Six thousand miles from Pittsburgh, I kept running into Pittsburgh

In a Jewish social service center in Lviv, Ukraine, I joined other Federation CEOs packing backpacks with school supplies for children from families displaced by the conflict. Many had fled from eastern Ukraine. Some of those children had fled from Kherson, a city that has been battered since the start of the conflict. They were about to start a new school year anyway, in a new city, because someone had decided they still deserved backpacks and pencils and a normal Tuesday.

That someone, in part, is us. It’s Pittsburgh and our Federation donors.

I spent last week on the ground in Georgia, Poland and Ukraine on a mission organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the century-old organization that serves as the Jewish world’s first responder in more than 70 countries, and one of our Federation’s historic core partners. JDC doesn’t focus on a single program. It provides the infrastructure that allows Jewish communities to care for seniors, respond to crises and rebuild after unimaginable loss.

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I went to see where our Federation’s dollars actually land. What I found, again and again, was Pittsburgh’s fingerprints.

In Tbilisi, Georgia, I toured a Hesed, one of the community centers JDC operates across the former Soviet Union to feed and care for Jews, most elderly, while giving young families a place to gather. It’s a warm, well-run building full of people who need it. This one happens to exist because Pittsburghers, the Posner Family, funded its purchase through a relationship built with our Federation. Halfway around the world, I was looking at something Pittsburgh helped make possible. I saw the same pattern in Warsaw, at the city’s JCC, where I met the head of the Jewish community center from Kishinev, Moldova. Both centers serve Ukrainian IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), and both received grant funding from Pittsburgh’s Jack Buncher Foundation, specifically earmarked for that work. Our Federation helped connect the Buncher Foundation to JCC Global so the money could actually get where it needed to go.

None of that prepared me for Lviv.

We left Rzeszow, Poland, early in the morning, drove to the Ukrainian border, crossed on foot and rode a bus to reach the city. Our first stop was another Hesed, this one also built with Posner family support, where seniors were cared for and looked after as Jewish children were playing in the courtyard. Speak to almost anyone there for more than a few minutes and you learn many are IDPs. From there we went to a JDC-supported volunteer center and spent part of our day packing those back-to-school supplies. It was, without question, the longest day of the trip. It was also the one I keep coming back to.

I’ve worked at this Federation long enough to know how easy it is for the services we fund to feel abstract, a line in a budget, a name on a grant. This trip erased that feeling for me completely. The Posner family’s gift is a building where a woman who survived things I can’t imagine gets a hot meal. The Jack Buncher Foundation’s gift is a partnership that moved supplies to refugee families before winter. And at the core of it all is our Community Campaign support of organizations like the JDC powering them to do this life sustaining work on our behalf.

I flew home from Warsaw thinking about scale. Pittsburgh’s Jewish community isn’t one of the nation’s largest. But in just one week, across three countries, I watched our generosity reach people I will never forget. It built a Hesed. It stocked a backpack. It brought Jewish joy. And it gave trusted organizations the flexibility to help when help was needed most. Jewish tradition has a word for this: arevut, the idea that we are responsible for one another, wherever we are. I’ve read that word my whole life. In Lviv, Warsaw and Tbilisi, I watched it work. PJC

Jeffrey Finkelstein is president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.