For Swerdlov, Chernobyl Didn’t End

by Sara Miriam Gross – Mishpacha Magazine

April 26, 1986, was meant to be a test demonstrating the safe operation of a Soviet nuclear power plant during a mock electricity outage. Faulty design and human error turned a routine test into a full-fledged nuclear catastrophe 100 times more devastating than the atom bomb detonated at Hiroshima. Twenty-five years later, its surviving victims, including thousands of Jewish Ukrainians, are still suffering. And children born after the disaster will be feeling the devastating effects well into the next century.

Anya hoards chicken schnitzel in her sock drawer, next to three apples and some rolls. She took doubles at lunch today. What if no food is served tomorrow? Not much time has passed since her evacuation on a rescue flight from her irradiated former hometown in the Ukraine. Life as a ward of the State of Israel is new to her, Judaism unfamiliar, but hunger pangs are very familiar.

Hebrew letters tease Misha as they dance tauntingly across the pages of his school books. He misses many classes because of his congenital heart condition and he has learning disabilities to boot.

Katya is in the hospital. Radiation-induced stomach pains have left her so weak she can barely stand. Her dorm mother stays at her bedside and spoon-feeds her like her real mother, who has long since left this world.

Anya, Misha, and Katya are still paying the price for what was the worst nuclear power plant disaster on the face of the earth — at least until all of the damages are totaled from this year’s near-meltdown of Japan’s Fukishima Daiichi plant. They weren’t even born yet at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, when an explosion released large quantities of radioactive contamination over much of the western Soviet Union and Europe. But although twenty-five years have passed, babies born now in the contaminated region face at least as great a risk of radiation-related illnesses as the children who lived there when the reactor exploded.

And, according to a UN study, the worst health effects are yet to come, and radiation levels will remain high until the middle of the century — some experts say it will be another 200 years.

“A survivor who was an adult then?” says Rabbi Yossi Swerdlov, as he tries to think of interview subjects who can recount the events of those fateful days.

“The average lifespan of the adults was only forty-six or forty-seven, and it’s already twenty-five years since it happened. There aren’t many adults left, but we are still taking the kids out of there.”

Rabbi Swerdlov is the Israel director of Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl (CCOC). He has maintained a respectful silence about the plight of Chernobyl’s Jewish victims, despite the plethora of general books and articles that have been written about the Chernobyl disaster. His reticence, until now, should come as no surprise.

“Back in 1986 the Soviet government was giving misinformation and people were outright dying,” says Rabbi Swerdlov. “The people living in the area realized [what was happening] because they saw funerals taking place every day, but the government denied the connection. The Jewish community made a request for help that ultimately came to the attention of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He immediately sent out a tzetel [note] saying: ‘If we don’t take responsibility for these children, who will?'”

What Went Wrong? The ninety-third CCOC rescue airlift since the 1986 meltdown arrived in Eretz Yisrael just last week. Eventually some of the parents remaining in the Ukraine come to Israel to join their children; in the meantime, a second generation of victims remains in the Ukraine drinking the milk of radioactive cows and eating tainted produce.

How did what was intended as a routine test go so awry?

Nowadays, even some household computers have surge protectors and back-up power supplies to facilitate safe, gradual shutdowns when there are electric storms. In the event of an electricity outage, nuclear power plants are also meant to be able to run for a short time until power returns, or to enable a safe shutdown.

Although there are few who lived to tell the full story of the Chernobyl reactor, it appears that an unauthorized emergency shutdown (fittingly dubbed a SCRAM) was conducted in order to assess the plant’s safety status and improve it as necessary. They never had the chance to finish the test.

As the plant was slowly brought to a standstill, the cooling systems essential for keeping reactor temperatures stable stopped too soon. Since the roofs of Chernobyl’s reactor buildings and turbine halls had been constructed — against safety regulations — from combustible bitumen, when reactor number four exploded, hot particle clouds of nuclear fuel containing cesium-137, iodine-131, strontium-90, and other radionuclides spread across Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Norway, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, and Moldova. Some thirty people died immediately from the accident.

In those years, Chernobyl was under the jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. The ruling Communists were more concerned with saving face than saving lives; their international reputation for being technologically advanced was on the line.

Firefighters and clean-up workers (called “liquidators”) came in by the thousands, but the wider world did not know what had happened until workers at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden, 1,000 miles away, found radioactive particles on their clothing. The Swedish workers tested their own plant and found everything in order. By April 29, three days after the accident, the Swedes had managed to trace the particles back to the sender: Chernobyl.

The number of people injured or killed by the the accident is still a matter of controversy. A 2005 report issued by the Chernobyl Forum, a group comprised of nine UN organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), claims that sixty-four people died and 6,000 people came down with thyroid cancer, most of whom were successfully treated.

A 2006 Greenpeace report uses a mathematical model to forecast that by the year 2056, some 93,000 people will have died from the effects and another 270,000 people will have come down with serious radiation illnesses. The Chernobyl Forum discounts the Greenpeace report because it was not “peer reviewed” as theirs was. Keeping in mind, however, that since 1959 WHO and IAEA have had a secrecy agreement in place that allows them to withhold information for the sake of the greater good of society, the value of “peer review” can also be called into question.

Second-Generation Victims Chernobyl’s radioactive wasteland is located in an area called the Pale of Settlement, a vast region covering between 386,000 and 472,000 square miles, to which Czarina Catherine the Great forced Jews to move during the late 1700s. The 1897 Russian census recorded nearly five million Jews as residents, earning the Pale (meaning “borders” or “district”) the status of world’s largest Jewish ghetto, both geographically and demographically.

There were still half a million Jews left in the Pale when the Chernobyl reactor blew up in 1986, and there are still impoverished and irradiated Jews living there now.

The first airlift of 196 children was organized a generation ago, although it wasn’t simple. The Russian government made several attempts to foil the plans, including canceling the children’s exit visas once they reached the airport. “The Russians underestimated the determination of the chassidim, who camped out in the airport for three days,” says Rabbi Swerdlov. Rabbi Yosef Raichik z”l, who was known as the father of the Chernobyl children’s project, used his connections around the globe to apply pressure. “In the end, a wealthy English Jew named Robert Maxwell sent his own private jet, and the children were brought to Eretz Yisrael.”

At the same time, the rosh yeshivah of Yeshivas HaNegev in Netivot, Rav Yissachar Meir ztz”l, sent emissaries — Russian olim who had graduated Yeshivas Dvar Yerushalayim — to the area to bring a group of orphaned children to a special dorm set up to absorb them.

With the shortened life expectancy of those in the immediate vicinity of the disaster, not many survivors remain to recount the details twenty-five years later. Vladimir, part of the “liquidators” crew, moved to Israel ten years ago from a village outside Kiev. He was called in to help detoxify the area less than two hours after the explosion. As a result, today he is considered 100 percent disabled.

“All the firefighters and those who tried to control the damage died from the radiation and the fumes,” says Vladimir. “I saw bodies all around me.” Fifty-two rescue workers perished within hours.

“In one hour, a liquidator could absorb a fatal amount of radiation,” says Alexander Klantirsky, head of the Chernobyl liquidators society in Israel. “I was on the reactor’s construction team,” he remembers. “After the explosion, we were called in to ‘volunteer’ to control some of the damage. To this day, those of us who survived still suffer from the radiation damage.”

Today Yaakov Tashunian lives in Netivot. Then, he was a Russian soldier from Minsk, called into the area a month after the meltdown to help evacuate the population. “We were told to evacuate anyone within just seventy kilometers of the reactor,” he says. “So everyone outside that radius stayed in the area and has paid the price for the last generation.

“After the meltdown, the government advertised for workers to clean up the nuclear waste. They were paying five times the market wages. I had a friend from Minsk who’d just bought a new house and desperately needed funds. He worked around the reactor for six months, but never got to benefit from the money. Within a year he was dead.”

While the world reported on the disaster, Soviet villagers in the area were unaware of the danger they faced. Only after the evacuations began did people begin to panic.

“There was this frenzy; no one knew what to do,” remembers Rita, a music teacher who lived in the town of Gomel, 130 kilometers from Chernobyl. “We also knew that we knew nothing about the danger we were in. So we all started passing around iodine pills. We were told it would protect us against the radiation. Then they took the young men for all sorts of rescue and cleanup operations. The ones who were sent to work in the vicinity of the reactor never came back. My husband was fortunate — he was sent to destroy crops in areas farther away.”

At the time, Rita’s son was a year old. “I don’t remember one healthy day with him after the disaster,” she says. For four years, the family didn’t eat fresh produce or dairy products. They lived on canned goods whose production predated the disaster. When the family arrived in Israel in 1991, the children didn’t even remember what milk was like. But, says Rita, the biggest miracle was apparent with her son — after years when there wasn’t a day he was ill, within a week of his arrival, he became a healthy child.

Japan and Chernobyl For comparison purposes, as devastating as Japan’s tsunami and the ensuing Fukishima Daiichi nuclear accident were, at press time the amount of radiation released in Japan was only one-tenth of that released in Chernobyl. No one can say what is yet to come, but reading the daily updates from Japan, via the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, brings a sense of déjà vu. Contaminated water, food supplies, hope, and then distress. In an attempt to deal with the worst problems, the Tokyo Electric Power Company even dumped 11,500 tons of water with low-level radioactivity into the sea in order to save space to treat the more contaminated water.

With all the negative publicity that Japan has received, one might think the Ukraine would want to lay low and benefit from the world’s deflected attention. Yet the Ukrainian government plans to begin offering educational tours of the ruined reactor, even though the hastily constructed, concrete sarcophagus that is meant to contain the melted fuel is cracked. The promised reinforcement shell has not yet materialized, and more contamination seeps out with every rainstorm. There’s a debate among experts as to whether visitors can even tour the area and escape harm. Despite the uncertainty, residents are still living in the general contamination zone, which according to less-than-reliable Russian government estimates is 1,000 square miles, and which outside experts place at anywhere from 35,000 to 77,220 square miles.

There is a nineteen-mile exclusion zone around the plant, but that does not mean is safe to live at mile twenty. According to physicist Dr. Kelly Classic of the American Health Physics Society (HPS), based on the rate of natural decay for cesium-137, it may take between 300 and 600 years for the radiation to abate and the land to become livable again.
New Lease on Life As the years go by and the radiation poisoning continues to take its toll, approximately half of the Jewish children who were living near Chernobyl at the time of the accident are now orphans.

The plight of orphans has reached crisis proportions in the Ukraine. Most of the area’s estimated 100,000 orphans had previously been abandoned by parents suffering from various health and socio-economic problems. The Ukraine has what is referred to as a “child barter market,” which potentially exposes children to a corrupt adoption system.

Jewish adoption in the Ukraine is nonexistent. While one can imagine a caring parent handing over a child to a Jewish organization such as the CCOC in order to save his life, how do orphans with no one to look out for them find the organization? After over seventy years of Communism, how do these children even know that they’re Jewish?

Rabbi Swerdlov pauses before answering. “We have a whole network of people involved, and not everything we do can we speak about, but a lot of what we do over there is trying to identify Jewish children in orphanages.”

Jay Litvin z”l, who served as Chabad’s Chernobyl medical liaison, made numerous trips to the affected area’s orphanages. He reported that many children did indeed have parents, but were abandoned due to radiation-induced deformities — missing limbs, contorted features. Litvin, a prolific magazine writer, passed away from cancer in 2004, and he admitted that doctors told him he had been exposed to elevated doses of radiation because of his many Chernobyl missions.

“Many of the children come with psychological and emotional baggage. Some suffered abuse or extreme poverty and malnutrition,” Rabbi Swerdlov continues. “Some even hoard food, but eventually they stop when they realize that they have everything they need. Schooling, tutoring, expert medical and dental care, psychological help, abundant nourishing food, and lots of love and attention. ”

“We’ve made four weddings this year,” Esti Herman, the director of CCOC’s New York office shares proudly.

But is there an ongoing stigma? Do the children need to marry other Chernobylites?

“Actually, most of them marry people from backgrounds that are different from their own,” Rabbi Swerdlov replies.

How is their general health? “Outwardly they look okay,” Mrs. Herman acknowledges. “Some have stomach pains or learning disabilities, and others have a syndrome known as ‘Chernobyl heart.’ It’s a hole in the heart, but not not a regular hole as we know it; it’s a birth defect that developed as a result of their mothers’ exposure to radiation during pregnancy. We’re worried when we get dental X-rays and we ask them to place lead plates on us. But can you imagine what these people are exposed to — daily?”

A study conducted by Israel’s Selikoff Center for Environmental Health and Human Development found prevalence of thyroid, liver, and other diseases. Furthermore, the study showed that today’s Chernobyl-area children face a risk as high as that of the youngsters at the time of the disaster, because their rapidly developing cells are especially vulnerable to radiation.

Pavel, a boy of thirteen who looks only nine, was reunited with his uncle as a result of CCOC’s ninety-third rescue mission. Pavel came to Israel a year and a half ago after his father passed away and his mother became physically and mentally ill (doctors have attributed both of their conditions to Chernobyl-related diseases). Pavel himself has been diagnosed with “Chernobyl heart” and suffers psychologically from his size and illnesses. Over the past year and a half, CCOC has provided the critical medical care and attention that Pavel needs, but open-heart surgery cannot be avoided at this time. CCOC’s team of psychologists recommended that Pavel’s uncle — his only relative able to be with him — come to spend time with him, and CCOC reunited the two family members by flying in Pavel’s uncle for a few weeks on the recent flight.

It’s already been years. Will the Chernobyl disaster ever end, at least for CCOC?

“I don’t think we will run out of Jews to rescue anytime soon,” Rabbi Swerdlov reckons. “Hopefully Mashiach will come and we’ll be done, but as long as the kids are there, we’ll be there.”