The New Ukrainian Aliyah

New people with old stories are sitting on the benches in Nahariya, the beach town in northern Israel where my parents live. One woman sits in a park near the Jewish Agency's immigrant absorption center, holding her smartphone and crying as another woman's voice says on the speaker from Ukraine, "There are fatalities in Kharkiv." A crew from the TV news is there to interview these first arrivals, and for an Israeli watching, it seems like headlines and history at once. Kyiv, Lviv, Moscow, the Jewish Agency. Is it the 1990s, or the 1930s? Another woman, Tatyana, embraces two of her three children, fresh from the airport. Her eldest son stayed behind to fight near Dnipro. "It's a miracle we made it here," she says.