Yuval Rabin Returns to his Grandfather’s Village

Today, in the small village of Sidorovichi in Western Ukraine, not far from Chernobyl, history came full circle. Yuval Rabin, son of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, unveiled a sculptured stone bas-relief plaque in the village where his grandfather Nehemia Rubichov was born in 1886 and emigrated from in 1905. The memorial is situated at the entrance to the Rabin Cultural Center in the village and depicts Nehemia and his two children, Yitzhak and Rachel (who lives on Kibbutz Manara.)

Yuval Rabin said, “This event is very moving both for me and all the family. My grandfather would tell often tell us stories of his Ukrainian childhood and I am very grateful to Limmud FSU, Keren Haysod, the Jewish Agency and the Israel Cultural Center in Kiev who made possible this tangible tribute to the heritage of my father and grandfather.”

The event was held under the auspices of Limmud FSU, the educational project for Russian speakers. The two day event, which opens tomorrow in Vinnitsa, marks 70 years since the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German wehrmacht, in the infamous “Operation Barbarossa” in June 1941 and the beginning of the Holocaust on Ukrainian soil.

The ancestral home of the Rabin family had been traced a year ago by Chaim Chesler, Founder and Chair of Limmud FSU. Earlier in the day, the delegation, which included MK Alex Miller, Chair of the Knesset Education Committee and Yulia Dor, Director of the Israel Cultural Center visited the Center which had been inaugurated by Yitzhak Rabin just one month before his assassination in November, 1995.