Love for a Loving Couple

The Fellowship  |  June 21, 2022

Isaak and Anna live in the town of Nahariya, Israel’s northernmost town on the Mediterranean coast. You might think the elderly couple live an idyllic seaside retirement, but you would be wrong.

The furniture in their home dates from long before the two made aliyah (immigrated to Israel) from the Soviet Union nearly thirty years ago — it was threadbare and secondhand then, and is barely holding together all these decades later. The clothes on their backs are just as threadbare.

Isaak and Anna are spending their golden years far below the poverty line, a fact that is hard to understand, considering Isaak’s career heights long ago. A chemical engineer, he worked on important strategic projects for the USSR, including aerospace fuel and power plants. Even now, the retired engineer could spend hours talking proudly about his patents and his hard work, but that does little to clothe or feed him or his wife.

Making aliyah when the Iron Curtain at last fell, Isaak and Anna had no pension to rely on — not from the fallen Soviet Union, and not from their new homeland. And now, as Anna suffers from dementia, and her loving husband tries his best to care for her, they often feel so alone, even there in their homeland of Israel.

But Isaak and Anna have come to rely on the love of The Fellowship. And as Anna’s condition worsens, making it harder for Isaak to care for his wife of many decades, The Fellowship has stepped in, providing the couple with not just food and other necessities, but the love that God’s children deserve.

You can remind one of God’s children in Israel that they are loved.