Meah Shearim native Rabbi Hillel Cohen is braving danger at the front lines and borders to rescue stranded Jews

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, AP Images, Personal archives

Artillery rumbled, drones flew overhead, and in the small towns west of besieged Kyiv, infantry fought at close range as an unusual ambulance set out for the front line a few days after Purim.

Inside was a Meah Shearim–born chassid in a Hatzalah jacket called Rabbi Hillel Cohen, along with Alexander Borisov, a businessman and Ukrainian army veteran turned volunteer driver.

As they left the roadblocks defending the capital behind them and headed into the thickly wooded countryside, the scenes they took in were apocalyptic.

Homes and supermarkets reduced to blackened hulks; the bridge at Irpin leveled; Hostomel Airport — scene of a savage battle between Russian paratroopers and Ukrainian forces — utterly destroyed.

But as the ambulance approached the town of Vorzel, which was still partially occupied by Russian forces, their tension mounted. In the house-to-house fighting there, the Russians had been pushed back a few streets. Burnt trucks and tanks were evidence of the slaughter that had taken place. Bodies lined the streets, and the living were desperate for water. Ukrainian soldiers, the pair knew, wouldn’t shoot, but the Russians targeted ambulances regularly.

Within 15 minutes, the job was done. The ambulance swooped in to load its precious cargo — a Jewish mother, daughter, and two grandchildren who were cowering in a basement — and raced out, hightailing it for Kyiv.

Even two weeks later, Hillel Cohen is shaken as he remembers that episode — and that’s saying a lot, because since the Ukraine war began, almost nothing has deterred this man in his quest to rescue the Jews of his adopted country.

For almost 25 years, Hillel has been a human tornado of Jewish activity in Ukraine. With no official rabbinic position, he’s married off couples, arranged more than 1,000 brissim for grown men, built mikvaos, and run a chassidic-inspired outreach program called “Baal Shem Tov’s Kinder.”

But this war has turned this father of eight and grandfather of two into something else.

“Partisan” is what people have started to call him.

In the span of a few weeks, he’s racked up almost 5,000 miles across the war zone, shuttling old people, babies, mothers and dual citizens out of the firing line, first in minivans and now by ambulance. The distance itself pales in comparison with the sheer chutzpah, resourcefulness, and fearlessness demanded by this epic journey.

“I call him Rav Rambo Cohen,” says ambulance driver Alexander Borisov. “There’s nothing he can’t do.”

Singing and dancing his way across Ukraine to endless iterations of Modeh Ani, and stopping to break the ice for predawn tevilah, Hillel Cohen has brought chassidic spirit to the holy business of saving Jews.