When war broke out in Ukraine, Kherson was one of the first cities to fall. Yasmin, a 22-year-old dentistry student, fled with her family to faraway Georgia. Cut off from her friends, her education, and everything else she had known, she says she questioned her purpose in life.
For the past two weeks, she has been singing, dancing, laughing, and just experiencing the joy of life as a Jew at a once-abandoned resort on Hungary’s Lake Balaton which Chabad Lubavitch emissaries have converted into a sprawling refugee camp for Jews from Ukraine.
Alina Teplitskaya, who directs an organization aiding the Jews of Ukraine, is herself among the camp’s residents. She speaks longingly of Ukraine, where she had a career and a community, and where her parents still live. Yet, like many of the 350 people living in the camp, she has no idea when she will be able to return to the life she once took for granted.
“It’s very hard for people here,” Teplitskaya, who lives in the camp with her two children, tells Chabad.org. “We are all waiting, waiting, waiting for the war in Ukraine to end so we can return home.”
But until then, the camp is the closest thing to a home that many of them have.
The sprawling campus, which belongs to the Hungarian government, has 180,000 square meters (1,937,500 square feet) of indoor space, including a dining facility that can accommodate up to 1,000 guests, many detached bungalows and ample room for activities, prayer, and entertainment.
The lakeside resort in bucolic Balatonőszöd, about 130 kilometers southwest of Budapest, had been abandoned for several years and needed significant restoration before it was able to become a functional home for hundreds of refugees.
Rabbi Slomó Köves of Chabad of Hungary and chief rabbi of EMIH (United Hungarian Faith Community), says that the funding for the camp comes from EMIH, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine—which camp resident Teplitskaya directs—the Hungarian Government, as well as generous donors from the United States.
Major Restoration Underway
He explains that many refugees had been crammed into small apartments in Vienna or elsewhere for the past several months but needed to leave the city for the summer, when school is off and the children could not remain home all day with no structure and no outlet.
With onsite swimming and sports facilities and regular trips to local entertainment, the children go to sleep each night after a full day of activities and entertainment.
Torah classes, prayers and all other religious activities are overseen by Rabbi Dov Axelrod of Chabad of Cherkasy, Ukraine.
In the first weeks of the war, as refugees streamed over the border, many ad-hoc refugee camps were set up in Moldova, Romania, and Poland. But those were always short-term solutions, and as the war grinds on with no end in sight, new programs to deal with the refugee problem are taking shape.
Teplitskaya says that the lake-side site, home to 350, is running at its current capacity, as ongoing renovation and the installation of mobile homes will soon allow them to house and feed 700 people at any given time.
Hosting Children from a Number of Camps in Ukraine
The resort also hosts a number of Jewish Ukrainian summer camps, which are obviously unable to open in their usual locations this year.
Camp Yeka was founded in 2001 by American Chabad rabbinic students. Located near Dnipro (whose Czarist-era name, Yekaterinoslav, gave the camp its moniker), it served Jewish children from across Ukraine, with a heavy concentration on those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Yeka Girls was founded in 2014 by Menucha Hanoka.
When it became apparent that the war would continue on through the summer, staff of both the boys and girls camps decided to open in two locations: A site in Kfar Hasidim, a village in northern Israel, would serve the children who are in Israel, while a European site would serve the children whose families had fled Westward, as well as those still in Ukraine.
This year, with so many former campers displaced, Hanoka also opened a division for university-aged girls, who—like Yasmin—craved the camp experience they took for granted during peacetime.
Yasmin had been a camper and then a staff member at the camp for many years, and says that her time in camp has given her “a reason to live again.”
“The campers are having a blast here,” says on-site manager of the university program Mendel Borodkin, who fled Dnipro along with his family and the students of the Bais Chana Seminary in the early weeks of the war. “Especially for the kids whose families had remained in Ukraine, this is such a breath of fresh air. They are singing, laughing, learning and having fun—just like they did before their childhood was stolen.”
The site also will also be home to the Tzeirei Hashluchim Camp, formerly held in Ukraine, which serves the children of emissaries from all over Europe.
“No one can predict how long the war will continue,” says Köves. “But as long as these people are not able to return to their homes—and many of their homes have sadly been destroyed by bombs—we intend to provide them with this home away from home.”
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