A Feeling of Warmth
The Fellowship | January 30, 2023
“I am going to tell you my story, and perhaps some parts of it sound like a complaint. However, I am not complaining.” This is what Avraham, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, recently told a Fellowship volunteer who visited him with food and winter items as the cold months set in.
Avraham’s story began when he was born a Jewish child in the middle of the former Soviet Union (FSU)—during the Holocaust. His older brother was killed, and their mother—disabled, and unable to walk or take care of her family—could not provide for her remaining son. The two were forced to eat grass that Avraham picked from the empty fields.
Avraham survived, but his mother did not. And Avraham survived the hard life that lay ahead of him in the Soviet Union, where he struggled to feed his own family while working as a street sweeper. Ninety years old and widowed, Avraham now faces the same fear he faced as a child—the fear of surviving.
“I am scared mostly at night,” the sweet elderly man admits. “If I die in the middle of the night, how much time will pass until somebody finds me?”
But Fellowship friends around the world are easing Avraham’s fears—and warming his heart and body—with gifts of food, winter necessities, and companionship, giving him a “feeling of warmth, of home, and of people who care.”
Your blessing will provide warmth and care for elderly Jews and Holocaust survivors like Avraham.