Family Extends Itself to Welcome Kosovo Refugees

Renee Laub Vlashi has 32 in-laws she’s never met, and they’re arriving in Los Angeles this morning for an extended visit.

She’s Jewish; they’re Muslim. She speaks English; they speak Albanian. She, her husband, Hajrush, and their 20-month-old daughter, Jeta, live in a pleasant house in West Hills, but it’s not that big.

Fortunately, the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles will help provide housing, clothing and other necessities for the first ethnic Albanians from Kosovo to arrive in Southern California under the recently announced federal resettlement program.

When Renee Vlashi first heard a few days ago that all those Vlashis were on the way, she felt momentarily overwhelmed. She’s a graduate student at Cal State Northridge. Her husband is a waiter at the Out Take Cafe in Studio City who immigrated to the United States from Kosovo eight years ago. Both are in their 30s, and their assets are understandably limited.

But Renee Vlashi is resourceful, and she found help.

She got on the phone, soon learning that the Jewish Federation is among seven nonprofit social services groups helping with the resettlement effort.

The fact that Kosovo Vlashis are Muslims didn’t matter a bit.

“We’re here to help,” said Miriam Prum Hess, an associate director of planning for the federation office here. “This is what we do.”

Renee Vlashi said she and her husband are “very, very grateful.”

Prum Hess and her associates got to work in a hurry.

Phone calls were made to the Vlashi in-laws, who had fled from their homes in a small border village in Kosovo when the NATO bombing began, and had dashed across to Macedonia and sanctuary.

The phone calls established the identities of Hajrush Vlashi’s mother, father, brother, two sisters and more than two dozen aunts, uncles and cousins.

Armed with this information, the federation enlisted the Vlashi family in the program that grants entry status to refugees who have relatives in the United States.

There’s apparently enough room for Hajrush Vlashi’s mother, father, sisters and brother in the house in West Hills, but there’s not enough for the rest of them.

The Jewish Federation got back on the phone, lining up housing in private residences.

“People have been incredible in opening up their homes,” Prum Hess said.

But Renee Vlashi said there’s still a lot to do.

As many as sixteen more Kosovo Vlashis may soon be on the way, and housing would have to be found for them, too.

“We’ll have to teach all of them English, get them jobs, get their kids in school,” she said.

How long the refugees will stay is uncertain. Although repatriation is the eventual goal for most of them, that cannot begin until the situation in Kosovo has stabilized.

Had Renee Vlashi ever imagined anything like this when she met her husband several years ago at a social gathering in Westlake Village? “Not really,” she said with a chuckle.

“Later, I hoped to go over there after things cleared up and meet all those people,” she said. “It turned out the other way around.”