From behind the Ukrainian border, their stories emerge— accounts of courage, faith, and hope
War caught the Kozlova family unaware. At 6 a.m. on that fateful Thursday morning, they woke to the sounds of Kyiv — a few miles distant — under bombardment. By 7 a.m., their comfortable life was over, and they were refugees fleeing Ukraine with little more than the clothes on their backs.
“When the news of possible war started a few months ago, no one believed that Russia would actually attack,” says Nomi Kozlova, a mother of four who was the dorm mother in the Beis Aharon V’Yisrael school in Kyiv that is affiliated with the Stoliner chassidus. “Both Ukraine and Belarus are considered like brother nations to Russia, and people in each country have relatives in the other.
“The fact that Russia had seized Donetsk and Luhansk in the east in 2014 felt distant, because it’s hard to feel the pain of people far from you.”
Even the night before the Russian onslaught began, Nomi’s husband, Rabbi Koslova — a Kyiv native with connections to government figures — heard from his sources that war wasn’t imminent.
Create a free account to keep reading.
