Ukraine’s 70,000-strong Jewish community, the world’s 11th-largest, is undergoing what members describe as its biggest upheaval since the Second World War. While most of the country’s Jews live in Kiev, up to a fifth reside (at least until recently) in the conflict-hit east. Convinced they would return home after the fighting ended, many now face the brutal reality of all-out war on Europe’s fringes. Some are resettling elsewhere in Ukraine, while others are immigrating to Israel (an act known as aliyah). The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) estimates that more Ukrainian Jews will make aliyah this year than in the last three years combined. Through September 1 of 2014, 3,252 Jews had relocated to Israel from Ukraine, compared with 1,982 in 2013, according to the IFCJ, which helps foot the bill for the move. In 2012, that number was 2,030. The IFCJ expects to spend some $2 million this year on securing plane tickets to Israel and predicts the number of immigrants could hit 7,000, Yechiel Eckstein, the organization’s founder, told me by telephone from Jerusalem. Under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jew in the world is entitled to Israeli citizenship.

The war in eastern Ukraine has displaced 1 million people, the United Nations reports. Moscow claims the vast majority—some 814,000—have gone to Russia, where they have family and friends. An additional 260,000 are displaced within their own country. The consequences of this displacement, António Guterres, the UN’s high commissioner for refugees, recently warned, “has the potential to destabilize the whole region.”

Jews in particular have a long and complicated history with Ukraine, having first arrived in the medieval state of Kievan Rus as traders. They were later pushed into the Pale of Settlement, a chunk of Imperial Russia that Catherine the Great carved out in 1791, and which encompassed most of present-day Ukraine. Despite repeated persecution in subsequent centuries, Jews generally prospered. They made up a third of Ukraine’s urban population before the Second World War and the Holocaust, when 900,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed.

Such history partly explains why the recent upheaval is so harrowing for Ukraine’s Jewish community, much of which was painstakingly revived in the 1990s after the fall of Communism. “After the Soviet Union broke up [in 1991], all that had been underground suddenly sprung upwards,” says Dmitry Spivakovsky, director of the Jewish humanitarian agency Chesed Dorot in Cherkassy, 120 miles southeast of Kiev. The central Ukrainian city sits on the right bank of the Dnieper River, separated from Kiev by a long stretch of black earth that has been plowed with acrid-smelling compost. “We had what you’d call a renaissance, and it came through the children, who were suddenly going to Jewish schools and learning about Jewish holidays and traditions,” says Spivakovsky, whose eyes light up when he boasts that he can trace his Jewish roots in Cherkassy back to the 1850s. Curiously, the cultural rebirth of the early 1990s coexisted with the mass exodus to Israel and the United States of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who were fleeing the poverty and chaos that followed the superpower’s breakup. In the words of Spivakovsky, “That’s why this war is a personal tragedy for everyone.” Hundreds of displaced Jews from eastern Ukraine have come through the Cherkassy region in recent months. The city’s Jewish school is setting up a boarding program for IDPs from the Luhansk region.