Church, synagogue team up to help refugees
Laurie and Mike Riley like to walk their dogs around their Weston, Fla., neighborhood in the evenings. The squirrels scurrying about the treelined paths have been an ordinary sight of the afterdinner tradition — that is, until Myroslav, 4, and Volodymyr Nemets, 5, 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 Odesa.”
The lives of the Rileys and the Nemetses came together the day before Easter Sunday through the Ukrainian Refugee Resettlement Project, a Floridabased volunteer group that matches refugees from the Eastern European nation with local host families and helps them kickstart their lives in the U.S.
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 Laurie Riley, who is Jewish. Her husband Mike Riley 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 more than two months since Russia’s most recent invation of Ukraine began and the Nemetses left the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, where Volodymyr, 35, grew up and worked as a marine mechanic while Anhelina, 25, took care of their young boys.
The family 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 his apartment until he could no longer host them. On their first day in Weston, the Nemetses 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 Nemetses are one of more than 30 families working with the resettlement program since it launched in late March.
Watstein was inspired to create the grassroots program after taking in the Sibiriakovas, a young family with three daughters that fled Bucha, Ukraine. Watstein 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, 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.