which is about a 15-minute drive south of Syracuse.
The North Caldwell, N.J. native has extended family in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg. He says that there is a gap with the younger generation against Putin and against the war while their parents support the Russian President.
“They [the older generation] are kind of brainwashed into, like, what Putin is doing is right. He’s justified in his actions,” Chelnitsky said.
Others are in the middle of the argument. Solomon Kaplan, 67, is a lawyer originally from Belarus and remembers life under Soviet rule. Kaplan is originally from a city northwest of Minsk called Maladzyechna. He emigrated to the United States from the then-U.S.S.R. in 1988, originally living in Baltimore before settling in Brooklyn in 1994.
“I was almost treated there [in the Soviet Union] as a traitor to the state,” Kaplan said.
When asked if he sees any parallels between his experiences with the conflict in Ukraine, he said he did not.
“I think the conflict that they’re having, it’s different. Different in nature,” Kaplan said.
He added that during his time in Belarus, he dealt with state-sponsored antisemitism. Now, he says that for Jews in Russia, the situation has changed dramatically. Many prominent Russian oligarchs are in fact Jewish, including Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club who was just sanctioned by the British government.
“You see now in Russia a lot of Jews having business, and they’re not experiencing the same persecution that I had when I left,” he said.
As for the conflict in Ukraine, Kaplan says that those fighting are not so different from each other. Russian is indeed spoken by a large chunk of Ukraine’s population.
“Back then, Russia and Ukraine were the same country,” Kaplan said. “There was no difference, the Russian people or the Ukrainian people. It’s like saying if you have the state of Texas deciding to be independent because they don’t like the federal policies.”
Despite this, Kaplan said he does not think that war with Ukraine is the right response.
“In no way [do] I support the military action. I don’t think the war is the answer to any problems,” he said.
Another important element of the conflict for Pavlov, Chelnitsky and Kaplan is the role of Israel. The Jewish state under former President Benjamin Netanyahu had close ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, visited Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, acting as a mediator between the two countries.
Many have argued that this closeness with Russia was for both political purposes as well as a common heritage. According to the Berman Jewish DataBank, in 2020 Russia was home to around 155,000 Jews.
Furthermore, the total who would be eligible for the Law of Return is around 600,000. These are people who have at least one Jewish grandparent. There are also many Jews in Israel who trace their heritage back to Russia.
According to that same Berman Jewish DataBank around 200,000 Ukrainians are eligible for the Law of Return, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Not taking a harsher stance, like, there’s only so much risk [Israel] can take. They already have so much animosity from around them,” Pavlov said.
“Putin, despite how crazy he is, is still very powerful. And I don’t think people want to mess with him,” Chelnitsky said.
“Israel is not in a position to break with Russia,” Kaplan said.
As far as geopolitics goes, many say that Russia’s increased role and influence in the Middle East leaves many in Israel loath to antagonize Putin. Unlike many countries in NATO and others in the West, Israel has yet to put official sanctions on Russia or on Putin.
As for Pavlov, while the argument remains, he says he has no interest in letting politics destroy his relationship with his father.
“I really don’t know how to reason it,” Pavlov said. “But see, he’s my dad and he’ll always be so.”