  Dear Reader,
Visiting Ukraine’s border with Poland last week, I met two Israelis, a pomegranate farmer and a couples therapist, who were making fresh pizzas for the refugees coming across. I also met Lila Bukhalova, who worked in marionette theater in the city of Kharkiv before the Russians bombarded it and had a blue-and-yellow flag draped over her shoulders. Lila wasn’t a refugee — she was staying with her sick mother in a church in Lviv, and, like the Israelis, was at the border as a volunteer.
I’d tagged along to Poland’s Medyka border crossing with 30 Jewish leaders on a 36-hour mission organized by the Jewish Federations of North America. They were there to witness the situation first hand, in order to bring home stories that would keep American Jews focused on what promises to be a long-term crisis.
During our brief time in Poland, we heard more stories than I can fit in a single email — more than I could fit in a month of emails. We met Sofia Sakada, a 15-year-old painter, whose traumatic escape from Kyiv had caused her to put her brushes down — but who’d picked them up again after days of safety in a hotel-turned-shelter in Lublin. We met Valeriy and Tatiana Eremena, retirees in their 70s who lost their legal documents when their home in the Ukrainian countryside burned to the ground — but were able to recover copies through the Joint Distribution Committee and were headed the next day to Israel. We met Aleksander and Ella Khanin, who had left their home in western Ukraine with Ella’s 97-year-old mother, who was too frail to keep running to basement bomb shelters.
“She survived the horrors of the Second World War,” Aleksander, a math professor who was wearing a yarmulke, told us. “She saw blood, she saw missiles. And now she has to see it all again.”
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In gratitude and solidarity,  Jodi Rudoren Editor-in-Chief The Forward |