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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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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie team up to strip US-Israel military tech cooperation from defense bill
(JTA) — In one of the latest examples of political extremes converging over Israel, Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie joined forces this week to challenge a provision expanding U.S.-Israel defense cooperation.
Khanna, a progressive California Democrat, and Massie, a Kentucky Republican, both said over the weekend that they would seek to remove a provision from the House’s annual defense bill that would expand U.S.-Israeli defense technology cooperation.
“If the provision in the NDAA to integrate/synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries (section 224) makes it out of committee, I’ll offer an amendment to strip it from the bill on the floor,” Massie, who lost his bid for reelection last month against a President Donald Trump-endorsed primary opponent, wrote in a post on X. “We are a sovereign country…”
The section of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2027 that Khanna and Massie have taken aim at would require the Secretary of Defense to designate an “executive agent responsible for synchronizing cooperative efforts between the United States and Israel, including bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation.”
The cross-ideological alliance marked the latest instance of the progressive Democrat and libertarian Republican finding common cause on Israel-related foreign policy, after the pair previously teamed up to oppose U.S. involvement in Israel’s war in Iran last year.
The pledge by Massie, a leading anti-Israel Republican in Congress, was quickly joined by Khanna, who has been staunchly critical of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza and recently opposed American funding for Israel’s Iron Dome defense system.
“And I will be offering an amendment in the committee itself to strip section 224 out, @RepThomasMassie,” Khanna wrote in a post on X. “Trump can’t kill the Massie/Khanna partnership no matter how much he posts on Truth Social.”
Khanna lamented Massie’s primary loss on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month, telling the outlet that he had been “taken out” because of the pair’s collaboration on opposing the war in Iran and the Epstein Transparency Act.
“Thomas is a real friend. He’s a good man, and he was taken out for two reasons,” Khanna said. “One, he had the courage to go after some very powerful people in working with me to get the Epstein Transparency Act passed. As he mentioned, that’s historic bipartisan legislation that finally got justice for the survivors, and he had people spend millions of dollars, and had the President of the United States after him. And second, he worked with me to stop this war in Iran.”
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Hasan Piker blames Israel after UK bars him from entry, citing ‘potential risk’
(JTA) — Leading British Jewish groups are applauding the UK government’s decision to bar the influential anti-Israel streamer Hasan Piker as well as his controversial uncle Cenk Uygur from entering the country.
The British interior ministry revoked Piker’s and Uygur’s travel authorizations on Monday, saying in a statement that “their presence in the UK may not be conducive to the public good.”
The ministry’s statement did not specify its concerns about the men but added that decisions to refuse or cancel ETAs are based “solely on an assessment of the potential risk an individual may pose to UK society.”
The revocations follow advocacy by Jewish groups against Piker’s planned appearance this week at the South by Southwest London festival, where he was due to speak on “How the American Left Learned to Speak the Internet.”
A number of Jewish groups urged the government to block Piker’s entry. The Community Security Trust said that he “has a record of promoting rhetoric that includes antisemitic themes, denial of well documented atrocities and apparent support for extremist groups.” Last week, a lawmaker from the Labour party, David Taylor, publicly called on the Home Office to revoke Piker’s visa.
Piker has also drawn sharp opposition from U.S. Jewish groups in recent months, as he has played an increasingly prominent role in advocating for progressive Democrats. His critics note that he has said he prefers Hamas to Israel and said “I don’t have an issue” with Hezbollah. Hamas and Hezbollah are considered terrorist groups under UK law.
In social media posts, both Piker and Uygur blamed Israel for their being barred from entering the UK.
“I’ve been banned for criticizing Israel. Are we free anymore?” Uygur tweeted, in one of multiple posts making the claim. “This is oppression of Western citizens by our own governments on behalf of a different country!” He later said it was “an honor to have made Israel’s enemies list.”
Piker responded to his uncle’s post on X, saying, “The uk has revoked my visa as well. all at the behest of israel. the west is betraying ‘liberal values’ for a genocidal fascist foreign government. soon we will all become Israel.”
The revocations come as the British government is under extreme pressure to demonstrate strong opposition to antisemitism, following a string of attacks that have unsettled British Jews. In recent weeks, the government has allocated new resources for security in Jewish communities and canceled the travel authorization for Ye, the American musician with a history of antisemitic remarks and a recent single called “Heil Hitler.”
Multiple Jewish leaders said they were pleased that the government had moved to block Piker’s entry.
“The government is right to ban those who seek to spread hatred from entering the UK,” the Jewish Leadership Council’s director of public affairs, Russell Langer, said in a statement. He added, “When Jews are being stabbed on the streets of London and Manchester, we should not be importing more antisemitism into this country.”
The acting president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Adrian Cohen, applauded the decision in a statement. “Where there is clear risk of individuals breaking UK laws and stoking community tensions, by showing support for banned terrorist groups or inciting hatred, and where event organisers have failed to show responsibility, it is right that government step in,” he said.
And the CST said that while criticizing Israel can be legitimate, Piker had exceeded the bounds of acceptable discourse.
“There must be consequences when public figures cross into hate speech,” the group said in a statement. “Piker has a record that goes far beyond robust or controversial political speech, including rhetoric that contains antisemitic themes, the denial of well-documented atrocities and language that risks fuelling antisemitism.”
The interior ministry said anyone who has an ETA revoked can apply for a visa, which would afford them a reconsideration.
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New York’s Israel Day parade was a shanda — but not because of Mamdani
Mayor Zohran Mamdani made the right decision in skipping the city’s annual Israel Day Parade — because of the specific Israeli officials the parade honored.
American Jews have the right to celebrate Israel’s existence, if they find it to be a meaningful part of their personal Jewish identities. But Mamdani’s specific decision not to march in this specific parade, this year, alongside far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich, Amichai Chikli and Ofir Sofer, is defensible. Those painting that choice as a sign of antisemitism have a lot of explaining to do about whose company they choose to keep.
Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism — the man who is supposed to be the voice of diaspora Jews in Israel — has used his platform to spread hatred. He has described LGBTQ+ Pride events as “disgraceful vulgarity”; courted far-right European extremists like Tommy Robinson while parroting their Islamophobic statements; and called antisemitic dog whistles deployed against George Soros by the like of Elon Musk “anything but antisemitism” — while serving as the minister tasked with combating antisemitism.
His behavior has been so outrageous that in 2025, hostage families and Jewish community leaders across Europe signed letters calling him an “inappropriate representative,” citing his statements calling for the expulsion of people from Gaza and southern Lebanon, which they said amounted to support for ethnic cleansing.
Smotrich’s record of inflammatory statements is even more extensive. In 2023, he called for the Palestinian village of Hawara in the West Bank to be destroyed by the state, saying “I think the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out” shortly after a shocking settler attack there that some compared to a pogrom. The United States State Department decried those remarks as “repugnant” and “disgusting.”
Smotrich has since called for Gaza to be emptied of its Palestinian population, and has spearheaded the radical expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, advocating for annexation with the explicit intent of preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. He himself says the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor has reportedly filed a secret arrest warrant application against him for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied West Bank.
At the Sunday parade, Smotrich approvingly told attendees that the event reminded him of the Jerusalem Flag March, an ultra-nationalist procession where participants this year chanted “Death to Arabs” and attacked Palestinian residents.
And Ofir Sofer, Israel’s immigration and absorption minister, has called for changes to Israel’s Law of Return, complaining that many new immigrants to Israel are not Jewish under Orthodox halachic standards. His vision of Israel includes no room for Reform Jews, secular Jews or partial-heritage Jews.
These are the people Mamdani was supposed to join in celebration?
Mamdani did not refuse to celebrate Jewish life. He refused to endorse these deeply problematic Israeli officials by appearing alongside them. That is not a slap in the face to Jewish New Yorkers. It is, if anything, a gesture of respect toward the many Jewish New Yorkers, including me, who find Chikli, Smotrich and Sofer an embarrassment and a threat to the diverse, pluralistic, egalitarian Judaism we actually practice.
Mamdani has stated clearly that he believes Israel has a right to exist, although not as a hierarchy that favors Jewish citizens over others. He has backed his administration’s Office to Combat Antisemitism and proposed expanded funding for hate crime prevention. He guaranteed a robust police presence at the Israel parade, spending weeks planning to ensure it proceeded, in his words, “seamlessly and peacefully” — as it did.
None of this fits the profile of an antisemite.
And those who criticized Mamdani’s refusal to participate are failing to grapple with an important truth: Mamdani’s politics, whatever one thinks of them, are not alien to American Jewish life. They are, instead, increasingly central to it.
A poll by the Jewish Voter Resource Center, released just this week, found that almost half of American Jews under 35 support a binational state: a single country in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, governed by all its inhabitants together. Among non-Orthodox Jews under 35, that figure reaches 51%.
This is not a fringe position on the left flank of the community. It is a near-majority position among the next generation of American Jews. Add to that the fact that a 2025 survey by Jewish Federations of North America — not a left-wing organization — found that only 37% of American Jews overall identify as Zionist at all, while among young Jews aged 18 to 34, the share identifying as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist has reached nearly a third.
As J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami put it: “The growing disaffection of younger Jewish Americans from Israel is a direct consequence of the policies of Bibi Netanyahu and the way the American Jewish establishment has demanded an ‘Israel right or wrong’ loyalty.”
When we ask whether Mamdani’s absence alienates Jewish New Yorkers, we need to ask: which Jewish New Yorkers? Did Mamdani marginalize himself from American Jewish life — or did the parade organizers, by welcoming these ministers, marginalize themselves from a large and growing portion of it?
The questions at the heart of this controversy — what Zionism means, whether anti-Zionism is compatible with Jewish solidarity, and how to honor Israeli independence while acknowledging Palestinian catastrophe — are genuine, difficult and deeply contested. I have colleagues I respect on multiple sides. I have family members who would disagree with everything I have written here.
But a parade is the worst possible venue for this conversation. A parade is not a symposium. It is not a town hall. It is a celebration, a statement of solidarity, an embodiment of a particular political position. Attending it is an endorsement of that position. And when the parade features ministers who demean Reform Jews, court European neo-fascists, advocate for the further reduction of Palestinian rights and liberties, and favor restricting who counts as Jewish enough to return to a Jewish state, the act of marching becomes an endorsement of those things, too.
We do need richer, more honest, more nuanced conversations about Zionism, anti-Zionism, Israel, and diaspora Jewish identity. Those conversations are happening, in synagogues, in classrooms and in the pages of Jewish publications like this one. They deserve serious venues and serious interlocutors.
Fifth Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, with Chikli, Bezalel and Sofer as honored guests, is not that venue.
Mamdani was right to decline to issue that endorsement. To the Jewish establishment that has called him an antisemite for it: I would ask you, with all due respect, to look again at who you invited to the party.
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