This past week, The Fellowship visited Holocaust survivors living in the city of Carmiel in northern Israel. These elderly Jews are beneficiaries of our With Dignity and Fellowship program. They were treated to food boxes and sufganiyot (jelly donuts for Hanukkah) and lit candles with Fellowship staff. This week, we’re eager to share the story of 93-year-old Raisa and how The Fellowship helped provide hope for her just in time for the Festival of Lights.
Born in 1932, Raisa was just a girl when World War II started. One of her earliest memories is walking with her grandparents to synagogue in their hometown of Gomel in Belarus. When the war broke out, Raisa and her family were on the move for months. Her Yiddish-speaking mother had little food to feed her four children. Raisa remembers walking around town with a bucket, selling water. Every coin quite literally mattered.
When their home in Gomel was destroyed, the family moved to Donetsk, which Raisa remembers as “one of the hardest periods of my life. The hunger was terrible. My mother would bring home a loaf of bread and slice it into perfectly equal pieces for each child. We were not allowed to lose even a crumb. The crusts were precious. I went to sleep hungry every night, my stomach aching, wondering what tomorrow would bring. The fear of not having enough food stayed with me for years,” she said.
Growing up Jewish was also difficult. Because her family spoke Yiddish at home, Raisa didn’t know much Russian. This made school so difficult for her that she didn’t want to speak Yiddish anymore. She also recalls being fired from a role simply because she was Jewish. However, Raisa also remembers the small warm moments from her childhood, such as getting jam sandwiches from one of her friends’ grandmothers on the way to school.
In the early 1990s, Raisa made aliyah. Her husband passed before he could go with her. The war in Israel forced her to revisit the trauma of her childhood, but the jam from the sufganiyot tastes just as sweet as those sandwiches.
“The assistance I receive from The Fellowship gives me security. Thanks to the support of The Fellowship, I can go out and buy groceries calmly. Before, I often didn’t have enough to buy what I needed, and the old fear from Donetsk would return – the fear of being hungry. Now I feel safe when I go to the store. I know I can buy what I need. Now that I am old, I don’t fear hunger the way I did as a child. That fear lived inside me all my life, and this help has taken it away,” Raisa said.
