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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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Her daughter left the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration just before the shooting, then asked, ‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’
The daughter of an American expatriate living about two miles from the mass killing at a Hanukkah celebration in suburban Sydney, Australia, escaped the carnage by coming home to change clothes, her mother said.
“She’d been there earlier that afternoon, on the bridge where they were shooting. She came home, changed her clothes, and was getting ready to go again,” said Michelle Stein-Evers, a former Los Angeles resident and a co-founder of the Alliance of Black Jews in 1995.
“She and her friends were on their way back to Bondi to go to the party and have something to eat, and they were stopped by the police,” Stein-Evers said. “She found out why, and she started calling everyone to let us know. Her best friend’s cousin was killed. Another best friend’s cousin was shot in the leg.”
Her daughter, who is 22, had previously locked down her Facebook account out of privacy concerns and requested that her name not be used. As the massacre unfolded Sunday, she turned to social media to search for information.
“‘Oh my God, there’s bodies everywhere,’” Stein-Evers said her daughter told her.
She also asked where her father was, amid rumors — later proven untrue — that the neighborhood where he had gone to play tennis was also affected.
Stein-Evers said the events were unfolding within minutes of their home, where she was alone after her daughter headed back toward the beach.
“It was scary. It was nothing but sirens — sirens and sirens — and helicopters,” she said.
Stein-Evers said she knew the first victim publicly identified among the dead, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who helped organize the celebration.
“He was, by consensus, one of the nicest guys in the Jewish community in Sydney,” she said.
Antisemitic incidents have been rising in Sydney and across Australia since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Stein-Evers said, adding that her daughter stopped attending the prestigious University of Sydney because of campus protests.
“She was constantly being heckled, asked, ‘Where are you from? Are you Jewish? Are you an Arab? Why aren’t you with us?’” Stein-Evers said. Her daughter would not respond to the questions and eventually enrolled in distance learning through a college in Melbourne.
Stein-Evers, who has lived in the Middle East — including in Muslim-majority countries — as well as Europe and the United States, said she now has concerns about her own safety.
“I was never scared to be a Jew in America. I was never scared in Germany,” she said — a fear she said is now shared by her daughter.
“When she came home last night, she was in tears,” Stein-Evers said. “‘Mommy, why do they hate us so much?’”
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Will laying tefillin make a difference? A rabbi responds to his cousin’s murder in Australia attack
The first thing I did when I heard news of the attack at Bondi Beach — at what must have been midnight Australian time — was to call my dear friend Michelle.
No response, though that’s not atypical: an American expatriate who’s lived in Sydney for a generation, she usually doesn’t get back to me for a day or two. Then I worked social media, searching for her and anyone else I might be connected to via Jewish geography — which often means a friend-of-a-friend among Facebook users.
While searching, the enormity of the horror set in. Fifteen people dead, about 40 wounded, hundreds under fire on the beach where the Chabad of Bondi, near Sydney, held its “Chanukah by the Sea” event.
If there were people I knew — one survivor had previously written for the Forward — the names of those killed weren’t released yet, except for Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who organized the celebration. His death was confirmed by his cousin, Rabbi Zalman Lewis of Brighton, England.
“My dear cousin, Rabbi Eli Schlanger was murdered in today’s terrorist attack in Sydney. He leaves behind his wife & young children, as well as my uncle & aunt & siblings,” Lewis posted on Facebook.
Lewis turned quickly from his cousin – “More about Eli later in the week” – to what to do next.
“Do a Mitzvah today,” he wrote. “Send pictures wearing Tefillin, saying a prayer, giving extra charity, lighting Chanukah candles.”
The suggestion instantly reminded me of another by a Chabad rabbi, in answer to a question by CNN’s Jake Tapper two weeks after the Oct. 7 attack. In the face of Hamas’s evil, that rabbi said, “Every Jewish woman should please before the Sabbath and before sundown light the Shabbat candles.”
I recall seeing Tapper’s baffled expression. It’s similar to what I’m sure many who saw Rabbi Lewis’s message must be thinking: There’s a major attack on Jews and all you can say is put on tefillin? How about kill all the terrorists?
At the other extreme are those cheering on the attackers — including one friend-of-a-friend (Jewish, I’m all but certain) who posted, “At this point, these random attacks are the only way to stop Israel. It should’ve never gotten this far but unfortunately the Zionists have brought us all here.”
I have to believe — or hope — the latter is an extreme minority opinion, and I’ll spare the poster’s name lest it incite any reciprocal violent reaction.
As for the former, kill-them-all reactions immediately run into the reality that it isn’t so easy to do, illustrated disastrously by the Gaza war. Measured purely in casualties and carnage, it was a military victory. Politically and morally, it was a public-relations disaster for Israel.
That reality has led some Jews to question the wisdom of celebrating Hanukkah as a Maccabean victory. Instead, many are accentuating Gemara rabbis who argued the holiday is more about the miracle of the oil than military might.
That doesn’t mean their successors have evolved into pacifists, but Chabad rabbis are largely speaking to Jews, about being Jewish, and, as they see it, things Jews can do themselves to repair the world.
“Let’s flood the world with goodness. As Jews, we know, as difficult as it might seem, that light & good will always win,” Rabbi Lewis wrote.
You don’t have to walk into a Chabad house to hear that. My own Reconstructionist rabbi in Duluth, Minnesota, said essentially the same thing, writing to congregants on Sunday, “Let us not succumb to fear or despair but rather embrace our faith that much more resolutely.”
Maybe some prayers are answered. Hours after my calls and messages — but much sooner than her usual replies — Michelle finally responded.
“Physically, we’re fine,” she said.
So she is safe. But too many others were not. And if faith prevents a similar fate for even a single human being, pray away.
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New York Jewish leaders at menorah lighting call for solidarity and pride after Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack
(New York Jewish Week) — Rivkah Rothschild was on her way to a public menorah lighting in New York City on Sunday evening when she decided to recite a specific Jewish prayer to herself.
“I actually said Shema Yisrael, which is the prayer that we say before passing away, just in the taxi coming over, just in case there were any terrorists here,” said Rothschild just after the event.
An attorney in Midtown East, Rothschild was planning to skip the menorah lighting at Carl Schurz Park until Rabbi Ben Tzion Krasnianski, the executive director of the Chabad Lubavitch of the Upper East Side, asked her and her fellow community members to come out following the deadly shooting at a Chabad Hanukkah party in Sydney, Australia.
“I think we all are very shaken. We’re devastated by the news of what happened today in Sydney, Australia. All our hearts are all broken for the people that are suffering what they’ve experienced there,” said Rothschild. “I was fearful when I made the decision that I’m coming.”
The menorah lighting just outside of Gracie Mansion, which was hosted by the UJA-Federation of New York, Chabad of the Upper East Side and Kehilath Jeshurun, was one of dozens that took place across New York city to mark the first night of Hanukkah.
Hundreds of people crowded together on the ice-covered promenade of the park, enjoying sufganiyot and latkes, as sorrow and determination hung in the air.
“It was a very unified spirit and a strong energy, a resolute energy, an energy of conviction, determination,” said Rothschild following the event. “In my study of history, when Jews are in danger, we usually do three things. None of them work. We appease, we flee and we ignore. We’re not doing any of that now.”
Despite the attack, which killed 15 people and injured dozens more, Chabad officials and Jewish leaders across the country urged for planned Hanukkah celebrations to move ahead with added security measures.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the NYPD has significantly increased security around Hanukkah celebrations, menorah lightings, and Jewish houses of worship across all five boroughs,” wrote NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch in a post on X. “New Yorkers will see an enhanced uniformed presence, specialized patrols, counterterrorism resources, and additional protective measures deployed where appropriate.”
Indeed, over a dozen New York police officers and members of Chevra Hatzalah, the New York-based Jewish ambulance service, could be seen on the outskirts of the crowd as Hanukkah songs blared over the speakers.
Prior to the lighting of the menorah, which sat raised above the crowd, several rabbis, Jewish leaders and city officials gave speeches where they urged the crowd to counter the attack in Sydney by being proudly Jewish.
The incoming comptroller of New York, Mark Levine, who urged Jewish New Yorkers to attend menorah lightings earlier in the day, told the crowd that none of the public Hanukkah events throughout the city had been cancelled and that “turnout has been off the charts.”
“We are aspiring now to be modern-day Maccabees, this is who we are in New York City,” said Levine. “To those who hate us, know that we are not going anywhere. We will not let you intimidate us, not here in this park, not in front of Park East Synagogue, not in our schools, not in our subways, nowhere.”
Julie Menin, a Jewish politician who declared victory last month in the race for City Council speaker, told the children in the audience that “this too shall pass and things will be brighter.”
“This is an incredibly difficult day for the Jewish community, and it is really only by coming together and celebrating the fact that we are Jewish, that we are lighting the menorah tonight, that we are lighting the candles in the darkness, that we are going to heal, and it is only through education that we are going to fight antisemitism,” said Menin.
Throughout the speeches, many leaders also took aim at the increase in antisemitic rhetoric that has proliferated around the globe over the course of the war in Gaza.
Some also specifically decried the use of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” a common pro-Palestinian slogan that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani declined to condemn during his campaign. He later said he would discourage its use.
“We are shocked and heartbroken about what happened, but we’re not surprised,” said Hindy Poupko, the senior vice president of community organizing and external relations at UJA-Federation of New York. “After two years of people shouting on our streets ‘Globalize the intifada’ from New York to Sydney, words have consequences. The violent rhetoric must end, and we call on all of our leaders and our elected officials to condemn that rhetoric.”
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, the leader of the Orthodox Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on the Upper East Side, also directed his commentary to the use of the phrase.
“I need to make this very clear, because some don’t understand it. Globalizing the intifada is not an unfortunate phrase, it’s not something to be discouraged, globalizing the intifada is a call to murder,” said Steinmetz. “It’s time for us to tell the truth that this anti-Zionism has led to the death of Jews in Boulder, in Washington D.C., in Leeds and in Sydney. It’s time to say that anti-Zionism kills Jews.”
The alleged attackers in Sydney may have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, according to news reports out of Australia. No reports have suggested that they made any specific comments during the attack.
In an extensive post on X Sunday, Mamdani condemned the attack and reiterated his commitment to “work every day to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe.”
“This attack is merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world,” wrote Mamdani. “Too many no longer feel safe to be themselves, to express their faith publicly, to worship in their synagogues without armed security stationed outside.”
Also on the stage at Carl Schurz Park Sunday night was Rabbi Menachem Creditor, a scholar in residence and rabbi for the UJA-Federation of New York whose brother-in-law, Arsen Ostrovsky, was shot during the attack in Sydney.
“I asked him just an hour ago, what should I say to your sisters and brothers in New York as your brother? He said, darkness will never triumph. We will prevail,” said Creditor. “We have a long history of doing better than surviving, friends. We have come back from so much darkness.”
Ben Axelrod, a 30-year-old Jewish resident of the Upper East Side who was in the crowd Sunday night, said he had cried that morning when he learned the news of the attack, but did not feel deterred from coming to the menorah lighting.
“Because at the end of the day, this is not new, it is scary, but we have to keep moving for all those who passed, and we can honor their memory by continuing to be proud Jews,” said Axelrod.
Rena Tobey, a 66-year-old Jewish resident of the Upper East Side, said that she had not planned to come but decided to attend the menorah lighting after learning of the attack.
“This is about light increasing every night, and we have to know that candles are temporary, but we have to carry that light with us no matter what the darkness is in the world,” said Tobey.
Another Jewish attendee of the menorah lighting, who identified himself by his first name, Steven, said that he was not afraid to come to the event despite the attack.
“We’re a strong, vibrant community, and we’re proud of who we are, and it shows how strong and proud we are given the weather conditions that we all came out,” said Steven. “Once we start to feel fear, you’re giving in, and we don’t give in.”
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