As I stand up to leave Lucy Korsky’s house in Allentown, she offers me a baggie to take home some of the Russian cookies she’d served me along with hot tea and honey as we talked.

“If you don’t mind,” I say.

“If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered” is her reply.

That captures a couple of traits I learned fast about Lucy: she’s generous and she’s direct, speaking with the accent rooted in her childhood in Kyiv, Ukraine. The generosity was why I was there to talk with her—specifically, her generosity to the Lehigh Valley Jewish community realized in a commitment to the Life and Legacy program administered through the Jewish Federation.

Lucy thinks of this commitment as the legacy of generosity passed down by her mother and father, both of them Holocaust survivors, and continuing through to her 11-year-old grandson, Jaden. “I’m doing this in memory of my parents and for him and his generation,” she says. “I’d like to have a bridge between the old generation and the young generation of my grandson.”

That bridge runs all the way back to 1918, when her father, Yeremey Feldman, was born, just after the Russian Revolution, at the time Ukraine was in a fight for independence that ended with its incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1922. It was a time of famine and poor nutrition, so when he suddenly stopped walking at age 5, it may not have seemed as odd as it sounds now. “Then, a year later, he just started to walk,” Lucy says. “They found out later he had polio.”

World War II brought much tragedy to his family. He lost a brother and brother-in-law who were soldiers, and his oldest brother was murdered with his family in September 1941 among 30,000 Jews the Nazis killed in Kyiv in two days. Yeremey volunteered for the military but was exempt due to his childhood polio. He finished his engineering degree and went to work in the military steel industry in Donbas, until 1946.

Lucy’s mom, Dora, was born in 1920 and experienced her share of tragedy and loss during the war, too. Three members of her immediate family were killed.

Yeremey and Dora had met before the war, but lost contact. Only by “divine intervention” did they find each other again, Lucy says. This is just one miraculous event in a lifetime that she describes as “miracle after miracle.” Yeremey went to Kyiv from Donbas for a couple of days in July 1944 to find information about his family. He also hoped to find the young friend he’d called Dorochka: Dora. Instead, he found the building where she’d lived destroyed by bombs.

Depressed, he went into downtown Kyiv. Walking around there, he ran into Dora. “He told her,” Lucy reports, “I won’t let you go.” They got married the next day. They remained together for 63 years until Yeremey’s death in 2007 at age 89. Dora would live until 2018, to 98 years old. Both would die at home, by their choice. A powerful, spiritual experience near the end of Dora’s life made a lasting impression on Lucy. Lucy asked her mother, “What would you like to ask God? I will pray on your behalf.” Dora responded in a very quiet voice with one succinct request: “Peace in the world.”

After the war, Yeremey worked in construction management, in the effort to rebuild Kyiv. He and Dora had Lucy, their only child.

In just one example of Yeremey and Dora’s generosity, when Lucy was 14, the government provided the family with a one-room place to live. Employed as a manager, Yeremey was entitled to two rooms, and a two-room accommodation was available. “But he gave this to his worker because the worker had two children and my father had only one,” Lucy says.

In 1978, Lucy and her husband at the time emigrated with their son, Michael, to New York City, seeking freedom and a good future for Michael. Her parents followed the next year. Both Yeremey and Dora became American citizens and graduated cum laude from Touro College in their 70s; they both had a higher education from the Soviet Union.

All the family members originally settled in New York. Then Lucy, a civil engineer like her father, moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, for her first engineering job in the United States. Later she worked on a large AT&T construction project along what is now Route 222 in Breinigsville. In 1987 she moved to Allentown, where she remains today.

Yeremey and Dora moved to Allentown in 1996 to be closer to Lucy. In 2001 they were honored by the Lehigh County Office of Aging and Adult Services as Unsung Heroes. “It’s great to be independent and we’re very happy to be here in America,” Dora said at the time. They earned the award, presented during Older Americans Month, for their work helping older immigrants who spoke Russian read and write letters, documents, and other communications.

Lucy made her eventual commitment to the Life and Legacy program through the Jewish Federation to preserve their legacy. “For me it’s important that I would do something that they would do themselves,” Lucy says. “They treated people so nice. Everybody loved them. They were compassionate and very humble people.”

With that commitment, Lucy wants to make sure that grandson Jaden learns the lessons of her parents, their values and their focus. “My parents never had any material possessions yet never felt that they were poor because they were spiritually rich,” she says, pointing out that Jaden has lived a comfortable life, never in need. “I’d like him to know what is important in life. I’d like him to pay attention to qualities that you can’t buy. There are things you cannot put a price on.”

Jaden is understanding that lesson. Lucy’s letters to him every year on his birthday make that clear. “You are kind, respectful, open-minded, philosophical, analytical, funny, and most importantly, you have a big heart,” read her most recent birthday letter in early February.

One day when Jaden was 8 years old, Lucy says, his school had a holiday season store set up where kids could shop for gifts. Jaden had recently received $20 as a gift to him for the upcoming holiday, to spend on something for himself. Instead, he took that money with him to the school store to buy gifts for everyone in his family.

“He noticed one kid who was crying,” Lucy says, explaining that this story came to her not through Jaden himself, but through a school friend’s family. She says he gave the boy some of his own money to shop.

When asked about this later, Jaden nonchalantly defended the boy’s dignity too, for good measure: “No, he was not crying,” Lucy says Jaden reported. “He was just sad.”

Count that as one more miracle in a lifetime of miracles that Lucy has been blessed with, from coming to America and finding freedom, independence, and new horizons to explore, to having two successful careers, in engineering and later in physical therapy, to having her grandson, to being in a position to make a commitment to the Life and Legacy program.

“It’s a miracle for me that I’m participating in something so meaningful,” she says. “I hope it can inspire other people.”

If you’d like to continue your own legacy of generosity, you can make a commitment to the future of the Jewish community through the Life and Legacy program. Contact Aaron Gorodzinsky at aaron@jflv.org for information.