Ukraine’s Jews fleeing to Israel as Russian support grows

[King_David]

KIEV, Ukraine — Yulia, Kostiantyn and their daughter, Valerie, don’t look like a typical refugee family. All well-dressed — even the Chihuahua, Micky, wearing a chic dog jacket — they might not seem out of place mingling with Kiev’s oligarchs.

But the truth is that the family, Ukrainians of Jewish heritage on one side, who arrived here five months ago from the eastern city of Luhansk, has lost almost everything since clashes between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian nationalists forced them to flee.

Parents, daughter and dog — with 226 other Ukrainian Jews — left Kiev for Israel on a charter flight funded by a Christian-Jewish charity. In Israel, a government agency waited to help them start a new life. The new arrivals joined more than 5,000 Ukrainian Jews who have moved to Israel in the past year, about 1,300 of them from eastern areas claimed by separatists.

The number of Ukrainians arriving in Israel in 2014 is more than double that of the previous year. The Ukrainian government, which is facing an economic crisis, has little means to help those internally displaced by the war, now about 500,000, according to the United Nations.

But groups such as the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which has spent more than $2 million on resettlement flights in the past year, and the Jewish Agency for Israel, a nonprofit organization that supports Jewish communities around the world, have stepped in to aid those of Jewish heritage. The Israeli government also offered the option to resettle in Israel.

That assistance has meant that 70 years after the Holocaust wiped out some 900,000 Jews in Ukraine and 20 years after 1 million Jews — forced to hide their religious identities under Soviet rule — left the former Soviet Union for Israel, the Jews that remained are among the luckier Ukrainians.

“Since I was small, my grandmother always told me to hide the fact I was Jewish,” said Kostiantyn, 33, who asked that his family name be withheld out of concern for relatives left behind in the conflict zone. “Now I don’t care what people say about me being Jewish. The only people who have helped here have been the Jews.”

- See more at: http://columbiadailyherald.com/news/world/ukraine-s-jews-fleeing-israel-russian-support-grows#sthash.LAVd4uFU.dpuf

[Duckhunter935]

1. but some say the Russians

are the good guys to save the Ukrainians from the evil Nazi fascist pro-NATO people in the Ukrainian government