Grateful to The Fellowship
The Fellowship | October 9, 2023
“We were all stunned when the crisis began. No one expected this to happen.” That’s what 89-year-old Moisey tells Fellowship volunteers who visit him with emergency supplies in his home in war-torn Ukraine. But for this Holocaust survivor, life has never gone as one would expect.
Born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Dnipro, Moisey knew from an early age that his family’s Jewish faith could only be honored covertly—celebrating Shabbat and Jewish holidays with secretly lit candles.
When WWII reached Ukraine, Moisey was seven. With his father sent to the front, the boy and his 10-year-old sister fled with their mother—a long journey in a cattle car, with little water but many other Jewish refugees trying to escape death at the hands of the Nazis.
At a train station in Kazakhstan, a kindly Gentile woman offered to take the small family into her home. Despite being only seven, and while attending school when possible, Moisey spent the war doing a man’s work, hauling coal.
When the family returned to their hometown after war’s end, they found their home had been destroyed. And even with the war over, Moisey remembers those years as a time of hardship and hunger—he even remembers one time being mugged for his bread coupon while on the way to the store for his mother.
After a long career as a truck driver, Moisey is now widowed, and all alone in a large and dilapidated Soviet-era apartment building. Now almost 90, he is homebound—and the only Jew remaining in the building of 140 units.
So, when Fellowship volunteers arrive, this precious Holocaust survivor not only appreciates the companionship they bring, but the emergency supplies—things so hard to come by for an elderly person in a warzone—are truly lifesaving.
“I’m grateful to The Fellowship from the bottom of my heart. If not for this support, I would not have been in the world for a long time.”