Rescue Mission Underway

The Fellowship  |  May 23, 2022

Earlier this month, we told you about Fellowship Freedom Flights from Ukraine that are helping bring elderly Jews – many of them Holocaust survivors – to Israel from their war-torn country. While our rescue flights continue, bringing “the least of these” to safety in the Holy Land, the holy work that you are helping us carry out is being noted in many places, including this piece by Business Insider’s Joshua Zitser:

An operation is underway in Moldova to rescue vulnerable Holocaust survivors from war-torn Ukraine.

Volunteers drive for hours, sometimes days, to evacuate Ukraine’s elderly Jewish population from Bucha, Kyiv, Mariupol, and Kharkiv — putting themselves in the line of fire and grave danger of bombardment by Putin’s forces.

“If you land in the wrong spot at the wrong time, it could really be really dangerous,” Mendel Abelsky of Moldova’s Chabad-Lubavitch community told Insider. “They are risking their lives going in…”

Holocaust survivor Tatiana Riabaya, 99, never expected that she would have to flee her home again after Hitler’s onslaught on the Soviet Union was defeated.

“Now, at my age, I’m running away from my city again,” she said in an interview conducted by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

“I did not believe that at my age, almost 100 years old, I would have to go through this again,” Riabaya added…