San Diego, CA (special) -- Rebecca Newman, national women's division president of the United Jewish Communities, recently returned to San Diego after leading a tour to Albania, Hungary and Israel to see first-hand Israeli and North American Jewish sponsored relief efforts for refugees from Kosovo, Belgrade and other portions of Serbia. 

Wherever the group of 21 American and Canadian Jewish leaders and 14 journalists who joined them in Israel went, they witnessed fear and heartbreak, and saw the gratitude with which war-tossed refugees from both sides of the conflict reacted to acts of kindness and humanitarianism. 

United Jewish Communities is the giant agency created in April by the merger of the United Jewish Appeal, United Israel Appeal, and the Council of Jewish Federations. When Newman led the tour in early May, she still was serving as campaign chair (head of fundraising) for the national women's division of UJA. She stepped up to the presidency of the women's division of the merged organizations shortly after the tour. 

The group of 35 flew from Israel to Tirana, Albania, on an Israeli plane that carried 10 tons of supplies for distribution to some of the estimated 470,000 refugees who have fled from Kosovo across the border to Albania in the wake of the war by Serbians against ethnic Albanians. 

They visited a camp that had been set up adjacent to the airport in the Albanian capital, and were met by Albania's Deputy Prime Minister Ilir Meta who told the delegation:  "We appreciate all the aid that is pouring in but the refugees are pouring in faster than the aid." He said another 250,000 refugees are anticipated"  Albania was one of the few countries in Eastern Europe that did not lose any of

Kosovar refugees encamped near Tirana airport

its Jewish population during World War II to the nazis," Newman reminded HERITAGE. 

"They protected their Jewish population. Bulgaria did the same thing. Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe and yet they have opened their border and Albanian doctors and nurses and everyone are working in these camps. They have been remarkably wonderful. They don't have the resources to take care of the influx of refugees they already have." 

In contrast, Newman said, "Macedonia, which also is a very poor country, does not want the refugees and keeps trying to close its border and trying to get the refugees to go elsewhere."
Among the supplies brought on the relief flight, she said, were "10,000 blankets, a lot of personal hygiene products like toothbrushes, tooth paste, sanitary products for men, diapers for babies, lots of underwear, socks, baby formula, condensed milk -- things like that." 

The flight was the ninth sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI), which paid for the supplies with funds donated both by North American Jewish communities and by Israelis who, awakened by the similarities to the Holocaust of the ethnic campaign by the Serbians against the Muslims, formed "The Spirit of Israel Campaign" to raise money for the refugees' relief.
"In six days," Newman said, "Israelis raised $1.5 million, which for Israelis is unprecedented. They have responded to the situation in a fashion they have never done before." 

Besides the hygiene products, there were 3,000 "activity boxes" filled by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) with coloring books, crayons and puzzles which were distributed to children between the ages of 5 and 8. "One of the many problems in the camp is the fact that there is almost nothing to do," Newman said. "These people get up; when they wake up, they just sit. I mean, there is no place to go. 

They have no money, no--nothing. All they have to do is worry. And the kids have nothing to do, so they try to put 30-40 kids in a tent and give them some activities and some classes."  Another contribution made by the JDC is support for Dr. Rick Hodes, a young Orthodox Jewish physician described by Newman as "probably one of the premier triage experts in the world. He had worked in Rwanda and in Ethiopia, and he was immediately sent to Albania

Kosavar Refugee children with JDC activity boxes

and has set up a field hospital outside Tirana. He is treating both acute illnesses and also setting up a psychiatric and psychological staff. What is patently evient when you talk to people is that one of the biggest issues is the psycho-social trauma, stress. These people have seen things that you don't believe you are going to see in your life anymore." 

Many of the Kosovo refugees had led middle class lives, as teachers, accountants, and every other type of job, and "yet all you have to do is live in a circumstance like this for a couple of weeks and it is completely dehumanizing," Newman said. 

"I sat with one family, three generations of women, and the only man that they had with them was the elderly grandfather, 89 years old. They had seen the men rounded up and taken away (by Serbian soldiers). They had seen their homes burned. They gathered up the children and they got on a train and that was the end of their life as they knew it." 

In newspapers, including the HERITAGE, the debate has raged whether the Serbian campaign against the ethnic Albanians is genocide or some more conventional form of warfare. 
Newman believes it is indeed genocide. "I was in one camp out of dozens and dozens of camps," she said. "The predominance of people in the camps are women, young children or adolescents, and very old men. There are no men of military age among the ethnic Albanians. They are not there. They are gone. 

"One woman took me into her tent. She had just had a baby. She and her sister were there and their husbands had been rounded up, and they were shoved out of their house with no money, no clothing, just the clothes on their back, and here she was obviously nine months pregnant, and they walked and they got on a bus or a train. Now they are in the camp, and they are shattered. They are scared, traumatized; they don't know how they are going to take care of their children. They have nothing to go back to, so even if the war were to be over tomorrow, they have nothing left." 

As to their husbands' fate, "these two women said they didn't know where they were taken, and then someone else in the camp said, 'Oh, they are all dead!' The fact of the matter is that many people have seen their husbands, brothers, fathers shot; many people have seen their families taken away, and there have been reports by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees that there are probably over 100,000 men who are missing." 

Adding to the refugees' sense of panic is that sometimes, "in all the melee at the border, families get separated, parents from their children," Newman said. "They are in different camps or they are not sure what happened to them, and so there is this anxiety, this sense of panic. When you talk to people, they are constantly wringing their hands and the tears are rolling down their cheeks: they don't know where their families are. And every time when someone comes through the camps with a list of names of people in other camps, people go running to see if they can find the name of someone in their family." 

Besides being uprooted from their families, the lives of the refugees are miserable because of the physical conditions in the camps. "I was supposedly in the nicest camp," Newman said. "People get a cold shower once a week because they are trying to keep the water supply pure because the last thing they need is an outbreak of disease. They are living 8-10 people, in some cases 12, per tent. These tents are on the ground. It rains there almost every day. NATO, the American government and the Israelis are trying to reinforce the tents, water-proof them more, find a way to keep them cooler in summer. But even in summer, it rains there every day, and they are also thinking long-term about what they are going to do six months from now when winter is upon us because no one has an expectation that these camps are going to be gone by next winter. 

"When you have close to one million people who are homeless, stateless and destitute (in Albania, Macedonia, and other countries), nobody is quite sure what will become of them."
Newman said she spoke in Washington with an official of the International Commission on Refugees who told her he believes that "eventually Kosovo will have to become sort of international protectorate so these people can at least return to the territory and we can help them rebuild." 

However, she said, "if they can't ever return to Kosovo, I don't believe that Macedonia is going to be very hospitable to them staying. Albania is hospitable but has no resources. So somehow or another, at the end of this long tragic period, there is going to have to be more assistance in helping them to rebuild--and that might have to include more permanent refugee facilities."
The refugees in Albania are ethnic Albanians, Muslims. How do they respond to aid coming from the Jewish community? 

Boxes are marked with the names of the Jewish Agency for Israel, but, Newman said, "in all honesty, these people are so miserable I don't know that they know where the aid is coming from. I don't think that is the important thing. I believe the important thing is to try to bring some alleviation to their suffering. ...The Albanians protected their Jews (during World War II). Just as you find in most parts of Turkey where there is a very secular Muslim community, you have a long history of good relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities." 

Certain images from the refugee camp will stay in Newman's mind. Throughout the group's four-hour visit, "a little boy followed us. We had no idea who he belonged to. Children everywhere are just running around. I don't know if they have parents or if they are without parents. And this little boy, you just wanted to scoop him up and grab him and take him with you. He was so lost. His face was just staring at us. His eyes were so empty. He wanted so much to hold somebody's hand and be taken along." 

Another image: "When we were leaving the camp, it started to rain. It doesn't sprinkle. It comes down in huge, slashing walls of water, and the place was turned to mud in a matter of minutes. And I thought 'this is fine for me, I am going to get on a jet plane that is going to take me from this place, but what will become of these people? What will happen to them six months from now?'"