The missiles Iran fired at Israel are not an abstraction to the children at Alumim Children’s Home in Kfar Chabad. They are a memory. The ceasefire came. The fear didn’t leave with it.
Malki Bukiet has heard the sound of sixty children waking up afraid three times now: in Ukraine when Russia invaded at dawn in 2022, in Ashkelon on the morning of October 7th, and again in recent weeks, as Iran’s ballistic missiles sent all of Israel running for shelter. Each time, she is the one who got them moving.
These children came from the poorest villages of rural Ukraine, orphaned or from homes broken by poverty. When Russia invaded, Malki packed a suitcase of birth certificates and moved everyone across the Carpathian mountains to Romania, then to Israel. They rebuilt in Ashkelon. Then October 7th came and they rebuilt again in Kfar Chabad. Then the sirens came back.
What most people don’t understand about children in residential care during a war is the specific cruelty of the shelter. When a normal family runs to a safe room, they run together; parents hold children, siblings crowd in. When children from Ukrainian orphanages crowd into a shelter, they see exactly what they don’t have. Every siren is a reminder: no parents coming, no relatives on the other side of the door. Psychologists working with residential care children in this war are documenting what Alumim’s staff saw every night: anxiety, regression, sleeplessness, children responding not just to the current threat but to every threat that came before it.
Malki and Rabbi Zalman Bukiet are, functionally, the parents of sixty children who have no one else in Israel. Housing, food, clothing, education, medical care, therapy. They provide all of it. And it runs entirely on donations. No government guarantee. No endowment. Your gift, and nothing else behind it.
Isaiah was direct about whose responsibility this is: “Uphold the rights of the orphan” (Isaiah 1:17). Wars end. The obligation doesn’t.
These children have rebuilt their lives twice. Whether they get to stay safe depends on what you decide today.
A gift of $36 feeds one child for a week. If you can help, click here to donate to Alumim now.
