“I thought about Israel from time to time, especially when I again felt a negative attitude towards me because of my Jewishness. I don’t have big problems due to anti-Semitism but sometimes I feel a very strong desire to be in a society where I can feel 100% at ease and free as a Jewess.”
“I successfully graduated from a music school and taught at a music school for many years. Now I am retired, but I loved my job very much. My students won prizes in all the Russian competitions. And being retired, I did a lot of tutoring. And in principle, I am quite a respected person in my environment. I have my own good house in Sevastopol. And in general, I have everything I need for life. I have been living in Sevastopol for more than twenty years, before that I lived in the Tyumen region. But I love my city and my country very much. My parents tried to bring me up as a patriot of their country.
But two years ago, my own sister, who had lived in Ulyanovsk for many years, decided to repatriate to Israel and began to collect documents for consular checks. When she told me about it two years ago, I didn’t seriously think about moving. But the last fall, when all necessary documents were collected – my sister signed up for a consular check. That’s when I got a very strong desire to move to Israel together with her. And when my eldest son found out that my sister had collected all the documents necessary for moving to Israel, he also got very eager to move there. He has already mastered written Hebrew, and speaking will be easier for him when he moves. Now he is waiting for the opening of the Israeli consulate, and as soon as he receives a visa, he wants immediately to follow us. Moving to Israel is an opportunity to live in a place where firstly, I will feel at ease as a Jewess. Secondly, I will live next to my family and the people close to me.”
“I have two sons, two grandchildren and one granddaughter. Therefore, my desires are very simple – that we all live together in Israel and everyone will keep healthy and live a full, happy and joyful life.”
“Almost all my life from school until today, I have felt anti-Semitism. But as I said before, I did not experience any serious problems because of this. There was one case when I could have become the director of a music school, but my leadership did not like my Jewish origins. My mom and dad were Jews. And my mother always warned us not to declare our Jewishness openly, although our surname spoke for itself. As children, during the war, my parents were evacuated to Uzbekistan, and thank God none of the relatives suffered from the Nazis. But during the evacuation, when there was bombing, my mother with her sister got lost. And for seven years they were in a boarding school. Only in 1948 their mother was able to find them. I do not know what my mother had to go through because of her Jewishness, she did not tell me anything about it. But she was very worried about my sister and me, no matter how anti-Semitism touched us.”
“Thank you so much! I have never met anybody in my life, who as a non-Jew, could help us – the Jewish people just like that, in this difficult time for my sister and me. It’s worth a lot. My gratitude is just hard to put into words.”