Realizing that mothers of refugee families from Ukraine were busy looking after their children all day long, the organization JRoots partnered with the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow to turn it into a day-care center.
Director Jakub Nowakowski makes sure teachers and psychologists are taking care of the children, which gives mothers time to figure out their next steps.
The day-care center in Krakow has organized outdoor trips for the children, including taking a group to a local restaurant for a workshop to learn to decorate biscuits.
According to Valentyna Merzhyievska, coordinator of the JRoots & Galicia Jewish Museum Day Care: “Each child from Ukraine is different (…) They come from various places: Kharkiv, Odesa, Lviv, Kyiv, the suburbs of Kyiv, villages from the area of Zhytomyr or Volhynia. They have different interests and levels of knowledge and different memories of their prewar life. All of them were expelled from their homes”.
In the safe environment of the day-care center, some relax and calm down; others, who were subject to danger for a long time, rehabilitate.
JRoots is a nonprofit organization based in Israel and the UK that has been organizing educational journeys to Poland, teaching thousands of people of all ages about the Holocaust.
