KFAR CHABAD, Israel -- In a sparse white room with a single bed and an old table, the housemother hands the little girl the telephone. The girl puts the receiver up to her ear, brushing back long brown locks. Timidly, she speaks into a mouthpiece that covers most of her tiny face.

"Da," she murmurs in her native Russian to a voice about 1,500 miles away, as the Israeli sunlight filters through white curtains. Yes, Mother, I'm OK. Yes, the dormitory is good. Yes, the food here is good.

Most 8-year-old girls might react shyly to unfamiliar surroundings, meekly watching the grown-ups move around them. But Katia, alone in a strange land and ill with radiation poisoning, craves attention.

Her large almond eyes search for approval from the faces around her. She chatters and giggles and wraps her thin arms around the Russian housemother's neck when she climbs into the woman's thick lap.
"I'm not afraid," she says in Russian, but her big eyes fill with fear.

Two days earlier, Katia and 14 other children ages 7 to 13, stepped off an airliner from Kiev, Ukraine, in the middle of the night to begin what their worried-sick parents in the former Soviet Union hope will be a new and healthier life in Israel. A 30-minute ride later, the children stepped into Kfar Chabad, a pleasant village southeast of Tel Aviv filled with 4,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews from the Chabad Movement, a sect of Hassidic Judaism based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Since 1990, the movement has been bringing children to Israel from radiation-contaminated areas of the former Soviet Union under the auspices of a program called Chabad Children of Chernobyl. Kfar Chabad means, simply, Chabad Village.

The children's arrival last week marked the 15th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 exploded at a Soviet nuclear power plant outside the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl.

Over the next few days, an estimated 100 tons of radioactive waste escaped into the air, soil and water of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. By comparison, just 65 pounds of radioactive uranium were contained in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Born in the areas contaminated after the blast, each of the 2,084 children who have traveled to Kfar Chabad suffers from some radiation-related disorder. The most common problems stem from thyroid malfunctions. But pneumonia, gum decay, tonsillitis, birth defects and damaged immune systems are also frequently found among the boys and girls.

And then there is the cancer.

Like most of the children who arrived here last week, Katia spent time in a hospital in her hometown of Kiev, though she doesn't know why. Born seven years after the disaster, she says she has never heard of Chernobyl.

Her brown eyes stare blankly when the housemother asks about radiatzia, the Russian word for radiation. "My head hurt, and I had a stomachache," she says with a shrug when queried about her hospital stay.

Doctors at Kfar Chabad don't yet know what is wrong with Katia. They are waiting for her medical records to arrive from Kiev, but they won't rely on the diagnoses of her Ukrainian doctors. Once Katia settles into her new routine, she will undergo a battery of examinations here.

She looks healthy while she giggles with her newfound friend, an 11-year-old girl from Belarus also named Katia, whom she met at the Kiev airport.

She is full of the energy of a normal 8-year-old. Her cheeks glow, and her complexion is smooth and a light-olive color.
Most of the children here, in fact, appear healthy at first glance. That is because radiation is insidious, often taking years, even decades, to work its evil upon the body. The longer a person is exposed to radiation, research suggests, the more likely that person is to develop disease.

For that reason, Katia's mother, Ira, packed Katia's few belongings in a small bag last week. She allowed her daughter to bring her favorite toy, a green-and-yellow stuffed bunny rabbit. A stuffed orange goose had to stay behind.

Then Katia, her mother and her grandmother drove in the family car for 30 minutes to the airport in Kiev, Katia recalls. There, other children were gathering from places all over Ukraine and Belarus, the two former Soviet republics hardest hit by the Chernobyl disaster. At the airport, her mother waved goodbye.

"She told me I was a good girl, and I would be healthy in Israel," Katia says. "She said the air here is clean."

Jay Litvin, the Chabad medical liaison who compiles research for the movement, has been traveling to the areas affected by the Chernobyl disaster for the past five years. He paints a grim picture of lands contaminated with radioactive substances released by the blast.

Immediately after the disaster, he says, the Soviet authorities moved entire populations out of villages near Chernobyl and designated contaminated areas as closed military zones. They cut down radiated forests, knocked down buildings, then buried the debris under tons of dirt.

The measures helped for a while.

But the contaminated wood rotted, and radioactive particles mixed with the silt and seeped into the region's water supply. Cows ate contaminated grass. Farmers harvested contaminated vegetables in contaminated soil.

Once, Litvin recalls, he saw people planting crops across a road from a field that the authorities had deemed too poisoned to use.
Children drank cow milk that doctors here say contained radioactive iodine, one of 126 radioactive isotopes released by the explosion. Iodine is a nutrient that the thyroid seeks, says Litvin. Unlike children in the United States, whose diet contains iodine supplements from sources such as iodized salt, boys and girls in the Ukraine and Belarus often lack the substance.

"Their thyroids were like little dry sponges," says Litvin.

"They just soaked it up," he says. "Those little thyroids weren't smart enough to know that the iodine was soaked with radioactive material."

To give one example, the rate of thyroid cancer in Belarus, adjacent to Ukraine where the disaster took place, had risen 500 percent by 1995, according to the World Health Organization.

In Gomel, one of the cities in Belarus hardest hit by the disaster, more than one in every three children who were age 4 or younger at the time is expected to eventually develop thyroid cancer.

At Kfar Chabad, 38.6 percent of the children have some sort of thyroid problem, not including those who just arrived and have not yet been tested. Goiter, an enlargement of the thyroid gland, is the most common ailment.

The health statistics are not getting better as time goes by.

In fact, they are getting worse.

A study released last August and reported in the October issue of the British Medical Journal found that children born in affected areas after the Chernobyl disaster had a greater chance of developing thyroid cancer, gastrointestinal and lymphatic disorders and other radiation-related problems than those who were more than 1 year old when the reactor exploded.

During the first year of life, the study found, a child is most delicate and susceptible to disease. Babies grow by leaps and bounds in the first 12 months of life. Cells multiply rapidly. The least amount of radiation looms large in their tiny bodies.

"Infants are more vulnerable. This is what we found," says Dr. Alf Fischbein, the director of the Selikoff Center for Environmental Health and Human Development who conducted the study of 1,080 children ages 5 to 15 living in Kfar Chabad.

The town is easily identified along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway because of a large brownstone that stands several stories above the white stucco houses of the village.

The building is an exact replica of the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn. Every detail has been duplicated here, down to an inscription above the white entrance.

Chabad members built the replica at the behest of the movement's spiritual leader, the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. Since his death, no one has replaced him as the new "Lubavitcher rebbe," as the movement's spiritual leader is called.

Started in the Russian town of Lubavitch in the late 1700s, Chabad followers emphasize charity as a religious duty. Their motto is, "Someone else's material needs are your spiritual needs." The word Chabad is a Hebrew acronym for "wisdom, understanding and knowledge."

In 1990, the movement's Israeli members renovated a sprawling government absorption center built in the late 1960s to use as a home away from home for the children they planned to bring from the former Soviet Union.

They created separate classrooms and dormitories for boys and girls, in keeping with their religious teachings. They built a kitchen, a library, a synagogue and a computer room, and turned an underground bomb shelter into a gym.

The first planeload of children arrived Aug. 3, 1990.

Since then, the movement has organized 55 more flights, including the one that landed last week. Each child receives housing and schooling at a cost of $15,000 per year per child. The average stay in Israel is 20 months. The Israeli government provides 8 percent of the budget. The rest is covered by donations.

As soon as the boys and girls arrive, they are introduced to other children and shown around the grounds. Once they are established in their new surroundings, they see a resident pediatrician and a dentist.

In school, they learn Hebrew and English, but most of the classes are in their native Russian. They study math and science and the Bible. The boys wear yarmulkes, and the girls dress in long skirts and long-sleeved shirts.

And they are taught to visit the pediatrician, a stout Russian woman the children call "Auntie." Not just for the big problems. For any little thing.

With extremely low immune systems, these children cannot afford to sit out a cold at home or take an aspirin and crawl into bed. And because many of their health problems are cancer-related, early detection is crucial.

"We train them that if you have any little sniffle, you go to the doctor," says Yossie Raichik, director of the Chabad's Children of Chernobyl project.

"If you have a headache, you go to the doctor," Raichik says. "Their immune system is so low, they can't wait."

Yura is a blond, chubby, freckle-faced 11-year-old boy who came to Kfar Chabad two years ago from Gomel in Belarus.
He wears a black Raiders cap and blue jeans and likes to play computer games when he's not in school. When he stands, he shifts his weight to one foot and thrusts out his chest in a cool pose of defiance that belies his young age.
In other surroundings, a visitor might never guess that Yura is ill.

Yura has a thyroid disorder. The inside of his mouth is diseased. Over the years, he has had fillings and root canals and teeth pulled. In Gomel, the doctors wanted to remove his thyroid.

When he arrived in Israel, the local doctors disagreed. Instead, they give him thyroxin, a drug that helps regulate the thyroid and allows him to run and play like a normal boy. If he keeps improving, his pediatrician, "Auntie" Masha Schwartzman, says, he won't have to remain under observation.

When Yura boarded the airplane that took him to Israel in 1999, his mother told him that he would be home in six months.
In the months that followed, Yura has adapted to life in Kfar Chabad. He wears a Jewish skullcap under his Raiders cap and ties tsitsit, religious strings proscribed by the Torah, to his jeans. He plays soccer with his friends. His older brother, Grisha, who also suffers from radiation poisoning, has moved to Kfar Chabad.

Now, Yura says, he hopes his parents will decide to move to Israel, too.

In fact, about 70 percent of the parents of the Chabad Children of Chernobyl eventually immigrate to Israel, a goal of the Chabad movement, whose members believe that all Jews should move to Israel.

As the sun dips into the Mediterranean, casting long shadows in Kfar Chabad, Katia plays on the jungle gym outside. She slides down the slide and climbs up the bars, giggling and seeking attention.

Doctors hope she is young enough to be successfully treated. Just eating healthy food and drinking clean water -- something she did not enjoy at home -- will strengthen her immune system, they say. Proper diagnosis and vigilant attention to her health will also help.

Even if Katia lives a healthy life, the past week's planeload of children will not be the last to arrive at Kfar Chabad. The affects of Chernobyl will not end anytime soon.

Radioactive particles will remain in the region's fields and streams for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
That means the children born around Chernobyl will be exposed to radiation from birth, and even while in the womb, for years to come.

"You have whole populations born into that contamination," said Litvin, the Chabad medical liaison. "That's one of the reasons we say the Chernobyl disaster will get worse with time."