Moshe Reuven Azman

Azman's mother's family was Chabad, his father's Litvish. He is married to the daughter of Reb Zusya Hirsh Lyubarsky, a shochet from Kharkiv. Azman was active in the refusenik movement since his youth and received ordination as a shochet (ritual slaughterer) when he was 18. In 1982, the central communist newspaper Pravda, reporting on Jewish refusenik activities in Leningrad, referred to him as "An enemy of Soviet Power." Several years later, in 1987, he received permission from the Soviet government to leave the USSR and studied in Chabad yeshivas in Israel. He was appointed head of "Beit Chabad for Russian Jews" in Israel during the Russian aliyah of 1991, helping Russian-Jewish immigrants adjust to Israel life in Israel and reconnect to Judaism. Rabbi Azman was also charged with bringing Ukrainian-Jewish children of Chernobyl to Israel and overseeing their medical and psychological rehabilitation.

In 1995, Rabbi Azman returned to Kyiv and began a synagogue in one of the rooms of the grand Brodsky Choral Synagogue in the center of the city, which had been turned into a puppet theater during the Soviet period.There he worked to rebuild Kyiv's Jewish community, which grew until the Kyiv government granted the entire synagogue to the Jewish community. Rabbi Azman went on to found several communal soup kitchens, a chevra kadisha (burial service), 1 kindergarten, 1 school, an orphanage, and many other charitable and educational institutions throughout Ukraine. He also rehabilitated Kyiv's Jewish cemetery and has created a medical center where poor families receive free medical care by volunteer doctors. In 2001 Rabbi Azman was officially awarded with the Badge of Honor by the Mayor of Kyiv, and in 2009 was awarded the Order of Merit of by the Ukrainian government.

In October 2005, Rabbi Azman was elected as chief Rabbi of Ukraine by the delegates of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress and the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, both headed by wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish businessmen. His election caused considerable controversy in the Ukraine Chabad community,

Most Jewish people and the government of Ukraine still Consider the chief Rabbi of Ukraine to be Rabbi Yaakov Bleich.,.[1][2] A group of rabbis from the Chabad Federation of Jewish Communities, headed by government Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar of Russia, attacked the appointment describing it as "illegitimate" and "insulting to the feelings of every believer".[3] 150 secular Jewish leaders sympathetic to the Federation later protested the vote as well.[3] However, Azman has a large following in Kyiv and has spearheaded several non-partisan projects for the advancement of orthodox Judaism across the country.

Rabbi Azman served in the IDF starting 1990 and has been present to care for soldiers during every war in Israel since then. Since 2012 he serves as the Rav of an elite Gdud in the Israeli army reserves. He has been at the forefront of efforts to aid East-Ukrainian refugees in Kyiv and Ukraine and at the beginning of the war in Donbass in 2014 led efforts to evacuate wounded people to hospitals in Israel and the West of the country. He is the founder of the project to resettle homeless Jewish refugees, due to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, outside Kyiv in the village of Anatevka.[4][5]