Communal Meals - Hot meals are served in community dining rooms in the former Soviet Union and parts of Central and Eastern Europe for destitute Jewish elderly as well as children and their families.

Dietsky or Children’s SOS and Basic Needs Programs were established by JDC in the former Soviet Union to respond to urgent needs among the region’s Jewish children. They provide one-time or ongoing material assistance that may include food, medicines and medical equipment, warm clothing, shoes, and blankets, as well as help in paying for medical operations, essential home repairs, and family heating and utility bills.

Monthly packages containing items such as oil, sugar, rice, grains, tea, pasta, and condensed milk are provided to elderly who are able to cook for themselves, and to vulnerable children and their families.

Part of the Hesed network’s hunger relief program in the former Soviet Union and also distributed to impoverished Jews in Europe, the sets may include fish, dairy products, eggs, fruit, and other perishable items. They are delivered primarily to needy elderly Jews who lack the strength or mobility to go to the market regularly, but are still able to cook for themselves; and to vulnerable Jewish children and their families who depend on JDC assistance to meet their basic needs.

Home care workers assist homebound elderly with basic activities of daily living such as bathing, laundry, and cleaning; and help support the healthy growth and development of ill, homebound children.

The International Fellowship for Christians and Jews (IFCJ)-JDC partnership is helping to ensure the material and social well-being of tens of thousands of Jewish children at risk in the former Soviet Union. The partnership was established to provide a long-term response to the intense unmet needs facing Jewish children throughout the region.

A supplementary nutrition program for Jewish children in Moldova that was piloted in 2002, when JDC launched its first interventions for at-risk Jewish children in the former Soviet Union. Providing food packages to children in need and their families, it was the first of many projects subsequently developed as a result of JDC’s outreach effort to the region’s Jewish communities, inviting them to design programs that would build on existing resources to address the hardships facing disadvantaged children and youth in their midst. It is now part of Moldova’s NES Jewish Family Service, and the packages have been replaced by food cards.

Cooked meals are delivered to those elderly or children and their families who are homebound and immobile.

Medical care includes medicines, medical tests and consultations, rehabilitation treatment and equipment, hospitalization, and surgery.

An important part of Jewish community welfare services in various countries in Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, and Asia, the winter relief program helps beneficiaries—mostly elderly Jewish Holocaust survivors and also impoverished children—purchase warm clothing, blankets, and non-perishable foods and pay their home heating and utility bills.