Hollywood actor cooks for refugees

A Hollywood actor and volunteers from the charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) cooked more than 400kg of brisket for Ukrainian refugees in Przemysl, Poland in honour of Passover.

On his Instagram page, actor Liev Schreiber wrote: “Let all who are hungry come and eat. Jews recite this ancient phrase during Passover, which begins Friday. Doing my part with WCK here in Poland, where we’re preparing traditional Passover delicacies for Ukrainian refugees.”

He described WCK as “the rockstar NGO [non-governmental organisation] serving and feeding those who have lost nearly everything”.

Schreiber, who last week had prepared borscht in a WCK kitchen for 1,500 refugees, then travelled to Lviv where he met more charity workers and witnessed air raid alarms before returning to his New York home.

He credits his maternal grandfather, Alex Milgram, who emigrated to the US from Ukraine almost a century ago, as a major influence in his life, and who enabled him to connect with his Jewish roots.

Schreiber described the annual seders at his grandfather’s house as “some of the best times of my life”, adding: “We’d all get together and me and my brothers would fight for the afikomen.”

It was announced this week that Schreiber will play Anne Frank’s father, Otto, in the Disney+ series A Small Light. It follows the life of Miep Gies (Bel Powley) who, along with her husband Jan, hid the Frank and Van Pels families from the Nazis in an attic for two years.