He stood at the window. That was the first thing I saw when I walked into the orphanage: A boy with big eyes in a blue shirt, his back to the bedroom. Everything around him was noise - children, caregivers, the clatter of breakfast, someone laughing down the hall - and he stood there, entirely still, looking out at a gray Odessa street on an autumn morning.

“That’s Danny,” one of the caregivers told me quietly, the way you explain a house rule everyone already knows. “He does this every morning. Wakes up before the others, before the kitchen even opens, and goes to the window. We stopped asking why. He needs it. This moment with himself.”

“How long does he stand there?” I asked.

“Sometimes five minutes. Sometimes 20. It depends on the day. It depends on what happened in the night.”

“And what does he see?” I asked.

She gave me a small, sad smile that held more than large words could. “That,” she said, “you will have to ask him.”

I stood there with a notepad in my hand and a pen behind my ear, following the gaze of an 8½-year-old boy toward a narrow street in a broad city that is fighting to stay alive. And I thought: Who is this boy? What brought him here? And what, in the middle of the din of a wartime orphanage, has managed to make him look so complete? The answers I found are the story I am writing now.

When you start digging into Danny’s story, you discover that it begins, like too many stories of Jewish children in Ukraine, with an absence. His original name was Denis. He was born in December 2018. His mother, a young woman whose details are blurred in the official files, disappeared. She did not die, was not hospitalized, did not move to another city, and forgot to notify anyone. She walked away one day and never came back. The father appears nowhere. No grandparents to be found. No uncle, no neighbor to take responsibility. Only a small boy, about a year and a half old, inside the Ukrainian state orphanage system, which does what systems do: Numbers, files, waits.

A year after him, in December 2019, his brother was born. His name was Anton. Exactly one year between the two of them, as if fate had arranged for the brothers to stay close. Anton eventually reached the same institution. Two children, the same mother who vanished, the same blurred prospects.

In early 2021, somewhere between official papers and human beings who still believe they have a part to play, a message reached a man I have not yet named. It came from the Ukrainian authorities. Two Jewish children in a state orphanage. What should be done with them?

Rabbi Avraham Wolff, a Chabad emissary and chief rabbi of Odessa and southern Ukraine, is not what I expected. I expected an orator: A man with prepared answers, ready quotes and stories polished over the years. After 34 years as an emissary - 34 years of building a network of Jewish institutions in post-Soviet Ukraine, building a community on ruins, raising orphans on soil that has not fully thawed - I expected someone who knows how to package himself, who knows what to tell a reporter.

He sits across from me. The desk is buried under papers it is better not to ask about. The phone rings; he silences it without looking. Then he says: “They told us there were two Jewish children. There was nothing to think about. We took them.”

That is all. I tried to get him to expand. To add something. To describe the moment, the decision, what went through his head. He looks at me with the patience of a man explaining something simple to someone hunting for a complication. “There is nothing to expand on. Jewish children, they have no one. This is what we do. Only this. Period.”

It is what they have done for decades. Mishpacha Ukraine, the network built by the rabbi and his wife, Rebbetzin Chaya Wolff, currently supports 124 orphans and children from broken homes. Children the state did not know what to do with. Children whose families could not, or would not, keep them. Children like Denis and Anton, who arrived with names nobody had particularly chosen and a future nobody had yet written.

“Every child who comes to us,” Rabbi Wolff told me, “comes with his own story. We don’t choose the easy stories. We don’t choose at all - the stories choose us.”

Denis came first. Two and a half years old, quiet in the way experienced people recognize, with eyes that look at the world from an angle it takes time to learn to read. The professional staff noticed quickly. A child who reacts differently. Who struggles with eye contact. Who withdraws when the room is too crowded. Who, when the noise rises, goes inward, somewhere the rest of us cannot always follow.

The diagnosis came quickly: Autism. Danny is a child on the spectrum.

Chaya Wolff, who runs the Chabad school network in Odessa and is responsible for the therapeutic and educational side of the entire operation, heard the diagnosis and said one sentence: “He doesn’t need less. He needs more.”

I asked her where that confidence comes from - the conviction that an orphaned, autistic boy growing up between gray walls is worth this kind of investment.

She looked at me as though the question itself were foreign to her. “Anyone who works with special-needs children has to work on the assumption that the present situation is a temporary disability, and that over time real improvement is entirely possible. The confidence that progress is possible is what puts the energy into the work. That is our motto. Danny is not a closed case. He is a child in the middle of a process.”

I spoke with Chaya Wolff separately, in a short meeting that ran long because I did not know how to stop asking questions. She is a woman whose speech is saturated with expertise rather than sentiment - anyone running a network this size in wartime has to be - but when she talks about Danny, something shifts. Not much. Enough for anyone watching to notice.

“Danny is a child who teaches you patience,” she said. “Not patience out of resignation, but patience that comes from recognizing that he has his own pace, and that his pace is no less valid than anyone else’s. You just have to learn to hear it.”

I asked whether it was hard. “Anything that costs something is hard - time, dedication, money, whatever it costs is hard. The question isn’t whether it’s hard. The question is whether it’s worth it.” She paused. “And the answer to that,” she said, “you’ll get on September 1.”

Meanwhile, Anton - his little brother, whom the staff had already nicknamed Mendy among themselves - waited. Ukrainian bureaucracy is not fast in peacetime. In wartime, as I discovered, it is almost frozen. And then the war broke out.

Nobody living in Ukraine needs me to explain what happened that morning. I can only tell what happened at the Mishpacha orphanage in Odessa, as it was described to me.

Rabbi Wolff’s phone rang before dawn. The first word he heard was “bombs.” One hundred and twenty-four children, the middle of the night, bomb shelters. Alina Chubatova, the orphanage director, told me the caregivers were up within minutes. “Nobody needed instructions,” she said. “Everyone knew what to do. Everyone knew the children were watching them, and that if they fell apart, the children would fall apart. So they didn’t fall apart.”

Rabbi Wolff describes that morning without drama, the way you would describe logistics. “You have to get them downstairs. You need them calm. They need to eat. Everything continues.” I asked whether he was afraid. He weighed the question seriously. “There was no time to be afraid. Fear is a luxury we don’t have. You have 124 children. You act.”

And Danny, three and a half at the time, did what he does. He folded himself into a corner of the room, wrapped himself in a blanket and stayed there. He did not scream. He did not cry. He went inward, to a place only he can find.

“That,” the rabbi said quietly when I told him the caregivers had described it to me, “was actually the hardest thing to watch. Because he couldn’t tell us where he was. He couldn’t tell us whether he was all right. All we could do was be there and wait for him to come back.”

About two months after the war broke out, in the middle of the chaos, Rabbi Wolff broke through the walls of bureaucracy and pulled Mendy out of the state institution. A two-and-a-half-year-old boy who entered an orphanage under wartime conditions and found his brother there. Two brothers, together again - as though the world, for all its disorder, had decided to get at least one thing right.

In the first months of the war, with sirens in the background and with air that smells the way air smells when you know something larger than yourself is happening, the circumcision ceremonies were held. Rabbi Wolff stood and said the words that have been said for thousands of years. Denis was given a Jewish name: Danny - Daniel. Anton, his younger brother, was given a Jewish name: Mendy - Menachem Mendel. The Rebbe’s name. A name that carries a legacy of generations, worlds of meaning and consolation. As a journalist listening, and as the father of a son also named Menachem Mendel, something in me was touched - something it is hard, and perhaps unnecessary, to put into words.

“How do you perform a brit when there are sirens outside?” I asked the rabbi. He was quiet for a moment, then smiled the small smile of someone who has thought about this a great deal. “Maybe,” he said at last, “that is exactly why it was so profound. Because everything could end. And you still bind the child to the covenant of Abraham. You are saying: Even if everything falls, he belongs. He has roots. He has a name. He has a place in the chain of generations.”

There are 124 children in the Mishpacha Ukraine orphanages, and Danny and Mendy are also two of 23 in the network who have no relatives anywhere in the world. None at all. No parent, no grandparent, no distant uncle to call in an emergency. For those 23, Rabbi Wolff and his wife have taken personal and official responsibility: Legal guardianship.

When I asked Chaya Wolff what that means in practice, she answered directly: “It means that when Danny is sick at night and needs a hospital, we get the call. When Mendy is frightened by a siren and can’t fall asleep, we get the call. When a decision has to be made - medical, educational, travel, anything - we are the parents. Exactly like parents, only we started later and with more paperwork.” As a journalist who covers Jewish institutions around the world, that detail hit me hard: They are not simply institution directors or community leaders. They are legal and emotional fathers and mothers, around the clock, to 23 children who have no one else.

Before moving on to the other rooms, the caregivers and the director, I sat with Rabbi Wolff a few minutes longer. I asked him the question that had been on my mind since I walked into the building: How do you look at a boy like Danny - a boy the world does not always understand, whom systems do not always know what to do with - and see in him not a problem to be solved but something else entirely?

Rabbi Wolff was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “The Lubavitcher Rebbe once said something about autistic children that I come back to often. He said that being autistic doesn’t mean they have no connection with anyone. They have no connection with other human beings, but with God they have a connection like everyone else, and more so - because since they are not preoccupied with human beings, they are preoccupied with their connection to God.” He paused. “When I see Danny standing at the window in the morning, I think about that sentence. I don’t know what he sees out there. But maybe that is exactly what he is occupied with.”

Chaya Wolff, sitting a little further off and listening, added quietly: “The Rebbe called such children ‘my generals’ - the words he used about children with autism. Generals. Not disabled, not limited. Generals. Anyone who grows up alongside a child like this understands why.”

Alina Chubatova is a woman whose eyes attest to experience - not the kind written on a résumé, but the kind written on a face, in the way she weighs words before she says them.

“We went down to the shelter this past year more times than I have time to count,” she says in a flat voice. “The children know the drill by now. They wake up, take their blanket, go down. There are children who also take one toy, because they’re allowed one toy. And there are children who take exactly the same toy every time. The very same one. Because that is what helps them feel that something stays.”

When I asked her about Rabbi Wolff, something in her expression changed - not the way I expected, but the opposite. “Rabbi Wolff is the person who is there,” she said after a moment. “It sounds simple, but it isn’t. Plenty of people mean well. He is there. During bombardments, at night, in the morning when there’s a problem with a child, on Shabbat, on holidays, on days with no particular reason. Even when he is physically in the synagogue, in a classroom, in a meeting. Even when he is very far away, somewhere in the world looking for supporters for this enormous enterprise, we know he is with us. That changes everything.”

The caregivers, whom I met separately in a small room with hot coffee and no management present, describe a job that demands a daily, renewed decision to stay.

“There are days when I drive home and ask myself why I’m coming back tomorrow,” one of them said, with an honesty that surprised me. “And then I walk in the next morning and Danny is already standing at the window, and Mendy is already running down the hall making half the house laugh, and I know exactly why.”

“The children feel everything,” said another. “When we’re afraid, they’re afraid. When we’re tired, they’re tired. So we don’t show it. Even when the window rattles from an explosion nearby, we smile and say it’s fine. And slowly, it becomes fine.”

And Mendy? Every one of the caregivers laughed when I mentioned his name. “Mendy,” one of them said, “is medicine. He runs around all day, making people laugh, causing havoc, pulling other children out of their sadness without even knowing he’s doing it. There are children who carry their hardship like a heavy load. Mendy carries it like wings.”

Good journalism means asking the questions people would rather not answer. I asked Rabbi Wolff about money. He did not dodge.

“One orphanage is a lot of money. Two is more. A whole network - orphanages, kindergartens, schools, food warehouses, a clinic, bomb shelters, psychologists, social workers, caregivers - that is already a huge operation. And almost five years into a war it becomes an extremely heavy burden. When donors think twice, and rightly so, before sending a donation; when inflation is climbing; when salaries have to go up and food prices are doubling - every month is a struggle for people’s lives. It isn’t easy.”

I asked whether there had been months when he did not know how he would pay. He looked at me and said, “There were months.” Nothing more. And that said everything.

For Danny alone, the decision to place him in mainstream education requires a certified one-on-one teacher trained to work with children on the spectrum, additional hours, adapted equipment and constant coordination with the school staff. “It costs,” Chaya Wolff says, with the simplicity of someone long past the stage of doubts. “But what’s the alternative - to give up on him? To put him in a corner and decide he’s worth less? No. There is no alternative.”

Behind these figures stands a staggering financial reality. Running the Mishpacha Ukraine network and its 124 children - from generators for cold Odessa nights to psychological treatment and the intensive individual support that children like Danny require - runs to millions of dollars a year, on a budget that depends entirely on the generosity of the Jewish world. Without that support, the enterprise simply could not keep going.

I was there: The Chabad school in Odessa, September 1, the opening day of the school year. In Ukraine this is more than a date. It is a national ceremony, a declaration that life goes on, that children are going to school, that teachers stand at the entrance smiling, that flowers are sold on every street corner. Even in wartime - perhaps especially in wartime, because it is an act of quiet, deep resistance to everything the war is trying to steal.

About 450 children, 124 of them from the Mishpacha Ukraine orphanages. Blue and white balloons, the smell of a new morning, girls with white bows in their hair and boys in pressed uniforms. And the eyes of parents, guardians, caregivers and a director, watching and seeing not only this day but the whole road that led to it.

I stood to one side with my notepad and wrote. And then I stopped writing, because I saw them: Two boys, hand in hand, moving toward the school gate through a wave of children, colors and noise. The older one in a white shirt, a new schoolbag on his back, a serious, deep expression on his face, as if he knew something important was happening. The younger one half a head shorter, walking with a bounce as though the floor were playing music beneath him, smiling in every direction - at the flowers, at the balloons, at strangers going past. Danny. Mendy. Danny is 8½. Mendy is 7. Both of them starting first grade. Together.

Yes, both in first grade. Danny, whose autism slowed parts of his educational development, and Mendy, at the natural starting age, arrived at the same point at the same time. As if they had waited for each other. As if their story, which began in a separation neither of them chose, had been arranging itself all along for togetherness.

Before going in, I stopped Rabbi Wolff for a moment and asked him: When you look now at Danny going into first grade, how do you explain this story to yourself?

He thought about it. “There are children whose bodies are flawed but whose souls are perfectly whole. When I look at Danny, I don’t see what he lacks. I see what he has - and what he has is a perfectly whole soul.”

Walking beside Danny is a teacher. Not at the edge of the classroom but inside it, at his side. A teacher trained specifically to work with children on the spectrum, who chose the job not for lack of an alternative but because she wanted it. “Danny is a child who has a lot to say,” she told me when we met before the school year began. “He just doesn’t say it in our language. Part of my job is to learn his language, not only to make him learn ours.”

She will be there when the classroom is too loud. When the words on the board are too hard. When the world moves forward too fast and Danny needs a moment to stop and return to himself. And Danny will learn - as his “parents,” Rabbi and Rebbetzin Wolff, decided - not off to the side, not in a separate room, not with a label on the door. Inside. As part of it. As a child who has a place. I closed my notepad.

I came to Odessa to write an article. I came with professional skepticism, a blank notepad and the feeling that I knew roughly what I would find.

I found a boy born to a mother who disappeared. Who grew up between gray walls with a name his “parents” chose for him. Who arrived at a place where his position on the spectrum was treated not as a reason to give up but as a reason to invest more. Who was a war survivor at three and a half, huddled under a blanket in the corner of a room. Who was given a Jewish name, a brit, responsibility, guardians who get the call at night when he is frightened. And who now goes to school holding his little brother’s hand, with a teacher who learned his language.

I found a rabbi who for 34 years has done one thing: Answered when someone calls to say there is a child with no one. I found Rebbetzin Chaya Wolff, who stands behind every child arriving at school in a new uniform, behind every trained teacher, behind every decision made quietly in a small room full of papers.

I found a director who knows how many times they have gone down to the shelter and does not mention it because it no longer surprises her. I found caregivers who smile when the window rattles. And I found Danny. Who does not know he is a story. Who does not know that a journalist came from far away to ask questions about him. Who will wake up tomorrow morning, like every morning, before everyone else, go to the window and look out at Odessa, at the street, at the morning that is his and no one else’s. And he will see exactly what he always sees.

And I, who wrote this article and know there is nothing to add, also do not know what he sees out there. But there is something in the way he stands that tells me he sees enough. That he, a child who was supposed to fall through the cracks, is standing steady, smiling, fed, clean and whole.

As we stand at the threshold of the New Year, in the days of mercy and forgiveness, we all wish to be inscribed and sealed for good and for a year of new beginnings. In a supplement devoted to the people of the year, to those who are changing the face of the world, it is clear to me that Danny is my child of the year - and that the vast enterprise of Rabbi and Rebbetzin Wolff in Odessa is the place where that miracle happens every single day.

But the miracle of Danny, and of the other 123 children of Mishpacha Ukraine, cannot go on marching alone. It needs partners. It needs open hearts in the Jewish world, so that tomorrow morning Danny can go on standing at the window, looking toward the future with confidence, knowing that someone is caring for him and for all 124 children sheltering in this institution.

Herzl Kosashvili is a journalist who documents Jewish communities around the world.

For more information, and to partner with the children of the Mishpacha Ukraine network ahead of the New Year

This article was written in cooperation with Mishpacha Ukraine