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A Jewish social service agency helped resettle young Ukrainians. Now the beneficiaries are giving back.
(New York Jewish Week) – On a sweltering July afternoon, 15 Ukrainian young adults gathered in a meeting room at the Jewish Community House in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. They toss a small ball to each other as an ice breaker — a way to indicate who should introduce themselves next.
As the ball flies around the room, each volunteer shares the Ukrainian city or town they are from, how they found the program and what their volunteering assignment is.
All of the participants left a country riven by war, were resettled in Brooklyn by the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst and are now giving back as part of the second cohort of a volunteer program entirely made up of Ukrainian refugees run by Repair the World Service Corps.
The relationship between the two organizations is reciprocal: The Ukrainian young adults are learning from Repair the World how to best give their time and labor to nonprofits and social services like the JCH of Bensonhurst, a community center and social services agency that has been helping to resettle them for the last year.
“This was a seamless integration of having an already-present population of young adults who are really interested in giving back to the community that’s helping them in their resettlement efforts by volunteering in different aspects in that community center,” said Michaela Slutsky, the Northeast regional director at Repair the World, who conceived the partnership six months ago. The national Jewish nonprofit mobilizes young Jewish adults for volunteering and community service.
Most of the participants so far are not Jewish — in fact, for those who lived outside Odessa or Kyiv, this is likely the first time they have interacted with Jewish institutions. But for volunteer Margaryta Monastyrska, a 21-year-old from Kyiv who is Jewish, it has been gratifying to see her peers learn about Jewish values.
“Nobody even asked me if I was Jewish or not,” Monastyrska told the New York Jewish Week through a translator. “They just helped me because they knew the situation in Ukraine. They helped me find a place to work and to find a community.”
“It’s really important that [the other Ukrainians] I volunteer with understand that they are not at any organization, but a Jewish organization,” she added. “I want them to understand that Jews are not some close community which helps only other Jews, that the Jewish people help everyone from any part of the world.”
For the first session of the summer, the group introduced themselves and talked about the Jewish concept of tzedakah over pizza at the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, July 6, 2023. (Julia Gergely)
Yehor, 19, who also participated in the first cohort of Repair the World’s Ukrainian Services Corps from March to May, said the best part of the program has been “eating pizza,” which they have at the end of every learning session. On a more serious note, he also said he enjoyed “having conversations about volunteering.”
A refugee from Kherson, Yehor came to New York in November with his parents and little brother. After a few months, he and his family — who are not Jewish — got connected with the JCH through their refugee resettlement program. Yehor went to the teen services department to ask about applying to colleges, boosting his resume, English classes and a part-time job. He was directed to the newly formed Ukrainian service corps.
It was teenagers like Yehor who helped inspire the partnership between Repair the World and the JCH. Since February 2022, when Russia launched its invasion in Ukraine, there has been an increasing number of Ukrainian young adults arriving at the JCH looking for jobs and career guidance. They also needed something to do and somewhere to meet other refugees who had been through the same experiences.
Repair the World provides a stipend to members for 10 to 12 weeks. Participants are matched with a volunteering project in the community they live in and meet weekly to learn about community service and Jewish values.
Slutsky has a lifelong connection with the JCH: Her great-grandparents volunteered there when they left the Soviet Union some 50 years ago, and the family has been deeply involved ever since. Slutsky herself had worked as the program director of the teen services department at the JCH for many years. Although the JCH and Repair the World have worked together to organize standalone projects and volunteer days, this is their first long-term partnership.
For the Ukrainian cohort, the Repair the World curriculum has been translated entirely into Ukrainian, and changes have been made to teach about Jewish values for those who may have never interacted with Jews before.
“There’s no way that our Repair staff would be capable of launching this cohort without working with JCH as a true partner,” Slutsky said. “JCH was a perfect fit because they get services here, they find community here, they find friends here. They feel integrated. The goal is when Repair walks away from running the cohort one day, these young adults will still have a place here in this community.”
Yehor’s first volunteering assignment was working in the JCH’s social services center, where he helped refugees like himself and others in need find jobs, attend career workshops and English classes, and get help resettling. This summer, he is working as a counselor at the Jewish Community House’s day camp, which enrolls 700 children.
Around 100 of the campers are Ukrainian refugees, and to have counselors who speak their native language, as well as understand their fears and anxieties about being in a new place, has been “a really big deal, it really helps the kids adjust,” said Gelena Blishteyn, the chief operating officer at the JCH. “We have a child who spent a long time in a shelter and is afraid of enclosed spaces. To have somebody there who speaks Ukrainian and knows exactly what this child has been through and can adjust the programming is really important.”
Some of the Ukrainian volunteers work in the JCH’s after-school program, where they are able to help out with the influx of Ukrainian-speaking children, while others work in senior centers and deliver meals to the elderly. Others work in the same social services department that initially helped them.
During the spring, the first cohort of volunteers planned a weekend excursion to the East Village to attend a Ukrainian Festival. (Courtesy Michaela Slutsky/Repair the World)
For the past 30 years, the JCH has been resettling Jews from the former Soviet Union and fostering a community of Russian-speaking Jews in Brooklyn. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they have resettled more than 7,000 refugees who have arrived in Brooklyn. And though the JCH works with anyone in New York — including the large Chinese population of Bensonhurst — many of their staff speak Russian or Ukrainian, as many of them are immigrants or first-generation Americans themselves.
For now, the Ukrainian volunteers are bonding with each other and getting to know their new city. At the same time, they are being exposed to community service through a Jewish lens. In a session attended by the New York Jewish Week, they spent time talking about tzedakah and tikkun olam — charitable giving and social action. Yehor said learning about Judaism has been one of his favorite parts of the experience so far.
“The main thing they try to accomplish is just get to know one another, form bonds and to create a community,” Blishteyn said. “Many of them come here completely alone. They don’t know anyone. So the most important part of this project, beyond professional success and financial aid, is to really get to form a community.”
Indeed, half of the first session service corps members applied to be a part of the second session. Yehor met his best friend in New York, Artem, a refugee from Kyiv, through the program — the two said they now see each other five or six times a week. Like other young New Yorkers, they hang out in Prospect Park, travel to Manhattan to see the sights and go to the beach together. Artem met his girlfriend, Diana, through the cohort as well — though they are only 19, they live together in an apartment in Flatbush because their families decided to travel back to Ukraine.
“When I arrived in New York, I had no friends in New York, so they helped me to find new friends, gave me the opportunity to make some money and let me try something new,” Yehor said. “I really love my job.”
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US House Appropriations Bill Seeks to Strip Funding From Universities That Don’t Crack Down on Antisemitism
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
The US House Appropriations Committee this week unveiled a major education funding bill with a new requirement aimed at incentivizing colleges and universities to adopt and enforce prohibitions on antisemitic conduct or risk losing federal funding.
The measure, spelled out in Section 536 of the fiscal year 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill, would prohibit institutions of higher education from receiving federal funds “unless and until such institution adopts a prohibition on antisemitic conduct that creates a hostile environment in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in all documents relating to student or employee conduct.” It would further bar funding to schools that fail to take action against students, staff, or organizations that engage in antisemitism on campus.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any program or activity receiving federal funding.
The proposed funding bill would also cut $49 million for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in 2026. The office has been the key body investigating allegations of antisemitic discrimination on college campuses.
The new language was released amid mounting bipartisan pressure on universities to take campus antisemitism far more seriously. Just last week, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman and Republican Sen. Dave McCormick, both from Pennsylvania, sent pointed letters to the leaders of Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, Temple University, and Lehigh University.
In their Aug. 28 letters, the senators warned that antisemitism on campus has escalated to a point that Jewish students feel unsafe and unprotected. They urged administrators to adopt a more vigorous stance against antisemitism, writing that “no student should feel like they must risk their safety to exercise their First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble and freely practice their religion.” The letters requested that the universities “work with your campus’s Jewish institutions and ensure all students, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or shared ancestry, are safe and able to fully participate in campus life.”
Antisemitism on university campuses exploded in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. However, the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities, including the suspension of federal funding, to more forcibly punish antisemitic conduct has led some schools to reach settlements with the federal government to pledge more resources to combating antisemitism.
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A ‘Ceasefire’ That Leaves Hamas in Power Is Disastrous for Palestinians and Israelis
A Palestinian Hamas terrorist shakes hands with a child as they stand guard as people gather on the day of the handover of Israeli hostages, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Calls for an “immediate end” to the October 7th war in Gaza may sound compassionate. But in practice, they are neither pro-peace nor pro-Palestinian.
They are, in effect, demands that Hamas survive to reconstitute itself as Gaza’s governing power. And if history has taught us anything, nothing could be more anti-Palestinian, anti-recovery, or pro-perpetual war than such an outcome.
Hamas Is Gaza’s Captor, Not Its Voice
Hamas is not Gaza. Hamas is not the Palestinian Arab people. It is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its goal is certainly not a Palestinian Arab state, but a global Islamic caliphate. A Palestinian state is only a means to that end.
For 18 years, Hamas has ruled Gaza not as a government, but as a theocratic war machine. Its charter calls for the extermination of Jews. Its leaders openly glorify martyrdom and war. Billions in aid were funneled away from hospitals and schools to build approximately 750 kilometers of fortified tunnels—military bunkers for fighters, not shelters for civilians. Ordinary Gazans never protected; used instead as human shields.
Under Hamas, generation after generation of Gazan children have been raised on a steady diet of hate, jihad, and martyrdom. To leave Hamas in power is not to liberate Gaza, but to guarantee that the cycle of indoctrination, violence, and terror continues — and that another October 7th is only a matter of time.
Ceasefire as Perpetual War
The world has seen this movie before. After every round of fighting — 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021 — the “international community” pressed Israel into premature ceasefires. Each time, Hamas rearmed, retrenched, and plotted the next round.
October 7, 2023, was not an aberration; it was the natural product of this cycle.
That is why today’s calls for a “ceasefire” are not pro-peace. They are demands for Hamas to survive long enough to start the war again.
Britain’s Perverse “Incentive”
Britain recently threatened to recognize a Palestinian state if there is not a ceasefire that leaves Hamas intact. On its face, this might sound like diplomacy. In reality, it is perverse. It sends Hamas a simple message: terrorism pays. Massacre civilians, hide behind hospitals and schools, and the West will reward you.
Such recognition will not advance the creation of the first Palestinian Arab state or make Palestinian lives better. It will, however, make that state less likely than ever by cementing Hamas and its brand of Islamist rejectionism as Gaza’s unavoidable power.
No viable Palestinian state can emerge from a Gaza ruled by Hamas and a culture held hostage to its murderous ideology.
Western Protestors’ Blind Spot
The irony is that the very Western activists chanting “ceasefire now” in London, New York, and Paris — those who imagine themselves champions of peace — are objectively, de facto pro-Hamas.
Whether they realize it or not, their banners translate into “Hamas must survive.” And if Hamas survives, endless war is inevitable –because Hamas’s central purpose is Israel’s destruction. Every chant for “ceasefire now” while Hamas remains intact is a chant for more Israeli deaths and more Palestinian Arab misery.
They are not pro-peace. They are pro-perpetual war.
Who Actually Loses When Hamas Survives
Those demanding an end to the war with Hamas intact claim to care about civilians. But preserving Hamas ensures:
- No real reconstruction, because Hamas steals cement for terror tunnels and fuel for rockets.
- No freedom, because Hamas rules by repression, executions, and censorship.
- No future, because Hamas indoctrinates Gaza’s children for violent jihad, not life.
Keeping Hamas in power is not pro-Palestinian. It is anti-Palestinian. It guarantees that Gaza’s children will inherit only tunnels, wars, and funerals.
A Century of Rejectionism
Since at least the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, this conflict has not been about borders. It has always been about the rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel. When Jews accepted partition in 1937 and again in 1947, Arab leaders said no. Their problem was not lines on a map but Jews exercising sovereignty anywhere whatsoever in their homeland. The atrocities of October 7 echoed the massacres of Jews that Palestinian Arab leaders incited in 1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936.
This unbroken chain of rejectionism has condemned Palestinian Arabs to statelessness and war for generations. And now Britain, and Western protestors, seek to reward it.
If one genuinely wants peace, ask: who should shape Gaza’s future? The terrorists who turned mosques into arsenals, schools into rocket factories, and aid workers into shields? Or people who, without Hamas’ boot on their necks, might finally build homes, schools, and businesses not tied to terror?
The answer should be obvious. Yet Western protestors chanting “ceasefire now” have chosen the terrorists over the civilians.
If the world wants Gaza to truly rebuild, if it wants Palestinian children to inherit schools instead of terror tunnels, and if it wants Israelis and Palestinian Arabs ever to live in peace, then Hamas must be defeated. Only then will peace even be possible.
Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.
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Director Julian Schnabel Rejects Calls to Disinvite Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler From Movie Premiere Over Israel Ties
In Venice, Italy, on Sept. 3, 2025, Julian Schnabel attends the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award 2025 and the ”In the Hand of Dante” red carpet during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. Photo: Luca Carlino via Reuters Connect
Award-winning American filmmaker and artist Julian Schnabel rejected efforts by anti-Israel activists to disinvite Gal Gadot and Gerard Butler, stars of his new film “In the Hand of Dante,” from the 82nd Venice Film Festival because of their ties to Israel.
Before the festival started, anti-Israel activists under the banner Venice4Palestine released a statement urging festival organizers to withdraw invitations to Butler, Gadot, “and any artist and celebrity who publicly and actively supports the genocide.”
“We wonder how we can pay tribute to figures like Gerard Butler and Gal Gadot, protagonists of a film out of competition, who ideologically and materially support Israel’s political and military conduct?” they added.
Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera confirmed that Butler and Gadot were not disinvited, but neither of them attended the festival this year.
Gadot is a native of Petah Tikva and former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces who has expressed avid support for her home country before and after the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. She has been spending the summer in Israel and a representative for the actress said she “was never able nor was ever confirmed to attend the Venice Film Festival.”
Butler attended the Friends of the IDF Western Region Gala in Los Angeles in 2018, but has not made any public comments about Israel since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
“I think there’s no reason to boycott artists,” Schnabel said on Wednesday afternoon at a press conference for “In the Hand of Dante,” before the film’s out of competition premiere that evening at the Venice Film Festival. He was responding to a question about boycott efforts by Venice4Palestine against Butler and Gadot. “I selected those actors for their merits as actors, and they did an extraordinary job in the film, and that’s about it,” he added. “I think we should talk about the movie rather than this issue.”
“In the Hand of Dante” is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Nick Tosches. The film follows the story of a handwritten manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s poem “The Divine Comedy” and jumps between the 14th and 21st centuries. Oscar Isaac plays both Tosches and Dante. The film also stars Al Pacino, John Malkovich, Martin Scorsese, Jason Momoa, Sabrina Impacciatore, Louis Cancelmi, and Franco Nero.
The movie received a 9 1/2-minute ovation after its world premiere on Wednesday night at the festival. Schnabel also received Venice’s Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award on Wednesday night in a ceremony held before the premiere. The award is given to someone who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry.
The 82nd Venice Film Festival runs from Aug. 27-Sept. 6.