A Summer Escape for Ukrainian Girls

In 2015, when Pasadena resident Menucha Hanoka was 18, she volunteered to help girls in a Ukrainian orphanage run by Rabbi Yossi and his wife Sara Glick of the Jewish outreach movement Chabad-Lubavitch. According to Hanoka, children in Ukrainian orphanages are predominantly from parents who are still alive but unable to care for them because of poverty, disability, or abuse.

“A year living with those kids really changed me in every way,” says Hanoka. “I was their mom for the year, and I saw their struggles.

That same year, Hanoka’s experience prompted her to co-found the nonprofit Camp Yeka Girls in Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine. (In 2016, the authorities officially renamed the city Dnipro).

They named the camp after Yekaterinoslav, the childhood village of the late Chabad leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and created it for orphan girls to connect with peers in a safe, Jewish environment.

Over the last decade, Hanoka and Camp Yeka Girls co-founder Hindy Levy, who also helps run Chabad of Buenos Aires, Argentina, have served about 600 girls. “We do a lot of things the girls will enjoy and let them choose workshops such as art, sports, baking,” says Hanoka. “We also do a lot of camp group activities such as swimming, hikes, a lot of Jewish learning, Shabbat prayer services and challah baking.”

The first summer, 110 children registered for camp, some arriving for the three-week session holding their belongings in a plastic bag.

“We became these girls’ families, so they knew they were loved and cared for,” says Hanoka, a mother of three who also serves as the youth director and Hebrew school director at Chabad of Pasadena.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the camps became an even more vital link, as Hanoka and the leadership team helped however they could, from buying supplies and clothing for the campers to wiring cash or sending other lifesaving aid to the girls’ families.

The camps shifted their locations depending on safety and demand, moving from Ukraine to Israel, Hungary, and Poland. This summer there will be one camp in Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains and one in Israel, with about 130 girls aged 5-18 at each. Each camp also has 20 to 25 volunteers and an onsite therapist. The Israel camp even has a therapy dog.

Many camp alumni become staff members, Hanoka reveals.

“They come back and give back all those years that they were campers. Many have families now and keep in touch via WhatsApp and Zoom.”

With Ukraine still under fire, these children are still in crisis, Hanoka says, noting that one girl who had been displaced from Ukraine and is now in Israel asked her, ‘Why does war follow me wherever I go?’

“They need us to be there for them,” Hanoka says. “So, we're going to.” yekagirls.com