25/05/2026
Hello everyone,
We recently celebrated 4 years of Parasolka. We truly appreciate everyone who has been with us throughout this journey — or even just part of it :)
Below you can find an English transcription of a speech by our founder.
You can find the full video from the event in the first comment.
Hello.
Every year, on the anniversary of Parasolka, I wear a Ukrainian vyshyvanka as a sign of solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
But today, my people and my country need solidarity no less.
And that is why I am standing before you now wearing a kippah and speaking to you in Hebrew.
Before I begin, I want to thank the teachers and Vika.
You are doing enormous work. And even if sometimes I get angry and say otherwise — don’t believe me.
Many of you know that I am an Israeli Jew.
My people and my country have never been especially popular.
And while it once amused me how many people believed that a handful of Jews were responsible for all the problems in the world, lately it has stopped being funny. Honestly, it is starting to scare me.
But what hurts me the most is not even open antisemitism. It is the sentence said as a compliment:
“You’re not a typical Jew.”
Not that “typical Jew” from other people’s imagination — caricatured, greedy, bloodthirsty, guilty of all the world’s problems.
But “good.” Kind. Generous. Ready to help.
And the strangest thing is that most people have never actually met that “typical Jew.”
So today I want to tell you about those “untypical” Jews I met after I started working on Parasolka.
The first was Vladislav Plaskov, a friend of mine from Israel. He called me and said that he and his colleagues had collected money, and asked how it could be used most effectively to help Ukrainians.
With that money, we rented a place, found a teacher, and started organizing art lessons.
Some time later, Kseniya wrote to me — someone I did not know at all at the time.
She saw my posts inviting children to art classes and offered financial support.
Later it turned out that Kseniya and her partners were also “untypical” Jews.
When Parasolka started to grow, many children joined us, and the place we had became too small. I started looking for a new space.
And honestly, it is a little embarrassing to admit — until that moment I did not even know there was an Israeli Cultural Center in Budapest.
But honestly, I’m pretty sure they had never heard of me either…
Otherwise, maybe they would not even have let me cross the doorway.
I wrote them an email asking for help.
Sabina replied to me.
She spoke with her colleagues in Hungary, and they spoke with their colleagues in Israel.
And within three weeks, we were already here. And we began… destroying this place.
By now you have probably understood — both Sabina and all her colleagues were also “untypical” Jews.
While we were here, delegations from Jewish and Christian communities from all over the world visited us —
South Africa, South America, Europe, Britain, the United States.
They loved what we were doing. They praised us, gave us advice, helped us.
But none of them were surprised.
For them, it was… normal. Typical.
Because people who have actually met Jews know this: helping when it is possible to help — is a very typical Jewish trait.
I know many people think about Jews:
“This can’t come from nowhere. People don’t just say these things for no reason.”
But those are exactly the same words I heard when I told friends in Russia that Ukraine was not run by neo-Nazis.
Today there are more and more places in the world where it is enough just to say who you are — and people will already start hating you.
Without a conversation. Without trying to understand. Simply because of the fact itself.
And so I have a request for you.
The next time you hear that Jews are responsible for all the sins of the world — and it will probably happen sooner than we would like —
try not to think about the Jews you have heard about.
Think about the ones you actually know.
Those “untypical” Jews who, in reality, are the most typical of all.
