Posted on 07/17/25
| News Source: Chabad.org
The director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Kherson, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Wolff, and his wife and daughter were confirmed to have survived and been left unharmed after a Russian suicide drone struck their vehicle on Thursday, Chabad announced.
Rabbi Wolff, his wife Chaya and their 19-year-old daughter were traveling to Kherson in southern Ukraine and were only a kilometer and a half from the checkpoint when the suicide drone hit their car.
The pair have called Kherson home since they set up a Chabad house in the southern Ukrainian town in 1993.
“I just saw it, for an instant, and then a few seconds later there was a crazy explosion,” Rabbi Wolff told Chabad.org. “You can see a picture of the car. It’s a miracle that we’re alive and well. You can’t call it anything else—a miracle.”
Of course I’ve heard these drones in the air before, but not like this—attacking you directly,” he said.
The front of the family’s Toyota Land Cruiser was completely destroyed, according to Chabad, though the family were unharmed by the attack.
A car which had driven ahead of the family returned to collect Chaya and her daughter to the city while a member of the Jewish community later traveled to collect Rabbi Wolff.
“The Talmud says ‘messengers of a mitzvah are not harmed.’ We were driving to Kherson to be with our community—a mitzvah—so we were, thank G‑d, unharmed. All I can say is do something good for another person, and leave the rest to G‑d,” the rabbi affirmed.
While the Wolff family survived the attack, Russian drones claimed the lives of two people in the region on Monday, regional governor Oleksander Prokudin said.
Prokudin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said a woman was killed in the region's main town, also known as Kherson, and a man died in an area north of the city along the Dnipro River, according to Reuters.
Russian forces remain in control of larges swathes of Kherson region despite a Ukrainian counter-offensive in late 2022 that recaptured the city of Kherson and other areas.