Health and Peace This Passover
Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1936, Alla remembers happier times before the war. Before the Holocaust. She remembers, as a small girl, celebrating Passover. But Alla also remembers when the Nazis came. Her father was sent to fight—and was killed. Her mother escaped with Alla and her young brother to Leningrad—which the Nazis besieged. “People were dying of hunger, and they were left lying on the streets of the city because there was no one to bury them. There were so many dead that we stopped being afraid of them,” All remembers. “We were only afraid of hunger.” And today, this elderly Jewish woman who once survived the unspeakable has again survived. “I was 5 years old when World War II began, and 85 years old when the current war in Ukraine began,” Alla says. “During the first war, I was a defenseless girl. During this war, I was a defenseless invalid without legs.” Trapped in Kharkiv, Ukraine, when the ongoing war started, Alla was evacuated by The Fellowship, first out of harm’s way across the Ukrainian border, and then on a special aliyah (immigration) flight to Israel. “We arrived in Israel a year ago on the eve of Passover, and I still have tears in my eyes every time I remember what a horrible existence we fled from,” Alla told Fellowship volunteers who visited her before this Passover season, delivering a food box full of special holiday necessities and basic staples to nourish her. “Now, every Passover we will celebrate not only the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, but also our own personal exodus. I want to thank The Fellowship’s donors from the bottom of my heart and wish them health and peace!”
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