Stepping up during a situation; Halfons help Ukrainians make aliyah

Rabbi Yitzchak and Hodaya Halfon in Tel Aviv with a list of Jews they have helped during the Russo-Ukrainian War, March 12, 2025. Photo courtesy of Etgar Lefkovits

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

It was on the day that the war in Ukraine started three years ago that Rabbi Yitzchak Halfon put the famous line from the Book of Esther read on Purim—“And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”—as his profile picture on WhatsApp.

Halfon had just gotten out of the country with his wife and three children.

The 45-year-old Tel Aviv native and his Ukrainian-born wife, Hodaya, had served as Jewish emissaries in Kharkiv, first for OU and then for Chabad, for a decade. They were safely out of the city, located less than 20 miles from the Russian border, and en route from Moldova to Romania with $700 in cash and luggage full of canned goods, but they were being inundated with messages from frantic community members who were under Russian bombardment.

“How can you help anyone with $700?” Hodaya, 44, wondered aloud. “We ourselves just barely got out.”

The Halfons began setting up WhatsApp and Telegram chat groups while driving, in an effort to help their fellow community members evacuate from what had suddenly become a warzone. “We still didn’t have any solutions; we acted on pure faith,” Yitzchak recounted in a recent interview with JNS in Tel Aviv.

Journey Of Life

Their joint journey of life and community outreach began when Halfon came to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, in 1996 to visit his sister, who was working at an OU summer camp established to connect Ukrainian Jews with Israel and Judaism. It was at the camp that he would meet Hodaya, whose Ukrainian name is Nadia and who didn’t know she was Jewish until the age of 11.

“I didn’t even know what it was to be Jewish then,” she told JNS. “All I knew was that it was something negative.”

A year after they met, the Halfons were married and in Israel, but three kids and more than a decade later they returned to Ukraine in 2010 with their young family to serve as educators. One year fast turned into 12, with two more kids along the way.

The Great Escape

For weeks before the war broke out, American and then Israeli intelligence reports increasingly warned of an impending Russian attack on Ukraine, but both the Ukrainian government and the local Jewish community would have none of it. “I felt that there was going to be an attack but everybody else in Ukraine thought I was crazy,” Halfon recounted. His recommendations to local rabbis to stock up on medical supplies and mattresses fell on deaf ears.

Not taking any chances, the Halfons fled eastern Ukraine in their vehicle, which he had assiduously filled daily with gasoline for days before the war broke out.

The invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, saw them in transit in central Ukraine. They—along with thousands of Ukrainians—fled to the Moldovan border where their 18-year-old son Michael, who holds dual citizenship, was nearly enlisted in the Ukrainian army under a mandatory draft for men aged 18-60 that went into effect that day. By some chance, the Ukrainian border policewoman allowed him to pass after an hour and a half of deliberations.

Rabbi Yitzchak, rear, and Michael, right, Halfon help a Ukrainian Jewish refugee head toward safety. Credit: Courtesy.

Action For Others

Out of Ukraine, the Halfons sprang into action. “When the war broke out, we had nothing: not a plan, not funding not a support base,” they said. “We just had our faith.” And with that faith they worked. And worked the phones and all their contacts, first desperately seeking to get buses to evacuate stranded residents. Some drivers refused to enter Kharkiv because it was too dangerous; others did not have fuel.

Since that February day three years ago, the couple has been able to assist as many as 5,000 Ukrainian Jews evacuate, they said, with funding they received through an NGO they set up named Kanfei Emunah (“Wings of Faith”).

The evacuees they helped would then make the journey to Israel on flights with the assistance of major NGOs, governmental and quasi-governmental organizations such as the Jewish Agency, the Israeli Consulates in Moldova and Ukraine, and the Israeli search and rescue organization ZAKA, which refocused its work abroad during the first months of the war.

After the frenzied activity of the first year of the war, and even more so again as the war in Israel broke out after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre, the operation of these organizations largely went into low gear.

Yet as the war in Israel raged on and was making the international headlines, so too did the war in Ukraine, albeit in lower gear, for a second and then a third year.

Yitchak Halfon persisted in his mission, assisted now by his son Michael, dividing his time between Israel and Moldova to help people get out, while his wife took a job in education in Israel. He also had to assuage the fears of Ukrainians that he had helped evacuate who came to Israel and were caught up in a second war. About 20,000 Ukrainian Jews came to Israel and another 25,000 went elsewhere in the world, mainly to Europe, since the Russo-Ukrainian War broke out, according to figures from the Jewish Agency for Israel. About 8,000 of them have since returned to Ukraine.

Aliyah Becomes Trickle

An estimated 100,000-150,000 Ukrainians remain eligible to immigrate to Israel, with about 30,000 believed to be Jewish according to halacha, religious law. Today there is but a trickle of requests to immigrate to Israel from Ukraine, but Israeli officials say the possibility remains of a sudden increase in aliyah requests, especially among men of military age—some of whom are in hiding.

“There are many who are eligible for aliyah but are still here because they cannot exit the country due to the enlistment law,” a Jewish Agency emissary in Kiev told JNS from Kyiv. “We believe that the end of the war and the lifting of the enlistment law will see a significant increase in immigration.”

Despite the downturn in emigration, the Halfons continue their work. “We felt that this was our mission to help out,” they said. “Who knows that this was not the reason that we were born and arrived at this place.”