The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore announced Feb. 24 that it opened a Ukraine Emergency Fund to provide support to the southern port city of Odessa and communities in Ukraine suffering from the conflict with Russia.
So far, more than $1 million has been contributed to the fund.
For the past three decades, The Associated has enjoyed a special relationship with Odessa through its Baltimore-Odessa Partnership. Over the years, The Associated has provided financial support to Odessa’s most vulnerable citizens, as well as to its Holocaust survivors. The partnership maintains a coordinator in Odessa and over the past 30 years, both Baltimore and Odessa residents have established longstanding friendships while working together and traveling back and forth to learn from one another.
One hundred percent of the money raised from the Ukraine Emergency Fund will help support on-the-ground work by The Associated’s overseas partners, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency for Israel and World ORT. For decades, The Associated’s partner organizations have provided humanitarian relief and community-building systems in Ukraine and have long-standing relationships on the ground that will enable them to respond despite the conflict.
Approximately 300,000 Jews live in Ukraine, and The Associated serves 40,000 vulnerable elderly and families there,
Funds raised by the campaign will:
- Provide lifesaving food and medicine and sanitary items like diapers, which have skyrocketed in costs.;
- Support mental health for Ukrainians experiencing trauma from the invasion;
- Assisting those wanting to move or relocate to Israel, and other emergency evacuations as necessary;
- Assisting those wanting to relocate to Israel and ensure other emergency evacuations of Jews as necessary;
- Purchasing satellite phones to maintain communications across the region;
- Supporting the hundreds of workers serving the Jewish community in Ukraine who are balancing work and their own trauma;
- Securing the local community and its institutions;
- Assisting internally displaced people in multiple locations;
- Launching an emergency hotline;
- Securing temporary housing for people in transit.
In a recent interview with WBAL-TV, Ukrainian-born Associated volunteer Vlad Volinksky, a Pikesville resident who works on the sister city partnership with Odessa, said of the emergency fund, “They’re doing the best they can to provide emotional and moral support to the people over there, but they’re suffering.”
Donations to the Ukraine Emergency Fund can be made at associated.org/Ukraine.
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