On a campus outside Bucharest in August, Rabbi Jeremy Barras watched his son, Ethan, play with the youngest children at Tikva, a Jewish school and children’s home that fled Ukraine in 2022.
“Watching my son play with the young children reminded me of how connected the Jewish people are around the world,” Barras said. “My family came from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland. They were some of the fortunate ones who were able to get out and move to America.”
Had his great-grandparents not gotten out, he said, his family would likely have faced the same challenges as the Jews of present-day Ukraine.
Ethan had come with an idea from Israel. Ask a child who has lived through a war how they’re doing, Barras says, and the answer is usually “fine.” Ask how their dog is doing, and the answer changes: he’s scared, he didn’t sleep well.
Rabbi Jeremy Barras and a Sister School in Odesa
The family’s tie to Tikva started about a decade ago, with a gala Barras talked someone out of. A woman came to see him on behalf of a friend who worked at a Jewish orphanage and school in Odesa, Ukraine, which had a small fundraising base in north Miami.
The institution was Tikva, which has been finding and caring for Jewish children in Odesa and the surrounding regions since 1994. It raises them from early childhood to independent adulthood. The woman told Barras they were the most unfortunate Jewish kids in the world. Many come from families broken by poverty, addiction, incarceration and suicide, in a region where, he said, there is a lot of antisemitism. Without Tikva, they would be in Ukraine’s state-run orphanages, which he calls “the worst places in the world.”
A gala, he told the woman, might raise $50,000 from people who had never heard of the place. He offered something slower. Temple Beth Am’s day school in Pinecrest would take Tikva on as a sister school, and the congregation would raise money for it over years instead of one night.
The Bus Ride Out of Odesa
Then came February 2022.
Barras said Tikva’s staff loaded about 400 students onto buses the day before Russia invaded and headed for Moldova, a trip of roughly 90 hours. Rabbi Refael Kruskal, Tikva’s CEO, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency weeks later: “As soon as the bombs started falling we took people out with buses through Moldova.” By mid-March, about 800 people from the Odesa community were celebrating Purim in Neptun, a Black Sea resort town in Romania.
The children stayed. Tikva rebuilt in Bucharest, where it now cares for children, alumni families and elderly people while still supporting those who remained in Odesa. Barras puts the number of students in Bucharest today at around 450. After the August trip, Temple Beth Am reported that the staff “has recreated their Odessa campus on the outskirts of Bucharest.”
Barras had meant to go for years. His trips to Israel are three-day business trips now, and a stop in Bucharest never fit. This summer, he and Ethan booked tickets.
Hibuki, the Israeli Dog Built for Children Under Fire
The dogs come from Israel. The program is called Hibuki, or “Huggy.” Tel Aviv University psychologist Avi Sadeh developed it in 2006 after a psychology student, Shai Hen-Gal, asked him for a fast intervention for children displaced when Hezbollah rockets hit northern Israel, Israel21c reported. The doll is a floppy dog with a sad face and arms long enough to wrap around a child. Children are told the dog is upset about what is happening and asked to take care of it. By the time of that report, some 60,000 Israeli children had received one, including children in Sderot near the Gaza border, and the dogs had been sent to Japan after the 2011 tsunami.
In Barras’s telling, a child who won’t admit to being afraid will say the dog is afraid. The fear gets somewhere to go, and the child gets the job of comforting someone, a small measure of control in a life where war has taken most of it. Each dog comes with a journal, written in Hebrew, which Tikva’s students learn.
Barras brought Hibuki to Temple Beth Am so the congregation could learn about it and support it. In December 2024, the congregation hosted Hen-Gal, by then a clinical psychologist, to present Hibuki therapy for traumatized children ages 3 to 9, and asked members to donate to the program.
How Ethan Barras Brought Hibuki to Bucharest
Taking Hibuki to Tikva was Ethan’s idea. The question was whether a method built for children on the Gaza border could work for children displaced by the war in Ukraine. The Barrases put it to Hen-Gal, of the Hibuki program.
“He said, of course,” Barras said.
Ethan taught the Temple Beth Am community about the program and raised money for Tikva. In Bucharest, he taught Tikva’s educators how Hibuki works. Temple Beth Am’s account of the trip names helping the children cope with post-traumatic stress as a central goal. Barras wrote there that he found a community where children “have been given new opportunities to grow up in a warm and loving Jewish environment.”
The next step is still ahead. The Hibuki team has agreed to help Tikva’s students use the dogs, Barras said, but turmoil in the Middle East has so far kept the Israeli team from traveling to Bucharest with the dogs to train the staff. He hopes it happens as soon as possible.
Ethan also brought a camera. His footage is becoming a short film about Tikva for Temple Beth Am to use internally as it raises money for the school. Barras said he hopes the congregation will raise $20,000 to $30,000 for Tikva this year.
What Ten Years of a Sister School Adds Up To
The gala Barras declined a decade ago would have raised its money and been forgotten by spring. The sister-school arrangement has outlasted a war, a 90-hour bus ride and a move to a third country, and its newest piece came from the rabbi’s son: a stuffed dog with long arms.
A toy doesn’t end anyone’s trauma. What it gives a child who has lost a family and then a city is a way to answer the question honestly, as long as someone asks about the dog.
