'He will take you to your land'

Natasha Zotkina couldn't hold back her tears. She had accepted an invitation from an Ebenezer team "fishing " for Jews in Atkau, western Kazakhstan, to watch a film about how she and other Jews could be helped to go to Israel. She cried because she was vividly recalling the words of her father when she was nine - 26 years previously.

One evening he had taken her outdoors, pointed to the sky and asked: "What do you see, daughter?" "The moon, the stars." She replied. Then her father told her, "Behind the sky is Heaven, where your God lives. An invisible God. When you are bigger He will come to you and take you to your land." A few months later her father was dead.

Natasha has had a tragic life. At five she was badly burned in a paraffin stove accident. As she writhed in agony on the floor a neighbor screamed, "Let all the cursed Jews be burned up!" A year in hospital followed. Her mother died of tuberculosis. Six of her brothers and sisters subsequently died. The surviving eldest brother told her she was a Jew and how she could prove her Jewish identity.

She married but soon after giving birth to her son became very ill. In hospital, however, she started to seek the promises of the God her father had told her about.

When the Ebenezer team arrived in Aktau years later her husband had divorced her and taken away her son. But she was looking to God to bring her to the Promised Land.

"I am God, and there is no other…What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that I will do." Isaiah 46:9-11 (NIV)