A view shows buildings damaged by recent shelling during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 8, 2022. REUTERS/Oleksandr Lapshyn

A Jewish woman was among the fatalities in Kharkiv on Tuesday as Russian forces intensified their heavy artillery and aerial attacks against the beleaguered city in the north-east of Ukraine.

News of the unnamed woman’s death was reported by Miriam Moskovitz, a Chabad emissary who spent the first six days of the war in Kharkiv before fleeing the city with her husband, Rabbi Mendel Moskovitz. The couple arrived in Israel on Tuesday shortly before they addressed an online briefing on the humanitarian situation facing Ukrainian Jews organized by the New York-based Orthodox Union (OU).

“The lady was killed when a rocket landed on her house,” Moskovitz explained. “We are working to arrange a funeral, but that’s not so simple.” According to Jewish law, a deceased person has to be buried within 24 hours of death.

Moskovitz said that the humanitarian emergency in Kharkiv — home to a Jewish community of 45,000 on the eve of the Russian invasion — was becoming more dire by the day. Jewish community volunteers had redoubled their efforts to deliver food and medical supplies to vulnerable members, she said. “There are elderly people living on the seventh and eighth floors of buildings where the elevator is broken, so the volunteers carry the supplies to them,” she said.

Moskovitz noted that “there were 1.5 million people in Kharkiv two weeks ago, 600,000 have already left. Our goal now is to save as many lives as possible. The situation is very, very bad, but the fact that people around the world care is very encouraging.”

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Jewish communities were facing a similarly bleak outlook as the Russian onslaught entered its 13th day.

In the city of Mariupol, where Russian forces have reneged on at least three agreements to give safe passage to fleeing residents, members of the Jewish community were “sitting in shelters with no food, no water, no medicine, no internet connectivity,” said Rabbi Mendel Kohen.

Now across the border in Moldova with refugees from his community, Kohen said that he had spent 17 years serving the Jews of Mariupol. “The Russians are playing a psychological war because they cannot take the city,” he said. “I see pictures of dead bodies in the streets and there are reports of people using snow to wash themselves. I get calls all the time from people asking, ‘where’s my mother, my father, my grandmother?’ And unfortunately, I don’t have that information.”

Kohen added that because the remaining Jews in Mariupol live in different parts of the city, organizing an evacuation in the midst of an unrelenting Russian attack was a daunting task.

Jews have also been leaving the southern port of Odessa, as reports of an imminent Russian attempt to seize the city have multiplied over the last week. Rabbi Raphael Kruskal of the Tikvah educational institute in Odessa told the briefing that he had arrived in Romania accompanied by 700 Jews, mainly children, who were now being housed in an entire hotel following an arduous journey. He said that by the weekend, he expected their numbers to swell to over 1,000.

“Tomorrow, we are flying out a doctor and a nurse from London,” Kruskal said. “We are also trying to bring our staff of psychologists out of Odessa, because they know the kids. The kids have been through a tremendous amount of trauma.”

Kruskal said that his main goal was to keep the community together and in contact despite their displacement from Odessa. “We have to try and rebuild what we built in 22 years, and what they (Russian forces) tried to break apart in a matter of hours,” he remarked.

In a conference call with US Jewish leaders on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, accused Russia of engaging in “pure Nazi behavior” during the invasion.

Addressing a packed British parliament on Tuesday via a video link, Zelensky repeated his demand for a no-fly zone to be imposed over Ukraine. Referencing one of the iconic speeches of former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the beginning of World War II, Zelensky pledged: “We will fight in the forests, in the fields, on the shores and in the streets. We will fight on the banks of our rivers.”