Four years after Russia invaded Ukraine, refugees receiving help from Krakow JCC

A banner over the front gate of a small Jewish building in the heart of Krakow, Poland, four years ago next week, became a symbol of timeless Jewish chesed – and of proactive involvement in a contemporary refugee crisis.

“Early, early” on February 24, 2022, Jonathan Ornstein, executive director of the Polish city’s now-18-year-old Jewish Community Centre, learned on the internet and from friends’ text messages that the Russian Army had invaded neighboring Ukraine, for the second time in eight years. Russian troops poured south over the border, overwhelming Ukrainian troops in the Dombas region. Immediately, fearful Ukrainians headed west, towards safety in many European countries.

Within hours of hearing the news, Ornstein, a native of Queens who has served at the JCC since its founding in 2008, had a hand-painted, blue-and-yellow (the colors of the Ukrainian flag) 15-foot-wide “Welcome” banner posted in Ukrainian — Ласкаво просимо. He foresaw, correctly, that many refugees would reach Krakow.

“We didn’t know what would happen, but I wanted the refugees to feel that the Jewish community in Krakow was welcoming them,” Ornstein remembered in a telephone interview last week. “As they began to come, we began to buy them a toothbrush or a sweater or some food.” The refugees kept showing up. About 13 million of them in Poland since early 2022, of whom an estimated million have remained in Poland with temporary protection status.

“The line in front of the building grew,” Ornstein said. “Local Poles saw what we were doing, and began to drop off clothes and food. The line grew longer and we started to publish our work on social media and we began to raise money to do more work.”

On the morning that Ornstein spoke about the JCC’s current work, a line had formed outside the building, where the women and children, who constitute most of the refugee population, would receive free food and clothing and other supplies for free at a “shop” set up near the front entrance.

“There is a line every morning,” he said. “They’re still coming.” And the JCC’s work has continued. At the beginning, the crisis was “acute. “It’s more stable now.”

The JCC, the second-oldest, US-style JCC in once-communist Eastern Europe, outside of the former USSR (Budapest’s JCC is 14 years older than Krakow’s), quickly began offering a wide-range of humanitarian, temporary-resettlement activities, much of them offered at other sites in the city – it rented apartments for the refugees, provided university scholarships to 250 students, opened daycare facilities for the families, offered lessons in the Polish and English languages, sponsored job training, hired Russian/Ukrainian-speaking psychologists, employed many refugees to assist in the relief effort, fed more than 1,000 people a week, set up an Ukrainian-language hotline for legal and psychological advice, and distributed 530 tons of “essential supplies,” including toys, hygiene products, blankets, and medicine. And sent supplies to Ukraine and border areas for further distribution.

Over the last four years, Ornstein said in an interview, the JCC has aided nearly 500,000 refugees – “99 percent of whom are non-Jews.”

Why does the JCC show all this kindness to strangers?

“We” – as Jews – “have a responsibility. Eighty years ago the Jews were the victims and the world remained mostly silent,” Ornstein answered. “Now, 80 years after the Holocaust, our community has been reborn and we can look at these poor refugees and say ‘The world didn’t help us so we don’t need to help.’ Or we can say ‘The world didn’t help us so we know what it feels like to be forsaken, and that gives us a special responsibility to try to prevent the suffering of others –especially here in the place where we were killed.

“Being Jewish,” he added, “does not mean being a victim.” The refugees “understand that they are being helped by Jews.”

The JCC, now the country’s largest Jewish organization – it adopted the institution’s English-language name, and the British spelling of Centre, as a form of thanks to England’s then-Prince Charles, its founding patron and leading financial supporter at the beginning – is located 43 miles from Auschwitz. The memory of the Nazis’ killing center is never far from the minds of the city’s Jewish and non-Jewish residents.

This massive outreach effort has raised some $16 million, more than four times the JCC’s earlier annual budget, “all raised in the United States from American Jewry.” Initial funding also came from the New York-based Joint Distribution Committee.

“Here in Krakow, from the ashes of the Holocaust, the Jewish community has been reborn,” King Charles said last month during a Holocaust Commemoration Day event at the JCC. “In a post-Holocaust world, projects such as this Centre are how we recover our faith in humanity.”

Ornstein said the JCC has downsized the scope of its activities for the refugees in the last four years. “At the peak,” he said, “we had about 30 full time employees working on Ukraine. That number is down significantly to around seven, but we have had thousands of volunteers from across the world who have helped.”

The refugees, and their plight, are a constant presence in the JCC’s four-story, 9,100-square-foot building in the center of the historic Kazimierz neighborhood, where Krakow’s wartime Jewish ghetto was located.

Have the Jewish members of the JCC, many of them aging Holocaust survivors, supported the JCC effort?

“Our community has been and remains incredibly supportive,” Ornstein said. “We even have Holocaust survivors that volunteer packing food for the refugees.”

The welcome banner is still posted at the JCC.

Nobody keeps an exact count of the number of refugees whom the JCC has aided, Ornstein said – the figure just keeps mounting each day.

The fourth anniversary of the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, and of the JCC’s efforts on behalf of the refugees, will be next Tuesday.

How will the JCC mark the date?

“We plan a small commemoration,” Ornstein said, “but most importantly we plan to feed as many refugees as we can on that day.”

For information about the Krakow JCC: https://www.facebook.com/jcckrakow.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)