Over 200 Jews from Ukraine arrived in Israel this week, fleeing the country’s civil war, The Washington Post reported Thursday, bringing the yearly total up to more than 5,000. The Post focused its report on a family, identified only by their first names, “Yulia, Kostiantyn and their daughter, Valerie.”

So on Monday, parents, daughter and dog — with 226 other Ukrainian Jews — left Kiev for Israel on a charter flight funded by a Christian-Jewish charity. In Israel, a government agency waited to help them start a new life. The new arrivals joined more than 5,000 Ukrainian Jews who have moved to Israel in the past year, about 1,300 of them from eastern areas claimed by separatists.

The number of Ukrainians arriving in Israel in 2014 is more than double that of the previous year. The Ukrainian government, which is facing an economic crisis, has little means to help those internally displaced by the war, now about 500,000, according to the United Nations.

But groups such as the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), which has spent more than $2 million on resettlement flights in the past year, and the Jewish Agency for Israel, a nonprofit organization that supports Jewish communities around the world, have stepped in to aid those of Jewish heritage. The Israeli government also offered the option to resettle in Israel.

The Post observes that the latest Jewish exodus from Ukraine is occurring 70 years after 900,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in the Holocaust and twenty years after one million Jews left the former Soviet Union. Kostiantyn told the Post, “Since I was small, my grandmother always told me to hide the fact I was Jewish. Now I don’t care what people say about me being Jewish. The only people who have helped here have been the Jews.”

According to the European Jewish Congress, there are between 360,000 and 400,000 Jews in Ukraine, making it the fifth-largest Jewish community in the world after Israel, the United States, France, and Russia.

The increase in Jewish immigration to Israel from Ukraine due to the unrest was already apparent in May, when it was announced that immigration to Israel was up more than 140% compared to the previous year.

France has been experiencing a similar increase in Jews leaving to go to Israel. It is estimated that the rise in anti-Semitism and economic uncertainty will contribute to 6,000 French Jews immigrating to Israel this year.

[Photo: International Fellowship of Christians and Jews / YouTube ]