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Hesed organizations and volunteers in the FSU are making life easier for poverty-stricken Jewish seniors. Two boxes at end of text.
Rosa Zaitseva was 26 and pregnant when the Nazis first arrested her. Between 1941, when she attempted to flee Kiev ahead of advancing German forces, and 1944, when she was liberated by the Soviets, Zaitseva hid with her husband's relatives, languished in a ghetto, and fled to the forest, where soldiers shot at her from the trees. Her husband joined the partisans and disappeared, she gave birth to their daughter in a barn, and briefly changed her name to Nina to sound less Jewish.
After the war, she returned to Kiev to find her apartment destroyed, and married a cousin who was injured during the war and died in 1968. Their only son died 17 years ago, and Zaitseva's daughter, who lives in Russia, has been ill since birth.
Today, Zaitseva, 88, lives alone on the sixth floor of a rickety, Soviet-era building with pitch-black elevators and unkempt hallways. Her pension is $30 per month. She is not recognized by the German government as a Holocaust survivor; in August 2000, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany turned down her request for assistance because she hadn't been imprisoned for at least six months in a concentration camp, prison camp, or forced labor battalion, and didn't spend at least 18 months in a ghetto, in hiding, or as a child under a false identity.
Zaitseva, it seems, had fallen through the cracks.
When the Soviet Union fell, the Communist system that the elderly had come to rely on also collapsed. In Ukraine, Jews old enough to have lived through the war, or the evacuation of some 300,000 Jewish Ukrainians to eastern Russia and Central Asia, were particularly hard-hit. Unlike those in the West, Soviet survivors never received compensation, their unique physical and psychological problems were never addressed. In addition, some 40 percent of elderly Jews are childless, and those with children are often alone due to the high emigration rates to Israel, the US, and Germany.
Ten years ago, Igor Kogan visited a small village where, he heard, 15 Jewish families lived. He found the Jews, all elderly, walking around in rubber boots...