Published: 20 June 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
For World Refugee Day, The Jewish Independent spoke with families that escaped the Russian invasion in the freezing Ukrainian winter and found warmth and Jewish community support in Bondi.
Olga Hanna-Dzyubchyk
“For months we were moving – in Europe and Australia. I didn’t know where we will sleep tomorrow.”
Olga Hanna-Dzyubchyk recounts how she rounded up her husband Anatoliy, 42, and three children, Melany, Stephanie and Lionel into the car, only hours after the Russian invasion of Kyiv. They headed from their newly renovated five-bedroom home in Lviv to the Polish border, and into a long and stressful journey into the unknown, which has found temporary reprieve in a one-bedroom flat in Bondi.
Hanna-Dzyubchyk and her family are in Australia on three-year refugee visas, but she fears that this could be taken away from her at any time. The joy of being able to call Australia home is shadowed by a fear that she will need to uproot again at any time, after her children have now become settled.
“The kids want to stay here. They already have a life here and friends. My oldest daughter wants to be a lawyer. The middle one wants to be a doctor and help people.”
Her youngest, Leo, had the hardest transition, finding it difficult to pick up a new language, but “last week, for the first time in over a year, he said that he feels at home.”
“Bondi is a dream because I knew there would be a Jewish community.” When Hanna-Dzyubchyk arrived in Australia, her priority was to find a Jewish school.
“I am Ukrainian, but I am also Jewish, and I want my children to know about their history and tradition because I didn’t have that. My mother hid from it me.” Hanna-Dzyubchyk discovered her maternal Jewish line at age 14. A discovery that led her to move to Israel at 16, alone, in search of heritage.
“My grandmother spoke Yiddish as her ‘secret’ language to my mother, when they didn’t want me to understand. I didn’t make the connection”.
