In My Grandfather’s Ancestral Home, A Window to Ukraine’s Jewish Future

As news of a possible ceasefire in Ukraine continues to make the headlines, I feel a rush of hope and caution.

It’s the same uneasy swirl of emotions I confronted weeks ago in Lutsk, when I finally let myself cry after five trips to Ukraine since the start of the conflict.

In that sleepy provincial capital in northwestern Ukraine, just a short drive from the Polish border, I was huddled with a group of social workers, volunteers, and internally displaced people in the local Jewish community center — documenting their work and learning how this ragtag group of humanitarian aid workers continues to make an impact under impossible circumstances.

Over kompot and cognac, stuffed mushrooms and borsch, we traded stories of the brutal conflict that has now entered its fourth year — tales of loss, displacement, and finding home.

Funny, that word “home”; it’s neither a guarantee nor a physical dwelling. As I have learned during my time in crisis zones, it’s something less concrete and more precious — home is a whispered prayer, a spark of hope to keep kindling even during life’s darkest moments.

Ukraine is a kind of home for me, too. My trip to Lutsk and nearby Rivne was my 11th time in Ukraine — travels that have taken me from cobblestoned Lviv to seaside Odesa, defiant Kyiv to gentle Poltava, resilient Chernihiv to snowy Sumy.

But in Lutsk, I wept at last. I’d found my place in the story.

In 1941, my grandfather, Samuel Kagan, fled the small village of Shatsk — about a two-hour drive from Lutsk — under cover of night. The Germans were approaching, and the village elders imagined they were looking to conscript young men, just as they had a few decades earlier during World War I. My zayde and his generation’s exodus, they hoped, would protect the most vulnerable women, children, and seniors.

But this was a different time, with different cruelty — more than 1,000 Jews in the Shatsk area were shot into a pit by Chorne Velyke Lake, nestled in one of Ukraine’s national parks and now a top summer tourist attraction.

My mother and I traveled to Shatsk on a bleak December day in 2011. We said kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, over the mass grave by the lake. We also found wizened village residents who could still recall our family — the general store run by our cousins, the tavern my great-uncle was so proud of. We lamented that this place where our roots run deep was not ours anymore, not really.

History had stolen Shatsk from us. This was a place of memory and mourning now, a bull market for grief.

Today, the story has another chapter in the guise of 69-year-old Irina Korkushko and her disabled son Andrei, 39. They are among the more than 6,200 internally displaced people (IDPs) that my organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), has served across Ukraine, assisting with vital necessities, rent, trauma care, and more.

Irina and her son fled to Shatsk from Kharkiv, where towering Soviet-era housing blocks now wear the scars of shelling like a boxer missing teeth after a bruising match.

“The windows in our apartment shattered, and in the courtyard I saw a 4-year-old child standing alone,” she told a colleague of mine. “His mother’s legs had been blown off, and her blood was all over the asphalt. That same day, we took everything we could handle and left for Shatsk with the cat.”

Before the conflict, Irina was a retired engineer and dedicated volunteer, assisting children and seniors in Kharkiv and working in the city’s Jewish community center, which is run by my organization. Now she’s far from home, trying to eke out a life in my ancestral village on a pension of just $80 per month. She relies on the food, medicine, housing assistance, and warm clothes we send her.

In so many ways, Irina’s journey is a part of mine, and mine a part of hers; the village my family had to flee from is now a place others find refuge. I couldn’t make it to Shatsk on this recent trip to Ukraine, and I’m not sure when I’ll get back, but that’s OK — the baton has been passed to a new family, with a new story.

“Shatsk is my safe haven. The most important thing is the silence, when I can hear the birds singing and not the sounds of artillery cannons,” Irina said. “I think we simply would not have survived without help from you, as my pension isn’t even enough to cover the rent.”

Since the start of the crisis, organizations like mine have poured tens of millions of dollars in aid toward the humanitarian needs of people like Irina. Alone, we’ve aided more than 55,500 people — an estimated one in three Ukrainian Jews who’ve remained in the country. In partnership with the Jewish Federations and an interfaith coalition of other supporters, we’ve also given winter assistance to tens of thousands of people, delivered more than 800 tons of humanitarian aid, and launched a national network of trauma support centers.

Against all odds, we’ve turned hell into hope — and it would be tantalizingly easy to think we may be heading toward better days. And yet, from what I’ve seen, even if peace were to come tomorrow, millions of people here, including the Jewish communities I have come to know over 13 years of travel, will be grappling with the impact of this crisis for generations.

It’s the practical and the profound — destroyed power plants and ruined cities, yes, but also the PTSD that comes from so many months of blaring air-raid sirens and mad dashes to frigid basements and bomb shelters. And don’t forget inflation that makes American egg prices look like a bargain and unemployment figures that climb too quickly to be accurately recorded.

Yana Zinkovskaya — a 49-year-old lawyer from Kharkiv who I met in November — knows it all too well. Her family’s grim journey these past three years has been a series of sprints from one false sanctuary to another.

Yana has moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv to Lutsk, then back to Kharkiv once more before a missile attack one street over killed 18 people and forced her clan — two elderly parents, Yana and her middle-aged sister, a millennial niece and her two young children — to leave yet again. They staked their hopes on comparatively calm Poltava.

Unfortunately, her family moved into a building directly adjacent to the city’s telecommunications institute, where a September 2024 strike killed at least 59 people. Their apartment was destroyed and they had to seek a new safe harbor once more, restarting their search for new jobs, a new roof over their heads, and a new fragile stability.

“For the children growing up now, these days will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Looking at my father, I know it’s true,” Yana told me, referencing her toddler grand-nephew and Holocaust survivor father. “Our family has chosen to live in Ukraine. Now all we want is peace.”

Generational trauma is real — I see it in my own family. For my mother, her father’s experience during the Holocaust is why October 7 and rising antisemitism in its wake hit her so hard. A 62-year-old nurse from Brooklyn, she didn’t live through the massacre in Shatsk. It doesn’t matter. She is destined to forever hear the Nazis closing in, and she still has an emotional go-bag packed, always ready to run.

For so many Jews, fear and flight is our inheritance. But we’ve also perfected another narrative: rejecting despair and sowing seeds of loss and desperation into fields of new life.

In Lutsk, I saw Ukrainians at a crossroads, situated at a moment when that visceral early urgency has given way to something painful and protracted — “the routine of emergency,” as my Israeli colleagues characterize their lives today. I’ll be direct: There is so much more left for the collective “us” to do as we help the people of this ravaged land heal, rehabilitate, and rebuild — but is there fuel in the engine?

Right now, too many of us are exhausted. We think we don’t have a role to play or doubt we could make a difference anyway — the challenges are too big, the return on investment too low. But what if we thought about it differently, if we saw ourselves in the story?

To numb yourself to the hard stuff is to deny every other emotion, too — so let’s feel it all fully. Perhaps our tears can restore something within us, something buried but sacred — a defiant need to reestablish humanity and kindness in places where it’s hard to find.

I cried in Lutsk because I got my home back. You can’t send me mail there, and I’m unable to walk by the lake or hear the birds that bring Irina from Kharkiv such comfort.

But that’s all right. Shatsk lives within me now — a prompt and a promise, a summons and a song. We’ll do it differently this time, Shatsk implores me, and my broken, hopeful heart listens and vows to try.