Program Stories

Life for a Jew in Ukraine has never been easy. Dolores knows this firsthand. She’s known this for every one of her 82 years in the country’s capital, Kiev.

Born to a Jewish family between the World Wars, Raisa soon learned of wartime hardship and horror w

A Russian poet penned those words to commemorate one of the darkest days of the Holocaust. On Yom Kippur of 1941, Nazis marched more than 30,000 Jews to a ravine outside of Kiev. As the grasses rustled, the Nazis forced them to strip. And as the trees looked on, the Nazis shot them, one by one by one.

This Passover story begins not with deliverance, but with danger. Danger that a precious elderly woman named Yunona has faced nearly her entire life.

June 21, 1941, promised to be a bright summer day. But it was the last bright moment that Leonid would experience for many decades. That day, the young Jewish boy and his family fled their home in Zhitomir, Ukraine, as the Nazis invaded and began to kill the city’s Jews.

It is a challenging job to raise your child as a single mother with no support, and sometimes it can feel lonely.

Mikhail dedicated his entire life in Ukraine to taking care of others. First, he looked after his mother, who was ill and bedridden for many years.

Varvara remembers the Jewish traditions, from long, long ago. From before the Nazis. From before the Communists. From before the current war in Ukraine.

“When the Nazis came, they came for us. I was one of three children, but I pretended that I did not belong to my family and that is how I survived,” says 95-year-old Mariya, a cold and tired Jewish woman who still lives in the same village in Ukraine the Nazis invaded as World War II began.

While many of the Jewish elderly who depend on IFCJ Canada for lifesaving aid and loving companionship, as well, their loneliness only arrived in their twilight years. But for Marfa, her entire lifetime has been one of loneliness.

Matat wouldn’t be alive if not for Fellowship friends. Quite literally, The Fellowship saved this elderly Jewish widower’s life when he’d lost all hope.

For historians of the Holocaust, Vinitsa in Ukraine is a horrifying name. Near the town, Adolf Hitler constructed his eastern retreat, complete with 20 buildings, gardens, a swimming pool, and a wire fence.