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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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Stories of ghosts, grief and Shabbat gladness win top prizes in Jewish children’s literature
(JTA) — Anna is a misunderstood sixth-grade girl who communicates with the ghosts of her Jewish ancestors. Teased by her classmates and worried-over by her family, she finds comfort and understanding with her Bubbe and her beloved Jewish traditions.
“Neshama,” Marcella Pixley’s lyrically written novel-in-verse, won the gold medal for Jewish children’s literature for middle-grade readers from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Its Sydney Taylor Book Awards were announced today in a virtual livecast from Chicago.
The award committee called Pixley’s “a lyrical, deeply Jewish story about identity, grief, and resilience.”
The annual award, named in memory of Sydney Taylor, the author of the “All-of-a-Kind Family” series, “recognizes books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience,” according to the award committee’s announcement.
Other winners include “D.J. Rosenblum Becomes the G.O.A.T,” a coming-of-age mystery by Abby White, which won in the young adult category, and “Shabbat Shalom: Let’s Rest and Reset,” a lively board book written and illustrated by Suzy Ultman, which won the picture book award.
The Sydney Taylor committee named Uri Shulevitz, whose 2008 book “How I Learned Geography” drew on his boyhood experiences fleeing Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, as the winner of its Body-of-Work award. Shulevitz, a multi-award winning storyteller and illustrator, died last year.
In addition to the top winners, the Sydney Taylor committee named five silver medalists and nine notable titles of Jewish content.
“This year’s winners and honorees exemplify excellence in Jewish children’s literature through vibrant storytelling and rich perspectives that foster empathy, understanding, and a deep appreciation for culture and community,” said Melanie Koss, chair of the award committee.
Winners will receive their awards in June in Evanston, Illinois at the AJL’s annual conference.
In “D. J. Rosenblum Becomes the “G.O.A.T,” an about-to-be bat mitzah-age girl is determined to prove that her beloved cousin did not die by suicide. Abby White lightens the emotional subject with a teen’s authentic, humorous voice.
“She wrestles with her Torah portion and faith, finding strength to face loss and begin moving forward,” the committee noted.
“Shabbat Shalom” may be the first board book to garner the award, Heidi Rabinowitz, a long-time podcaster about Jewish children’s books, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The sophisticated board book combines succinct text with playful art,” the committee wrote in its release.
In awarding its Body-of-Work award to Shulevitz (1935-2025), who lived with his family in Israel before settling in New York, the committee recognized him as a “foundational voice in Jewish children’s literature.” His books “illuminate Jewish culture and reflect universal experience,” the committee wrote.
Many of Shulevitz’s titles reflect his Jewish roots, including “The Golem,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer and “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela,” an illustrated travelogue for children based on the real-life voyages of the 12th-century Jewish traveler who visited Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad and Jerusalem. Shulevitz garnered the Caldecott medal, children’s literature’s top honor for illustrated books, for “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship.”
Earlier, the AJL announced that Jessica Russak-Hoffman, a journalist for Jewish media outlets, won the organization’s new manuscript award for “How to Catch a Mermaid (When You’re Scared of the Sea),” a novel set in Israel for ages 8-13.
Last week, the AJL named Jason Diamond as the 2026 winner of its Jewish Fiction award for his novel, “Kaplan’s Plot.”
At Tuesday’s event, the Youth Media Awards hosted by the American Library Association, the winners were also announced for the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newberry and Printz awards, among others. The Asian American Picture Book award went to “Many Things All At Once,” by Veera Hiranandani and illustrated by Nadia Alam, the story of a girl with a Jewish mother and a South Asian father.
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NJ church deletes video of pageant featuring antisemitic character but says critics took it ‘out of context’
(JTA) — A New Jersey church says it is “committed to engaging in dialogue, and teaching others about our heritage” after putting on a Christmas pageant that drew criticism for reflecting antisemitic stereotypes.
St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s pageant, known as a vertep, featured an antagonist named Moshko who danced with the devil while wearing faux Hasidic garb like side locks and a black hat. The character was referred to as “zhyd,” a Ukrainian slur for “Jew.”
“We do not have any intention to promote harm or hatred with this pageant,” the church said in a statement issued on Facebook on Friday night. “However, we recognize some outside of our culture may assign elements of the performance to stereotypes when taken out of context which is inclusive of peoples historically present in eastern Europe.”
The church did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment prior to an initial report on the vertep earlier this month. It did not respond to an additional request for comment on Monday, following the statement. The church removed photos and video of the pageant from its Facebook page following the JTA report.
The vertep is a centuries-old Slavic Christmas tradition that emerged from puppet theater. In recent years, many Ukrainian Orthodox churches have removed material criticized as offensive. Since the current war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2022, one popular replacement for the Jewish antagonist has been a Russian character.
In its statement, St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church emphasized that “the event does not target any specific group” but indicated that it could make changes in future pageants.
“The church is reflecting on this matter seriously and is committed to engaging in dialogue, and teaching others about our heritage while ensuring that future events continue to uphold the dignity, respect, and safety of all people,” it said.
The Anti-Defamation League of New Jersey, which said earlier this month that it was reaching out to St. Mary Protectress, told JTA on Monday that it had not been able to communicate with anyone from the church.
The church’s apology rang hollow for Lev Golinkin, a Jewish writer born in Ukraine who has advocated against the antisemitic elements of the traditional vertep.
“It’s not an apology, it’s more of an insult,” Golinkin said. “The problem is not the context. The problem is exactly that. It is in context perfectly.”
He added, “They’re making it seem that the people who are criticizing them … are the ones who have a problem because they don’t understand the culture.”
St. Mary Protectress is not the only Ukrainian church in the United States to import the antisemitic elements of the vertep from the old country. A church in Connecticut erected a backdrop poster for its pageant this year that included a Moshko character standing next to the devil.
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A new exhibit honors writer Lore Segal, a child survivor and lifelong skeptic of easy truths
(JTA) — I’ve never read a Holocaust chronicle quite like Lore Segal’s autobiographical 1964 novel, “Other People’s Houses.” Mordant, unsentimental and sometimes painfully honest, it’s the story of an Austrian girl sent to England on the Kindertransport, as well as a portrait of the artist as a young refugee.
More than one of her legions of admirers have noted that Segal, who died in 2024 at the age of 96, was only one year younger than Anne Frank, and grew up to become the kind of writer Anne too might have become had she not died in Bergen-Belsen.
Segal’s work, which includes decades of stories in The New Yorker as well as a delightful children’s book, “Tell Me a Mitzi,” is also remarkable in its humility. Segal was adamant that memory — especially of traumatic events like the Holocaust — cannot be a perfect repository of truth. It’s not that authors couldn’t be trusted, but that neither the writer nor the reader should take anything for granted.
That challenge is captured in the title of a new exhibit mounted by the Leo Baeck Institute in New York: “And That’s True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal.” The title is a quote from “King Lear,” a favorite of Segal’s and a reminder to hold opposing truths in the same sentence, of resisting the false comfort of a single, final version.
“We tried to give you an insight into Laura’s ability to look at the world from many angles,” Karin Hanta, the exhibit’s curator, said at the exhibit’s opening on Thursday, just days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
At the event, actress Toni Kalem, who played Angie Bonpensiero on “The Sopranos,” read an excerpt from “Other People’s Houses.” Kalem, who met Segal years ago and discovered that their mothers shared the experience of the Kindertransport, spoke of Segal’s “unbridled curiosity” — a quality that runs through the display of photographs, manuscripts and family keepsakes.
Lore (pronounced “Laura”) Groszmann was born in Vienna in 1928; one month after the Nazi pogrom on Kristallnacht, she was sent to England and raised in a series of foster homes (her refugee parents would eventually arrive and find work as domestics). Later she would join her family in the Dominican Republic, and they eventually found refuge in Washington Heights, the Manhattan redoubt for German-speaking Jews. After she established herself as a writer, she became part of a circle of mostly Jewish writers in New York, including Cynthia Ozick, Vivan Gornick, Grace Paley, Norma Rosen and Gloria Goldreich. Her husband, book editor David Segal, was 40 when he died in 1970.
Hanta had hoped to write a biography of Segal, but when that project stalled, she pivoted. “With all the materials I had gathered,” she recalled at the opening, “why not stage an exhibition?”
The first iteration, mounted in Vienna’s Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt — located in the district where Segal grew up, and, as Hanta later discovered, near the hospital where she was born — drew thousands of visitors. The New York version, expanded and sharpened, shifts the focus westward, tracing Segal’s journey from prewar Vienna to Manhattan, where she lived for decades, taught generations of writers, and, according to the New York Times, came “closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.”
That novel, “Her First American,” appeared in 1985 and explored the uneasy intersection of race and Holocaust history through the relationship of a Jewish refugee and a Black intellectual. (LBI has scheduled an online event about Horace Cayton, Segal’s real-life lover and the inspiration for the novel.) “Other People’s Houses,” her first book, earned Segal a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her short-story collection “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” (2007) became a Pulitzer Prize finalist. All three books will be reissued in the spring of 2026 by the New Press, while Melville House is publishing a posthumous collection, “Still Talking.” Introduced by Gornick, it features the linked “Ladies’ Lunch” stories she wrote late in her career, about elderly Manhattan friends dealing frankly and often hilariously with the daily indignities of growing old.
The exhibit at the Center for Jewish History, where LBI catalogues the history and culture of German-speaking Jews, includes notebooks from Bedford College in London, where Segal studied after the war, filled with short stories entered into competitions. There are manuscripts marked and re-marked in a hand that never stopped revising. There are address books kept by her parents — one from England, one from the Dominican Republic — opened to pages that quietly testify to vanished worlds: cousins who hid behind kitchen curtains in France, friends who assumed false identities, children who never made it onto the trains.
One small object carries particular weight: a childhood friendship book, the sort in which relatives and friends inscribe poems and well-intentioned advice. Segal’s includes an entry from her first English foster mother, urging her to cherish friendship — advice that reads differently if you know, as Segal later wrote, that their relationship was fraught. Her father’s contribution, a drawing of a boy hiking in the mountains, echoes a story Segal drafted as a young woman about a prewar hike in the Alps with him. She revised that story at 90 and retitled it “Dandelion.” The New Yorker published it in 2019, 70 years after its first draft.
The exhibition is accompanied by a season of in-person and virtual programs, and Hanta has her own wish list of commemorative projects: She hopes that a park in Vienna where Segal played as a child might be renamed in her honor; that the exhibition might travel; that “Other People’s Houses” might be distributed free in Austria in 2028, the centenary of Segal’s birth and the 90th anniversary of the Kindertransport.
On opening night, before reading from “Other People’s Houses,” Kalem paused to apologize for the necessary cuts she made. “As you know, all her life, Lore was a master of meticulously crafting and scrupulously revising her work,” said Kalem. “So it feels like literary malfeasance on my part to attempt to edit a word of Lore’s story. It feels akin to cutting Shakespeare by shortening Hamlet’s soliloquy…. So Lore, I hope you understand and I hope you will forgive me.”
The exhibition also includes a video produced by Hanta and Segal’s grandson, Benny, which captures Segal late in life, still circling her subjects, still attentive to the elusiveness of truth. At the opening, Segal’s son Jacob spoke of his mother’s ambition and her modesty, her seriousness about art and her refusal to be undone by success or disappointment.
“She always made the world larger,” he said. “It’s smaller now.”
“And That’s True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal” runs through April 15 at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St., New York, New York.
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