Valentina Milzon

Valentina Milzon (maiden name Leznik) was born in 1930 in Novokonstantyniv, a small Jewish-Ukrainian village in western Ukraine. She was the middle of five siblings. As a young child, she narrowly survived the Holodomor famine of the early 1930s. Years later, she would recall her childhood wish - to see bread on the table without feeling the desperate need to eat it.

In 1941, her life was once again upended by World War II and the Holocaust, forcing her family into years of fear and displacement. One of her most haunting memories was standing on a train platform in Kyiv and seeing the cruel smile of a Nazi pilot as he descended to kill the evacuees. Together with her mother and younger siblings, Valentina fled east into Russia and eventually to Tajikistan, where she again came close to losing her life during the brutal winter of 1942.

After the war, the family returned to Ukraine. In 1957 she married the love of her life, Zakhar Milzon. Together they endured many challenges, including the freezing –50 °F winters of Siberia in the early 1970s, where Zakhar worked in the military. In 1994, after decades of antisemitism and discrimination, the family made the difficult decision to leave everything behind and immigrate to the United States as refugees - starting anew for the sake of their children and grandchildren.

In this new chapter, Valentina became the heart of her family's life in America. While her children worked and studied long hours to build their futures, she devoted herself entir ely to caring for and raising her grandchildren. This selflessness defined her. She never thought of her own comfort before that of others, always finding ways to make someone else's day brighter, easier, or happier.

When people think of Valentina, they remember her smile - a smile that didn't just light up the room but made others smile in return. She was gentle and kind, always ready to welcome, to help, to listen. Yet beneath her warmth was remarkable strength. She held her family together through the hardest times and was someone you could always rely on. She turned strangers into friends and left lasting impressions wherever she went. Her cooking was legendary - friends of her grandchildren would often ask to visit just to taste her borscht or dumplings.

Words can never fully capture who Valentina was, but everyone who knew her felt the depth of her kindness and generosity. She lived with an open heart and gave freely of herself every day of her life.

She is survived by her two children, Svetlana and Gennady; three grandchildren, Tanya, Sergey, and Dima; and four great-grandchildren, Aiden, Galina, Anabel, and Tikhon.

Funeral service will be held on Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at The Temple Cemetery.