Nuclear emissions from the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 continue to endanger the lives of millions of people living in the former Soviet Union. One small group of volunteers is bringing new hope to the forgotten victims.
By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
Sending a beloved child away, even to escape a dangerous place, is a most difficult choice for a parent. But it was a wise and lifesaving decision for the parents of the 2,000 Jewish "Children of Chernobyl" who have been brought to Israel by a dedicated band of Chabad Chassidim (a Jewish religious sect based in the US and Israel) in the past decade.
The children were born in the former Soviet Union before and after the April 1986 nuclear reactor accident. The explosion released radiation about 100 times that of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Radioactive particles were brought down and absorbed into the earth by rain, and some of the isotopes (cesium and strontium) are as powerful today as when the accident occurred. Scientists estimate that these isotopes could retain their strength and even increase it, contaminating the environment for as long as 60 years.
However, as new disasters - both man-made and natural - grabbed the headlines, Chernobyl became old news, and the world slowly forgot its victims, regarding the event as a "disaster of the past."
Even senior officials in the United Nations now admit they have done too little too late to deal with the human fallout of the nuclear disaster. However, under instruction from the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, a major and permanent resettlement effort for victims of Chernobyl was launched in 1990, with Rabbi Yossi Raichik at the helm. Chabad Children of Chernobyl (CCOC), based in Kfar Chabad (near Tel Aviv), recently brought over its "2,001st" youngster, and pledged to evacuate and resettle the 3,000th child by 2004.
Jay Litvin, in charge of medical liaison at CCOC, explains that because of their growing bodies, children are at the highest risk for malignant disease, the mechanism of which involves rapidly dividing cells. In addition, the longer the children remain in the contaminated areas, the sicker they become and the higher is their risk of developing goiter, thyroid cancer, gastrointestinal and lymph disorders, and autoimmune diseases.
A startling new, independent study of 1,080 of the children aged five to 15 who were settled in Israel showed for the first time that youngsters born after the disaster are at a higher risk for radiation-induced diseases than those who were over one year old at the time of the explosion. Litvin, who has personally made extensive visits to unheated orphanages and meagerly staffed and ill-equipped hospitals in the affected regions, explains this finding by the fact that newborns are more vulnerable to radiation from the isotopes.
Mikhail Gechtin, whose children Ira (now 22) and Yvgeny (18) were on the first CCOC airlift a decade ago, says they had suffered from medical problems but are now well and happily integrated into society. Chabad saved them, he says, without indoctrinating them or forcing religion on them. "It was very hard for me to send them away, but their health had suffered so much in Gomel that I feared for their lives," he says. "I could feel the effects on my own body of the contaminated air, water, earth, and food. I arrived later to settle in Israel, and I felt I had emerged from hell."
Requiring $15,000 per child per year, Chabad has raised funds among its own members, from Jews around the world, and even from non-Jews - both ordinary people and well-known persons such as Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight. Although the children and teenagers are brought directly to Kfar Chabad, they are not required to become religiously observant; they are prepared for high school matriculation and a secular higher education that Chabad's own community, whose main interest is religious studies, does not get.
Although the evacuation and resettlement effort is aimed at the Jewish population, CCOC emissaries who travel regularly to contaminated areas have dedicated much of their time, effort and funds to help victims who have nowhere else to go. For example, breast cancer is rampant among women in the area, and the level of medical care, for both detection and treatment, is deplorable. Girls who were exposed to the radiation and are now adolescents are at much higher risk for developing breast cancer throughout their lives, say cancer specialists. CCOC has donated a fully equipped mammography center in Zhitomir and will soon deliver the first-ever needle-biopsy equipment to the northern Ukraine for screening for breast cancer.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is well aware of the problems and is doing his part in publicizing the plight of the victims. In a recently issued pamphlet, Annan wrote: "Chernobyl is a word we would all like to erase from our memory. It [opened] a Pandora's box of invisible enemies and nameless anxieties in people's minds, but which most of us probably now think of as safely relegated to the past. Yet there are two compelling reasons why this tragedy must not be forgotten...First, if we forget Chernobyl, we increase the risk of more such technological and environmental disasters in the future. Second, more than seven million of our fellow human beings do not have the luxury of forgetting. They are still suffering, every day, as a result of what happened 14 years ago. Indeed, the legacy of Chernobyl will be with us, and with our descendants, for generations to come."