Mike Evans launched a global campaign to mobilize support for Ukraine

JERUSALEM, April 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mike Evans, the founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem launched today from Jerusalem a global campaign to mobilize support for Ukraine.

The campaign is called "Ukraine Can't Breathe". Evans has hung a three-story flag of Ukraine with those words on his Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem. "Ukraine Can't Breathe" is a slogan associated with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Evans said the phrase is used against inequality.

"If ever there was inequality, the Ukrainians are indeed the victims. They need all the support they can get," Evans said and continued: "They can't breathe, to breathe you must have air, Ukraine must have air space to breathe.

"Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust. The entire globe needs to stand up for the Ukrainian people."

Almost half the children of Ukraine, now over 3 million people, are refugees. Evans and his son, Michael Evans II, just returned from Ukraine. It was the second trip in two weeks to deliver 19 tons of food to feed 45,000 people.

Michael, Mike's son, was in Kyiv, taking the food to the Jewish community with the convoys. Evans has been working in Ukraine for more than a decade, feeding Holocaust survivors and Jewish orphans. He has also built a community center in Jerusalem for Ukrainian Holocaust survivors, and beautiful apartments for them at his Friends of Zion Heritage Center campus. He feeds several thousand Holocaust survivors each week in Israel. In addition, Friends of Zion holds many events for them, including a dance at the Kotel where they are Bar and Bat Mitzvahed.

Evans hosted dozens of children from the "Alumim" children's home in Zhitomir, who managed to leave Ukraine after 11 days and arrive to Israel, and he will be caring for and supporting their needs. Also present at the event were some families of Holocaust survivors who, with the help of the Friends of Zion and Yad Ezer Lahaver organizations, were rescued from Lvov, Mosul, Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine. Eliyahu Gerinkevitch, a soldier who immigrated from Ukraine 7 years ago and serves in the Jerusalem Border Police, told his personal story and thanked the people of Israel and Friends of Zion for being able to rescue his entire family from Kiev, after he had not seen them for three years.

Evans said in the event: "The world must not be silent. Young people can organize marches and fundraisers to show compassion for the suffering people. Millions of them are refugees who have nothing, and those living in Ukraine are suffering unspeakably. They all can't breathe and all their lives matter."

That's why I am launching the Ukraine Can't Breathe campaign. Please go to https://ukrainehope.com/. Help a refugee family that is stuck with no country, no home, and no husband, and Ukrainians who are in living hell in Ukraine with no electricity, food, or even medicine.

For inquiries, contact Tal Marom Spokesperson for FOZ [email protected]

SOURCE Friends of Zion