Our volunteer trip to Poland and Ukraine

Hello! As many of you know Adi, his sister (Dr. Nirit Rosenblum), his dad (Ben Rosenblum) and his niece (Maya Mehrara) travelled to Poland/Ukraine in October of 2022. While the purpose was a volunteering effort for Ukrainian war refugees it ]also became a family history trip to connect with their heritage and Jewish roots.

This June we are all travelling together to Poland and Ukraine as a family. The 4 of us (along with Adi's sister and 3 of her kids and Adi's dad and his wife) will be volunteering in hospitals and refugee camps in both Poland and Ukraine. We are excited, nervous, pensive, and eager to have this experience as a family.

We will be travelling with a several medical professionals to provide as much care as we can for those who have been displaced because of the war. On the last trip, the team bought much needed medical supplies (and services), crafts, paint, food for meals, etc. to help provide a little relief to the displaced or injured families. 90% of the refugees are women and children.

While in Krakow, we'll be visiting refugee centers and helping with whatever is important for the families seeking shelter there. We'll travel across Poland to the East, and cross over the Ukrainian border and will continue until we reach Lviv, Ukraine. There we'll be spending a few days a the primary children's hospital where our medical staff will assis theirs and our non-medical volunteers will spend time with the kids staying (and recovering there). We are asking our friends and family to help us provide for these Ukrainian families and our travel.

The previous trip, as well as this one, has deep meaning for Adi's family as his maternal family was from Poland, and his paternal family was from Ukraine. Adi and his family felt a strong pull to not only visit where his ancestors are from but to help the citizens in the midst of an exhausting war. They visited women and children living in the Western part of Ukraine- displaced by the war on the Eastern front and separated from their husbands and fathers who are serving on the front lines. They cooked together, sang together, painted lots of finger nails, learned about their culture and engaged with the children about their dreams and passions - art being one of many talents! They visited hospitals and refugee camps. Sometimes the best thing they could do was to provide a song strummed on a guitar or a shoulder to lean on. Adi met a young burn victim that he still communicates with today! He is living with his Aunt and Uncle as his parents were killed in a bombing that left this young boy and his older brother severely burned.

On the last day of their trip, they visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. To say this visit was life changing, is a total understatement. Finding family member's names in the books and then standing in the same spot that a family member was shot and killed was harrowing but deeply moving for all of them. When you don't know much about your family history because of the Holocaust, every morsel of information you can glean is cherished even if it is unspeakable.

I asked the girls to put into words what this trip means to them.

"I am so excited to go to Ukraine to help people. I want to go because I know it will be a great learning experience for me and my family. It is important to do this as a Jewish family. I know I will grow as a person and learn new experiences and cultures! Our family believes in helping others and the people of Ukraine are suffering and I know we can make thier lives a little easier."

We will be travelling with Lev Ehad, an NGO focused on helping in times of crisis. They are based in Isreal (where Adi's parents are from).

Please help us provide much needed medical care, emotional support and positive goodwill to the families in the Ukraine. Our family thanks you!