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Photos by Erin Nelson.
Yakov Lyublinskiy, a personal trainer at the Levite Jewish Community Center, demonstrates an exercise for Barbara Gordon during a training session March 24.
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Yakov Lyublinskiy stands in front of the Levite Jewish Community Center.
Yakov Lyublinskiy, and his daughter, Angelica Lyublinskiy, are having trouble sleeping at night.
The Ukrainian-Americans are worried about their friends and family as they seek refuge, some hiding in basements, in their home country in the midst of an ongoing Russian invasion.
Some of their friends and family have been able to flee to Poland and Germany, Yakov said, but others, like his wife’s father, grandmother and cousins, are forced to stay in Ukraine.
“Victoria’s father has to stay because her grandmother had a stroke a couple of months ago and also has a broken hip so she can not be moved,” said Yakov, a Birmingham resident and personal trainer. Victoria is his wife and Angelica’s mother.
Yakov has been working as a trainer at the Levite Jewish Community Center in Mountain Brook since 2004, he said.
Since then, he has also become a massage therapist, physical therapist and martial arts instructor at The Country Club of Birmingham in Crestline and at Lakeview Fitness.
The situation in Ukraine is “just heartbreaking,” Angelica said.
“It’s heartbreaking to see my family so distraught and worried, especially my mom because it’s her sister that had to flee Kyiv,” she said. “There are countless nights where she doesn’t get any sleep, and because of that I don’t get any sleep. It’s just a constant worry.”
She said even though she’s lived in the U.S. most of her life, she still grew up in Ukrainian culture and feels connected to it.
“It really hits home seeing my people being basically slaughtered, and I feel hopeless,” Angelica said. “I feel like I’m not doing enough, and I just want to do more, and it’s a very hopeless feeling.”
Their family created a GoFundMe campaign to help Victoria’s sister, Julia, flee Ukraine with her two sons, Yakov said.
She was separated from them when fleeing Ukraine but was reunited with them when they all reached Germany, he said.
“The thing that’s bothering me about this situation is uncertainty,” Yakov said. “We don’t know what the fate of Ukraine is going to be, what the fate of millions of people will be or the fate of refugees. Are they going to live indefinitely in refugee camps, are they going to be able to come back? When will the conflict be over?”
Yakov and Angelica said they are seeing their country’s history repeating itself.
Ukraine is no stranger to struggling for independence and its own identity. In the mid-1800s, for instance, after the majority of Ukrainian territory was under Russian rule, the Russian government interrupted the distribution of Ukrainian literature and made it illegal to speak Ukrainian, with citizens being shot if they were caught speaking the language.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis, and if we don’t do anything about it, history’s just going to repeat itself,” said Angelica, a Ukrainian-American studio manager and junior producer in Birmingham. “The whole point of learning history is to not make the same mistakes, and I think the more we talk about it and raise awareness, the more people will actually want to do something.”
The father and daughter have been raising awareness and money toward the conflict. Yakov has been featured on multiple media outlets to talk about his feelings on the war and has donated to several humanitarian groups.
Angelica hosted an art show at Dave’s Pub, a bar in Birmingham, to raise money for people in Ukraine on March 13, she said.
“Basically, I called upon artists of Birmingham to see if anybody would be willing to donate their artwork to benefit Ukraine, and I actually got an overwhelming amount of responses,” she said. “I got a lot of artists involved, they donated their art, and I donated mine.”
She said the show raised more than $600.
It’s important to talk about the current crisis, she said, to fight misinformation so people have the correct facts and to inspire them to help instead of not getting involved.
“That’s how evil prevails: by not doing anything,” Angelica said.
Yakov worries about the future of both Ukraine and Russia. He grew up with a love for Russian movies, music, literature and culture, he said.
Because Russia and Ukraine are so close, he said, and Russians and Ukrainians have friends and family in both countries.
“They probably have family and friends in Ukraine or their parents might have family and friends in Ukraine,” Yakov said. “It’s incomprehensible.”
He said Russian President Vladimir Putin is destroying people’s love of Russia “indefinitely.” Yakov said Putin is committing crimes against Ukraine and his own people.
“Putin is sending those kids to die for what?” Yakov said. “There is no winning for him in this conflict. Even if he were to take all of Ukraine tomorrow, it would take just over a million soldiers and only in the big city centers to control the city centers.”
He said there is no positive outcome for Russia in the war, which is what worries him.
“There is no winning end for Putin and Russia in this conflict, but he can make sure that everybody loses,” Yakov said. “He can use tactical chemical and nuclear weapons. Russia could be a pariah indefinitely.”
Yakov said he was born and raised in a small town called Podilskyi in western Ukraine. He said it wasn’t easy for him being raised in the Soviet Union, now Ukraine, experiencing a lot of anti-Semitism as well as quality products such as clothes and shoes being in short supply.
“For a good pair of American jeans, you might have to save six to eight months,” Yakov said.
He came to the U.S. when he was 27 years old with his mother and other relatives to escape anti-Semitism, he said. He just started dating Victoria, and they had to decide what their next steps were going to be.
“We had just started dating,” Yakov said. “She was 18, I was 26, and I knew I was going to be leaving, and we had to decide what we were going to do.”
He was told they would have to get married, and Victoria would have to apply for citizenship in order for her to be able to live with him in America, he said. They got married after three months of dating and lived together for 10 months before Yakov immigrated to the U.S. with his family.
When Yakov was about to move with his family, Victoria had been pregnant with their first child, Angelica, he said, leaving for America right before she was born in 1997. It would be two years before he saw his wife and child, he said.
