I decided to take the kids on a trip to cheer them up. A volunteer from Romania drove us to a local mall in Slovakia. These Ukrainian children will be starting school in Slovakia soon, and I wanted them to feel a little bit normal and excited by new clothes, backpacks and school supplies. I…
Oksana Naumchuk was supposed to host friends visiting from Poland in her Kyiv apartment this May. All she had to do before then: Finish renovating her kitchen. Now, Naumchuk doesn’t know when she’ll return to Ukraine. “I hate this word ‘refugee,’” she said. “But this is how it is.” Naumchuk, 26, is one of an…
IRSHAVA, Ukraine (JTA) — Like dozens of displaced persons camps that now dot Eastern Europe, the one in this Ukrainian town near the Hungarian border has inhabitants whose lives were turned upside down by Russia’s war. But the refugee camp at Irshava is different. For one thing, it’s equipped with a kosher kitchen and accommodates…
Barbara Cook was watching the horror in Ukraine unfold on TV and feeling helpless when she stood up, turned off the television, and started packing her bags. Fifty-six bags, to be precise. Cook, an entrepreneur who lives in the East Bay and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, started gathered donations of clothing, toiletries and suitcases…
Two years ago, Avi Schiffmann made headlines as the high schooler from Seattle who built one of the world’s first and largest COVID-19 tracking systems. Now a Harvard University freshman, he’s taking a semester off to apply his technical skills to another urgent cause: finding housing for Ukrainian refugees. The 19-year-old created Ukraine Take Shelter,…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently made an urgent plea to global leaders: “If you don’t help us now, if you fail to offer a powerful assistance to Ukraine, tomorrow the war will knock on your door.” The war is already knocking. Ukrainians — especially women and children — are fleeing their cities, enduring unimaginable risks….
Every year for Hanukkah, my mother would gift me a book about the Holocaust. Every vacation we took, even within the continental United States, my mother insisted we carry our US passports, just in case we needed to flee at a moment’s notice. Those books and passports served as reminders of my Jewish ancestry —…
This has been a tough week for all of us at HIAS, but it has been so much worse for the people of Afghanistan. My mind is occupied by the family members of the Afghans and the Americans who were killed at Karzai Airport today, and for the many people of Afghanistan whose lives are…
די ווילנער דאָקטוירים יעקבֿ וויגאָדסקי און צמח שאַבאַד זענען אויך געווען געזעלשאַפֿטלעכע טוער.
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