Israeli artist Zoe Sever has painted on the walls of already many shelters in Ukraine together with the children and staff

Boris Lozhkin
2 min readSep 16, 2024

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  • Children, let’s think up what you’d like to see outside your window. Any fantasy, any country, anything that even doesn’t exist in the world.

- Mountains!

- Forest!

- Japan! Mount Fuji!

- Polar bears playing basketball!

- Seagulls!

- Sea!

- China!

- Space!

- What about you, Masha? (fictitious name)

- I want to see my dad.

- And what about traveling anywhere?

- We’ve had enough of traveling in 2022 and came back. I don’t want to go anywhere. My home is here. I want to go to a cadet school. I was supposed to enroll this spring, but I ended up in the hospital…

This is how Israeli artist Zoe Sever described her dialog with children before starting painting on the walls of a bomb shelter in one of the children’s hospitals in Ukraine.

Young patients often spend most of the day in the bomb shelters due to prolonged alarms. The “Window to the World” project of the Embassy of Israel in Ukraine literally brightens the hours of forced stay of children in the basements. The gray concrete walls are transformed into a world that the little Ukrainians themselves want to see. A world without war.

Zoe has painted on the walls of already many shelters together with the children and staff. For security reasons, the locations are not disclosed in advance.

On the photo you can see a children’s hospital in my native Kharkiv. You can already see here bears playing basketball, a blue eagle, mountains and the sea. And there is no war.

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Boris Lozhkin

President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress. https://borislozhkin.org/