Gil Preuss, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, recently returned from a weeklong trip to Georgia, Ukraine and Poland more optimistic than he expected.

Preuss was part of a 15-member delegation sponsored by the Joint Distribution Committee. The aim was to experience in real time how Jews were surviving and what challenges they were facing. The group left July 11 and returned July 17.

“We did some volunteering while we were there, but it was mostly to learn about what is happening on the ground” and to meet with leaders from the different community organizations, Preuss said. Also, participants were charged with returning to their home federations and talking about what they saw.

While visiting Lviv in western Ukraine, Preuss saw people out and about, sitting in cafes and generally going about their lives.

“A lot of us come there thinking that we were going to find a very depressed community, but that is not at all what we found,” he said. Their attitude “was very positive,” and the residents stressed that they were living their lives and “doing the things they need to build community.”

The people Preuss spoke with “don’t even like the term resilience,” because it implies they are trying to overcome so many obstacles. “I think we all left, not really optimistic, because the war is still ongoing, but feeling much more hopeful about that community and what they are able to do.”

Preuss added that Lviv is “really very far west so they have not been in the crossfire as much” as other Ukrainians. “They get attacked. Sometimes it is once a month, sometimes it is a couple of days in a row.”

He pointed out that the incoming missile warning system is not as precise as the one in Israel. “They get warnings when the missiles are coming, but the warnings are general, more like what town rather than a more precise location,” he said.

The group’s first stop was in Tbilisi, the capital and largest city in Georgia. About 8,000 Jews live there out of a population of 1.37 million. The delegation stopped at a chesed center that was set up by the JDC shortly after the USSR fell. It offers homecare, food, help for seniors and programs to strengthen Jewish life.

Preuss met with some of the families who receive services there. The people were of various ages, he said, noting, “It’s a significant share of older people who are living there now. More of the young people have left, and there also is negative population growth. There aren’t as many families and young people as there used to be, so it is disproportionately old, but there were a lot of young people and families we met.”

He enjoyed speaking with a blind woman who receives homecare services thanks to the Jewish community. She was a Hebrew teacher, and thus enabled the group to converse directly with her in Hebrew rather than having to use a translator.

The next stop was in Warsaw, Poland, to a Jewish community center that had opened about 13 years ago. There was a Jewish day school and a summer camp.

When Russia first attacked Ukraine, “hundreds of people, actually thousands of Jews” left Ukraine and came to Poland. “Now there are only a few hundred Ukrainians who remain in Warsaw. They continue to be integrated,” he said.

Preuss had traveled to the same area in March 2022, right after Russia invaded. At that time, he said “people were just streaming across the border, just constantly walking across.” That is no longer the case.

Delegation members walked across the border into Ukraine, where they got on a bus to Lviv. There they saw many internally displaced people, meaning they had come from the eastern part of the country where much of the bombing is occurring. The JDC provides them with homecare, programming for children and assistance in finding places to live.

Delegation members also spoke with teenagers who had been displaced. They volunteer through Active Jewish Teens to assist other Jews, which helped them form a strong sense of community, Preuss said. “They really felt connected,” much more than in their own hometowns prior to the start of the war.

The group didn’t sense the strong antisemitism currently happening in “western Europe, South America or what we are seeing increasingly in the United States.” When they walked around, they did notice security, “but less than what I see in synagogues in the United States,” he said, noting, “People walk around wearing kipots.”

What he did notice was the poverty experienced by senior citizens, especially in Georgia and Ukraine. “They are struggling.”

The average pension is between $90 and $120 a month. “There is an assumption in old age, people will be poor, even doctors,” Preuss said. The elderly are living in “significant poverty.”

While those living in Poland are better off economically, Jews in Georgia and Ukraine are hurting financially, he said, noting that Ukraine now has a 200% inflation rate on key goods.

Jews who are classified as Nazi victims receive money from the Claims Conference funded by Germany. Many other elderly Jews rely on the JDC for help with food, homecare, technology and what else they need to survive.

Federations across the United States provide $40 million a year so the JDC can continue to help Jews around the world. The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington provides $1.5 million.

Suzanne Pollak is a freelance writer.