Laurie and Mike Riley like to walk their dogs around their Weston, Florida, neighborhood in the evenings. The squirrels scurrying about the tree-lined paths have been an ordinary sight of the after-dinner tradition — that is, until 4-year-old Myroslav and 5-year-old Volodymyr Nemets and their parents joined them from Ukraine last month.
“The children are fascinated with squirrels,” said Riley, 52, “Apparently, they don’t have a lot of squirrels in Odessa.”
The lives of the Rileys and the Nemets came together the day before Easter Sunday through the Ukrainian Refugee Resettlement Project, a South-Florida-based, volunteer-run group that matches refugees from the Eastern European nation with local host families and helps them kickstart their lives in the United States.
The Rileys decided to offer their home after getting a phone call from Angelina Watstein, the wife of the rabbi of a local synagogue: Could they take in a young family fleeing the war?
“We just took a leap of faith and said yes,” said Riley, who is Jewish and whose husband is Christian.
The day after the Rileys’ Passover Seder, the couple rushed to prepare the house. They cleared spare bedrooms and bought Easter egg baskets. Their daughter, a junior in high school, searched for stuffed animals for the children.
It has been over two months since Russia invaded Ukraine and the Nemets left the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, where Volodymyr, 35, grew up and worked as a marine mechanic while Anhelina, 25, took care of their young boys. The family fled their home the day the war began.
They traveled through Moldova, Romania and France before crossing the U.S.-Mexico border on March 20. After being paroled, the family came to Florida, where they stayed with Volodymyr’s cousin in a Sunny Isles apartment until he could no longer host them. On their first day in Weston, the Nemets celebrated an American Easter Sunday with their host family, complete with a dinner of ham and mashed potatoes.
“We feel at home,” Volodymyr said.
The Nemets are one of more than 30 families working with the resettlement program since it launched in late March to help Ukrainian refugees coming to South Florida.
Watstein was inspired to create the grassroots resettlement program in South Florida after taking in the Sibiriakovas, a young family with three daughters that fled the Ukrainian city of Bucha. She searched for volunteers and host families within her communities and at B’nai Aviv, the conservative Weston synagogue her husband Rabbi Adam Watstein has led for over a decade. They joined forces with the St. Nicholas Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a Cooper City sanctuary that was already housing, clothing and feeding Ukrainian refugees.
Working with other religious and social service organizations — including the Ramat Shalom synagogue in Plantation and Jewish Family Services — the Broward County religious institutions have forged an interfaith partnership of about 150 volunteers working round-the-clock to support Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.
“It’s brought so many people together. It’s a humanitarian cause and it transcends any religion, any faith, any individual needs. That’s a beautiful consequence,” Vanessa Silberberg, a Weston-based life coach and B’nai Aviv member who created the intake process for host families and refugees and coordinates the volunteer ambassadors that directly support refugee families once they arrive in host homes.
From Ukraine to USA
Angelina Watstein received government permission to leave the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic on her first birthday. Her family joined the mass migration of Jews in the 1970s and 1980s fleeing the antisemitism and persecution they experienced in the Soviet Union, at a time when a global movement pressured the communist state to allow its Jewish citizens to emigrate.
“My grandparents were carrying matzah from the matzah baker in a pillowcase in the middle of the night,” she said, “My family was going to synagogue underground.”
Four generations of Watstein’s family flew to the United States in 1981 and settled here with help from the New York Association for New Americans, an agency that began resettling Jewish refugees in the United States after World War II.
Watstein recalled that during Word War II, many people looked the other way in occupied European cities and towns as Nazis rounded up and forced the local Jewish communities into ghettos. Anchored in her own experiences as a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant who fled repression, she says she refuses to ignore the death and suffering of others.
The agency that aided Watstein and her family shuttered years ago. But decades after arriving in the U.S. and now with American kids of her own, she is building her own community-led “agency” resettling Ukrainian war refugees.
“We are teaching our children this is the way you need to be in the future. This is what the world needs to look like,” she said.
A ride to Orthodox Easter
Churches like St. Nicholas in Cooper City are at the frontlines of assisting war refugees, said Juliet Bedard, a 35-year-old Ukrainian immigrant coordinating the refugee resettlement program from the Broward County sanctuary. Almost eight in 10 Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christian, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, while one in 10 identifies as Catholic.
“When people started crossing the Mexico border, the first place they contacted were churches, asking for places to stay and other support like food, clothing, everything. It was overwhelming,” said Bedard.
Many, if not most, of the program participants come through St. Nicholas, after showing up at services or calling and emailing the church. Some hosts are also from St. Nicholas, but most hosts are from B’nai Aviv, which serves 600-something families, mostly of Eastern European Jewish descent, and other local synagogues.
“It’s worked out great. The Jewish families were giving the Orthodox families a ride for Easter to the church. We are so united no matter what language we speak, what religion we are, where we are from,” said Kateryna Tserkovniuk, another St. Nicholas volunteer whose own experiences as a Ukrainian immigrant coming to the U.S. alone six years ago inspired her to help resettle refugees.
Several of the Jewish host families follow kosher diets, which their guests have learned how to follow — one of the Sibiriakova daughters even asked Watstein for matzah pizza after trying the bread during Passover. And like in the case of the Watsteins, who found out that their guests were not Jewish after they moved into their home, host families and the refugees they shelter are often from different faiths.
“Religion is taking a second seat behind the person’s life,” said Watstein.
How it works
After Ukrainian refugees fill out the intake form to join the resettlement program — which asks them for basic information like clothing sizes, languages spoken, medical needs, and ages — Watstein, Tserkovniuk, and Bedard work together to match them with potential hosts.
Many of the families come from cities like Mariupol, Kharkiv and Bucha, whose names have become synonymous with relentless Russian attacks and countless civilian deaths. They have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border — over 5,000 Ukrainians did so during the month of March, according to federal data— and come to the United States on tourist visas.
Once the families are paired, the resettlement program arranges transportation for participants, and host families prepare to receive them, sometimes in 24 hours or less. A volunteer case manager visits each family and their hosts with gift cards for Publix and Target, and explainers with information like how to open a bank account and how to get a driver license. Different departments from the program also kick into gear to help the new arrivals, like a donations team that puts together personalized packages with clothes, shoes, strollers, bikes, toys, and diapers.
Volunteers help enroll children in schools, solve medical needs like prescription medication, and identify the professional experience of the refugees so they can eventually find jobs. B’nai Aviv is planning on having English immersion classes for Ukrainian youth as part of their summer camp, while St Nicholas is planning to launch a Sunday school where children can continue speaking Ukrainian, read books in the language, and play.
“The idea of this project is that they get here we help them assimilate and we help them get on their feet as soon as possible,” said Watstein.
“They’ve become family”
Host families and refugees have formed bonds and routines of their own.
Before the war, 31-year-old Olga Nesposudna worked as an employment agency manager and had her own apartment in the city of Kharkiv, about 25 miles from the Russian border. Nesposudna woke up to explosions the first minutes of the war. She slept for a week in a bomb shelter before fleeing to a friend’s place in rural Slovakia on a crowded train.
She flew to Mexico in April after deciding to cross the border into the United States, where she could have more opportunities as an English speaker. Florida, she said, a “beautiful place” with a Ukrainian Orthodox presence, made sense.
“I understood that I have to build a new life,” said Nesposudna, “I don’t know when I can come back to Kharkiv.”
After she called St. Nicholas after staying in a Deerfield Beach hotel for a week, the resettlement program placed Nesposudna in the Weston home of Dana Isbitts, a 55-year-old operations manager and her husband Robert. Nesposudna sleeps in the room of the couple’s college-aged daughter, one of their three adult children.
“They support me, they help me, they give me advice... They treat me like I am part of the family,” she told the Miami Herald.
Isbitts said about Nesposudna: “She’s just been a delight. We’ve come to feel like she’s a daughter in two weeks.”
For the Nemets and the Rileys, the language barriers have been the most challenging. While Volodymyr speaks bits of English, his wife Anhelina and the kids speak only Ukrainian or Russian.
“We went from a family where the rule was no cell phones at the table to everyone must have their phone at the table because it’s the only way we can communicate” with translation apps, Laurie Riley said.
There have been communication hiccups: One time, Google translated “ladies around the corner” in English into “dead ladies” in Russian. But the families have also found affectionate words for each other in their native languages. On the third day of their stay at Rileys’ Weston home, five-year-old Volodymyr asked their hosts if he could call them babushka and dedushka, the Russian words for grandparents.
Mike plays catch with the two kids and has introduced them to root beer and American junk food. The Rileys gifted Volodymyr weekly music lessons after he played melodies on their piano. When Myroslav came down one night wearing a Darth Vader mask, they taught him how to say, “Luke, I am your father.”
The Rileys have introduced their family and friends to the Nemets, who in turn have introduced them to the new friends they have made in St. Nicholas. Anhelina, who studies English nightly, video calls with her mother every day, and sometimes Riley, who has learned some phrases, joins.
One Saturday morning during a lightning storm, young Volodymyr was watching cartoons with the Rileys when he ran up the stairs. He had confused the thunder with the sounds of the explosions that shook their apartment near Odessa’s airport.
But the kids have also found connections to their old life, like the family’s Labrador mix and Havanese dogs, who have become their playmates after they had to leave their own dog behind with Anhelina’s mother. Many of Myroslav and Volodymyr’s first English words revolve around the Riley pets: Maggie sit. Charlie come.
For Orthodox Easter, the families dyed eggs for the Nemets to take to Sunday service at St. Nicholas. That night, Riley made syrnyk, a Ukrainian Easter sweet cheese alongside an American classic: chocolate brownies. Days later, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Nemets joined Riley, who was leading the choir at service in Weston’s Temple Dor Dorim.
Their evening walks are now a shared routine where Anhelina and Riley teach other Russian and English. The children dart towards the squirrels in the trees.
“They’ve become our family,” she said.
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