From Chaos to Cooperation

The Fellowship  |  March 23, 2022

As so many refugees continue to flee the war in Ukraine — leaving their entire lives behind — it is apparent that no one could have prepared for the ongoing havoc being wrought there. But, as The Times of Israel’s Sue Surkes reports, The Fellowship and our partners on the ground have been uniquely positioned to aid the dizzying number of refugees:

Anna left her village in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine, near the Black Sea, on March 6, with her children Vadik, 6, and Dasha, 3, her mother Nadejda, and her younger sister Vika, aged 13…

With a grandmother, aunts, cousins, and a sister already in Israel, Anna and her mother will most likely be found eligible to immigrate.

This reporter met the family at the head of a long queue at the Israeli Consulate in Chisinau as they waited to present their papers. They had been on the road for 11 days and looked tired out…

Alla Bolboceanu, the JDC–Joint Jewish Distribution Committee’s Moldova representative, said, “We are not experts in crisis management, but we’ve become experts in three weeks.”

A dizzying number of organizations are involved in rescuing Jews — and many non-Jews who hitch a lift on the buses — out of Ukraine, with each running its own hotline, among them the Jewish Agency, the JDC, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), the local Jewish community, and Chabad.

Some of the cases are particularly challenging…