the historic ‘Negev Summit’ held this week. Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

As the current wave of Ukrainian Jewish war refugees making Aliyah to Israel continues, an ICEJ team was at Ben-Gurion Airport on Thursday evening to welcome our latest sponsored flight of 97 new immigrants coming from all across Ukraine. The flight arriving from Warsaw was once again mostly filled with women, children and the elderly, as the fighting-aged men must stay behind to help defend the country.

Over the past five weeks since Russia’s invasion, over 9,000 Ukrainian Jews have filed applications to immigrate to Israel, and nearly 8,000 of them have already arrived in Israel. So far, the ICEJ has sponsored temporary housing and Aliyah flights for 620 of the new arrivals through the Jewish Agency for Israel.

This latest ICEJ-sponsored flight included Jewish families coming from Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Odessa and many other embattled cities all across Ukraine.

As the new immigrants came off the plane last night, our ICEJ team spoke to several Ukrainian Jews about their difficult journey to Israel.