By, Daniel Sugarman
4 min read
ByDaniel Sugarman, Daniel Sugarman
With snow piled high on either side of the road, our minibus moves slowly — the streets at times seem less like thoroughfares and more like small potholes nestling inside larger ones.
We are in the city of Beltsy (Balti) in northern Moldova, where the temperature is hovering at around minus eight. We have come to visit Semen Malamud, a 71-year-old who lives in one of the grey Soviet-era apartment blocks huddled together in the ice-choked town.
Mr Malamud greets us and invites us into his apartment. He is not a well man — he has a hernia, gastrointestinal tract problems and severe joint pain. His wife is at the hospital, caring for her sick mother. The apartment is bleak and spartan, and we keep our coats on — with no central heating, it is little warmer than outside.
Moldova is the poorest country in Europe. Here, just a three-hour flight from the UK, Mr Malamud lives, along with an estimated 20,000 other Jews.
Our trip is made up of boys and girls of bar and batmitzvah age, along with their parents, and has been organised by World Jewish Relief. The charity works closely with 11 organisations across Moldova to provide 14 different programmes, primarily but not exclusively for Jews.
A former construction engineer, Mr Malamud’s pension is equivalent to £6 a month — not enough to cover utility bills, let alone food or medicine. In time, he will hopefully be one of those helped by World Jewish Relief’s home repairs programme, which seeks to improve living conditions for poor and elderly Moldovan Jews.
He survives, he tells us, thanks to the local Jewish community centre, which also receives funding from WJR.
“They give me significant help,” he says. “They gave me a food card so I could buy food, and medicine with a medical card. They also give some money towards electricity and utilities. From time to time we receive clothes.”
WJR operates welfare programmes, but also training initiatives designed to help people find work opportunities.
After a trip to meet Maria Dolinskiy, a grandmother who is raising her grandchildren on her meagre pension following the death of the youngsters’ parents, the family’s WJR caseworker tells us she was previously assisted by the programme herself.
As a widowed mother-of-two who struggled make ends meet, she says: “It is important to have food, but it is also important when you have people who can help you psychologically and who help you not to lose your dignity and your confidence.
“There is no other organisation that will help children like this,” she says of WJR.
“A child has a food card, they have access to extracurricular activities and vocational training when they are still at school.”
Our tour group is based in Kishinev (Chisinau), the capital of Moldova. Pogroms, the Holocaust, and post-Soviet migration to Israel have left a city which once had 77 synagogues with just a small remnant of its Jewish population.
The Jewish Community Centre (JCC) in Kishinev is the beating heart of the community. World Jewish Relief operates a programme here which aims to provide sustainable employment opportunities for hundreds of people, giving them the training and resources they need to find permanent work. We meet training programme graduates. Many are now in full-time employment.
“These small but vibrant Jewish communities have depended on welfare hand-outs for generations,” says Rafi Cooper, director of communications for WJR. “They now have hope for a sustainable future, thanks to the work of World Jewish Relief. For the younger contingent on our trip in particular, meeting their Moldovan counterparts who share a heritage but have faced such a different upbringing, is eye-opening.”
The British children are profoundly moved by their experiences in Moldova.
“We met a lot of children in Beltsy and in Kishinev,” says 13-year-old Avi Rubinstein. “They were a similar age to us and had some very similar interests, but they were living in completely different conditions to us.”
Benji Callman met Maxim, a 14-year-old who with WJR’s help is studying to become a waiter and bartender. “It’s strange to think that I’ve still got quite a few years of school life and he’s already training to work,” Benji says.
Jake Leigh, 12, said prior to coming to Moldova he “didn’t know quite what level of poverty to expect”.
He describes one of the home visits he joined, to meet Boris and Maria, “a couple in their late eighties who are living in a rundown apartment and surviving on a $52 (£40) monthly pension, having both worked their entire lives, just as any of our parents would do — and as we’ll probably do in our future.
“Their windows were broken, they had no hot water. I was so shocked by this. You think about poverty and you understand the situation can be hard, but you don’t really understand the details of it, having to decide what the little money you have should be spent on.
“That’s why World Jewish Relief’s help is so important. It will help them make repairs so they can use their money for food and medicine.”
Back in Beltsy, we visit the city’s Jewish community centre, a sanctuary for Beltsy’s Jews. The building complex is known simply as “Chesed”— “kindness”.
Here, kindness is not just a trait, it is also a place. WJR works closely with the centre to provide food, medicine, home repairs and companionship to those in need.
We are welcomed by a choir of older women singing familiar Jewish songs including Hevenu shalom aleichem, and our tour group joins in. Jews from very different backgrounds, voices raised together in harmony.
We see people of all ages engaged in activities — reading groups, singing, arts and crafts — which connect them to their Jewish heritage and, especially with older participants, gives them a way to combat loneliness.
As we leave, we are told: “Please tell everybody about us, we are eager to expand the company of our friends. Because the more friends you have, the more strength you have.”
