From the beginning of the interview Alena Druzhynina, Ukraine country director for IsraAid, apologizes. She, her husband, daughter and two dogs spent another sleepless night as Kyiv, where they live, came under Russian attack again and they had to run for shelter in the basement of a nearby school. Since the start of the war three years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, she has been sleeping nightly on the floor in her closet, because, she said, though it is not a shelter at least there are no windows.

Hopefully, she said, there would not be a siren during the interview.

“We have those here constantly and have to be very flexible and adaptive in our everyday tasks and our every day. Last night another drone attack struck Kyiv city, which is happening for the last several months,” she told eJewishPhilanthropy in a video interview on Thursday. “It’s almost every night and forcing me, my husband, my 10-year-old daughter, and my two dogs to seek shelter.”

Her daughter is lucky in that her school has a shelter so she has been able to keep going to classes. Most of the schools in Ukraine do not have shelter, and so many Ukrainian children have had their education interrupted — first by COVID-19 and now the war, which will carry developmental consequences for years to come.

The one thing that helps her get up in the mornings and face the day is knowing that her work with IsraAid makes a difference in people’s lives, she said.

“I still have like a privilege because I have an opportunity to give, to do good things, to, to make changes, to make a difference,” Druzhynina said. In the early days of the war, like many Ukrainians, her family fled the fighting to Europe but not long after they returned. They preferred to be a part of what occurred in their country rather than to become refugees, she said.

She joined IsraAid two months later  in August 2022 shortly after they set up their operations in Ukraine. “It became a coping strategy for me to realize that with all that is going on around, I still have an opportunity to support, to be useful, to find meaning, to find purpose. This is something that very often makes me get up in the morning after the sleepless night and do my work. There are days, especially after the massive attacks with a lot of civilian casualties, when it’s really hard, like we are breaking in tears. There are days when you just realize that the only thing you can do is just in baby steps. Do what you should do. This is what keeps you going one day at a time.”

She said she finds energy to continue her work when she sees positive change taking place, especially through long-term collaboration with communities. She frequently returns to these communities, working closely with them, and during each field visit, she witnesses the transformation firsthand. She recalls how things were before — how a school once stood closed, lacking water and access for children to gather — and sees the impact the nonprofit’s water treatment station has made, improving life for the entire community.

“The communities which rely on us are amazing examples of resilience and they are inspiring and they are motivating in general. Like Ukrainians they are resilient, but they cannot do this alone,” said Druzhynina. “It’s also very very important you know when you’re not alone and you feel this support.”

IsraAid is an Israel-based nonprofit that responds to emergencies all over the world with targeted humanitarian help and has been aiding displaced and needy Ukrainians since the start of the war, as have Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which already has been working with the most vulnerable in the Jewish community since the fall of the Soviet Union, and Chabad.

Over the past three years IsraAid, which partners with local organizations to implement projects for all Ukrainian citizens, and their programs in Ukraine currently reach approximately 400,000 people. This includes about 330,000 individuals accessing water, sanitation and hygiene programs, and around 45,000 people benefiting from protection programs, which encompass mental health aid and psychosocial support such as their Quokka hubs, child-friendly spaces named after Australia’s “friendliest animal on earth.”

“Basically in front of our eyes we see how children are suffering from stress and anxiety,” said Druzhynina. “They don’t know how to communicate with other children because they were isolated and how the change is happening. It has become the place where younger children learn how to communicate with each other through arts, through games, through play, through some educational activities with our facilitators. They are becoming kids again and they are getting back their childhood, which was taken from them.”

Some of those spaces have been implemented with IsraAid’s local Ukrainian NGO partner Istok, which already has a presence in libraries, noted Shachar May, a spokesperson for IsraAid.

“We mostly work with implementing partners, which means that we work with local NGOs that are familiar with the area or familiar with the community already to help build on that trust. We’re very open to collaborating. Collaboration helps you get a better response for the community,” she said.

An estimated 150,000 of the 200,000 Jews living in Ukraine before the war have remained in the country, noted Ariel Zwang, CEO of the JDC.  She said the JDC has continued to provide essential food and medicine, housing assistance, homecare for the elderly, trauma support, online and in-person educational opportunities and financial and employment assistance to more than 38,400 of the neediest Jews around Ukraine. Additionally, JDC is supporting over 9,000 Jewish refuges with ongoing assistance through local Jewish communities in Europe.

“The network of human service organizations, the Hesed organizations that JDC created 30 years ago that provides the humanitarian aid and was working with about 35,000 poor Jews before the beginning of the war still are providing food and fuel, winter relief, basic supplies,” she said. “That was the baseline before the beginning of the conflict.”

“Since the start of the crisis, we have assisted over 55,500 vulnerable Jews in Ukraine with ongoing emergency aid, including food, medicine, homecare and evacuation services. Additionally, we provided vital necessities such as food, medicine and psychosocial aid to more than 40,000 refugees as they crossed from Ukraine into Romania, Moldova, Poland and Hungary,” Zwang continued. “Additionally, 1,000 Ukrainian Jewish children and their family members participated in respite programs at Szarvas, the JDC-Lauder International Jewish Camp in Hungary.”

The JDC’s representative in Odessa, Inna Vydovyhenko, said that the Hesed centers have become “the main anchor of hope” for many Jewish elderly especially now. For the most vulnerable and the elderly homebound, the home care provided by JDC, which can include anything from helping with personal hygiene to bringing them groceries, cooking foods and cleaning apartments, is their “window to the world,” she said.

“For Jews with special needs for internally displaced Jews… wherever they are, we help them with subsidies for rent and they receive a spectrum of assistance from the Hesed centers,” said Vydovyhenko. “In addition to that, like everywhere else, they have food for the soul, which is participation in Jewish holidays wherever possible, of course in online programming, including cultural Jewish history, online education, all these things.”

Describing their reality, Vydovyhenko said it has been “about 1,100 days of grief, fatigue and anxiety.” In Kyiv, IsraAid’s Druzhynina described it as “very, very, very hard.”

“In the beginning we were hoping it will be for the short run, and then we understood it is a marathon. Now it seems to have no end,” Druzhynina said. She and her husband have decided not to look at the current news reports until there is an announcement of anything concrete as preparations for a Trump-Putin summit are underway.

Everything that has happened in Israel over the past 16 months — except for the initial Hamas attack — has been happening in Ukraine for the past three years: displacement, loss of home and jobs, loved ones fighting in the front for an undetermined amount of time, loved ones dying in the war, overnight attacks — except in Ukraine they have no safe place to take shelter and are suffering from regular interruptions of the power grid, Zwang said.

“I really want the world to understand that even though our attention is on many other things, and of course especially on Israel, three years after the beginning of this conflict, the fact is that the misery [in Ukraine] has only increased,” she said.

Similar to IsraAid’s child-friendly Quokka hubs, JDC’s Hesed centers also provide such projects in centers where children can gather, do distance learning together assisted by a teacher in the room — as their schools are closed because of lack of safe shelter and water, Zwang said.

“These are places where they also have more reliable electricity and heat and of course companionship and also an adult teacher that’s not the mom, someone that’s an education professional,” she said.

After three years of war, the mental health needs continue to grow, change and become more intense, said May. One of the main focuses of their work has been psychosocial support and mental health, she said, in addition to the child-friendly spaces and training for first responders on mental health care; one of their programs is the “Psychologist, Doctor, Patient” program is being implanted under the “How are you?” initiative led by First Lady Olena Zelenska who has made mental health her main focus during the war. Since 2023 over 100 psychologists have been trained to support hospital staff, patients and families. This would be the first time mental health services have been integrated into Ukraine’s health system, said May. The program is currently running in 11 hospitals, and is now in its third phase collaborating with Ukrainian authorities with the goal to expand nationwide ensuring long-term sustainability integrating mental health care into medical care for years to come, she said.   

“That’s a really big focus of ours in terms of sustainable programming that leaves a mark for as long as we’re there and beyond, and also can help serve communities not just right now in the moments of the highest need, but for the long term and puts those skills inside of the community themselves so that they can carry it forward,” said May.

Likewise, JDC has opened eight trauma centers throughout Ukraine, which provide counseling for children and adults, said Zwang. For one preteen girl whose father has consistently been battling at the front, that meant gaining tools and learning techniques to manage her feelings and reactions, while for her younger sister it has helped her learn how to ask when she needed to see a therapist, said Zwang.

“I don’t even want to say these are emerging needs because it’s already more than a year that we are providing them. These are a different kind of need than the ‘get me out of here need,’,” she said. “It’s the need of someone who’s staying to be connected to Jewish community, to have the communal resources, which we help provide to serve these folks.”

While neither JDC nor IsraAid depend on U.S. government funding for their work in Ukraine, May said some of the partner NGOs they have been working with were told from one day to another that their projects had to be put on hold because of the Trump administration’s freeze on USAID.

“So it just means there are more unmet needs, and organizations like ours who are lucky enough to have funding, are doing our best to work together and do a quick pivot and find ways to meet those immediate needs so that a community who had access to a program one day doesn’t find themselves without it the next and that of course is an effort,” said May.

JDC has been spending about $47 million a year in Ukraine, said Zwang, but there is concern that they may not be able to sustain that level of funding.

“What we have is emergency, continuing, crisis-level needs without emergency fundraising response, campaign response,” she said. “We’re able to cover the costs with fundraising that we continue to expect to come in through the end of 2025 and starting in 2026 we’ll need to raise additional resources. We’re making our best case to everyone that this is a major humanitarian need. These are our Jewish brothers and sisters and they really need us now. People can hold more than one need in their mind. For example, Jewish communities in the United States are very concerned about antisemitism at home so it’s not that they only see one need, they see many and they juggle many. It’s our responsibility to make sure that Ukraine is part of that and not forgotten.”

May noted that while donor fatigue can be a real thing in ongoing conflicts such as the war in Ukraine as media and donor attention gets turned elsewhere for the moment, IsraAid donors have understood the importance of the work they are doing. But, she said, IsraAid is still actively fundraising to meet the continuing needs that remain “incredibly high.”  

“I think everywhere, unfortunately, the media attention often does equal donor interest in a lot of cases. The longer a crisis goes on, the harder it is to renew interest in it. It’s not unique to Ukraine, but it’s always heartbreaking to see when crises don’t get the attention they need to meet all the needs,” said May.

From time to time they feel in Ukraine that the world is going into darkness, said Druzhynina.

“This is the feeling we have because of this long, long war. And we are exhausted,” she said. “This is why our work today is more important than ever, because it’s also about light. And it’s not enough. Of course, it will never be enough, but the light creates light and you can fight the darkness with the light.”