At dawn on a recent Saturday, a 56-year-old soldier finished his shift coordinating operations against Russian forces and walked through the empty streets of Ukraine’s strategic port city of Odesa to morning prayers at Beit Menachem synagogue.

By 10 a.m., dressed in religious clothes, his tallit, a prayer shawl, draped over his shoulders, he was reciting Hebrew psalms in a building reborn after nearly a century of persecution.

Fellow soldiers had seen him, but didn’t recognize the man in the prayer shawl as the same person who had fought beside them. “They saw two different characters,” he said with a bemused smile.

For centuries, Jews in Odesa navigated their place on the edge of empires — Russian, Soviet, even Zionist. Today, they are in the center of something new: a fight for a Ukra

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