Elena Vakulchik

Tamara Feiman belongs to the generation for which growing up in the Jewish environment and living Jewish values is a natural way of life.
Her parents managed to keep their Jewish identity despite growing up in the denationalized environment of the Soviet Union.
Since she was a child Tamara has been actively involved with emerging Jewish organizations. She attended the first Jewish kindergarten in Belarus and then continued her Jewish journey in Chabad religious school «Lauder Shneur College». She has been attending the Young Leadership School for two years and has worked in day camps and family camps as both an assistant and madricha. She has also participated in seminars and Shabbatons, visited the Atlanta, Georgia JCC Camp Barney Medintz, and worked as a madricha in Camp Szarvash. Her warmth and care are well-known to the special needs children from Ivenets orphanage who she visited as part of Helping Hand program.

The life of Maya Lomakina is that of hard work and privation. Her story, however, is that of optimism and hope.
Having cared first for her younger sister when she was a young girl herself and then for her own severely ill husband for most of her life, at 65, with a “bunch” of chronic diseases like acute myocardial infarction,  high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and liver problems, Maya has nobody to take care of her. Her mother and sister made aliyah a long time ago, and her only daughter lives with her family 20 km away from Pinsk and can not visit Maya very often.

Volunteers are the heart and soul of any Jewish community. This is also true about Minsk Jewish Campus. It is hard to give an exact number of MJC volunteers, but some 800 people of different ages donating their time and effort to the community can proudly call themselves volunteers of MJC.
There are volunteers dedicated to the Jewish History and Culture Museum of Belarus. One of them is Mikhail Izrailsky (Belen’ky). Having come to the “Mogilev Ghetto” exhibition opening in 2002 he fell in love with the museum and the work done there, and his heart is still in it.