Matityahu Samborskyi’s body was recovered several months after he was presumed killed in the strike.
The funeral ceremony was attended by hundreds of people, both Jews and non-Jews, as well as Israeli ambassador Michael Brodsky, the Times of Israel reported.
Samborskyi’s father, Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, presided over the funeral himself.
Azman was appointed Chief Rabbi of Ukraine in 2005 by the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, although there are competing claimants to the title.
His son, born Anton Samborskyi, was adopted by the Azman family in 2002, at the age of 11, out of a Jewish orphanage.
He was drafted a week after his first and only daughter was born in May. After a rapid training course, he was sent to the front. Azman said that the last time he was in contact with his son was on July 17.
Samborskyi’s unit was struck by a missile with no chance of anyone surviving. His body was identified by his wife on Wednesday.
At the Thursday funeral ceremony, Rabbi Azman stressed that Ukrainian Jews do not shirk away from doing their duty in defense of their homeland.
“The best of our sons are at the front against the Russian occupier in order to defend the homeland. Matityahu went to the front, fought bravely for Ukraine, for justice, and for peace, and fell a hero,” he said.
According to the Chabad-Lubavitch-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, the organization has helped bury 47 Jewish Ukrainian soldiers, although it estimates the number of Jewish Ukrainians who lost their lives in the conflict to be at least five times higher.
Russian propaganda has repeatedly tried to present Ukraine as ruled by “neo-Nazis,” in spite of the fact that the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is himself Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust.
Historians have dismissed the accusations used by the Kremlin as disinformation aimed at delegitimizing the democratically elected and Western-backed government.
