By Emily K. Alhadeff, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Editor’s note: Hillel at the University of Washington’s Jconnect program and the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, with the help of the Federation, sent eight local young adults to the Russian Far East for nine days of service work and interaction with the Jewish community of Khabarovsk. JTNews assistant editor Emily Alhadeff went along as participant and reporter. You can see many of her musings on the blog at www.jew-ish.com and stories in upcoming JTNews issues.
After a draining morning of small-group home visits to JDC aid recipients, we all gathered back at the Hillel to process what we’d witnessed: Poor, elderly Holocaust survivors living on a couple hundred dollars a month; single mothers without enough food for their infants; and most shockingly, a family of eight women in a three-room house, without a working refrigerator or running water. Trash and stagnant pools, I was told, marked the landscape down a dirt path forgotten – or ignored – by the upwardly mobile city of Khabarovsk proper.
“I don’t even know if there’s an emotion to describe it,” one participant said of her experience visiting the women’s shack.
As Americans, we tend to be oblivious of the extent to which Jews struggle elsewhere. “It challenged my concept of Jewish poverty,” said another member of this group.
But the existence of poverty among Jews was not the only challenge we faced. Our local JDC representative Boris and the Jewish community leader Vadim shared the sad fact that participants take advantage of the system. The family of eight in the shack might even be included in these ranks, intentionally avoiding work to continue receiving aid.
“We’re facing a really serious professional dilemma here,” Vadim said.
Every case the JDC works with is unique and requires special attention. The photographs included here depict an elderly Jewish woman retelling the story of her survival through the Holocaust, during which she nearly froze to death while hiding on a roof, among other injuries. To this day she suffers health problems caused by that period of her adolescence.
“Why,” she lamented, “was I given such a long life?”