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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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Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue
Voters may react differently to a Jewish politician who publicly practices their faith than to one who simply identifies as Jewish, a new poll found. The distinction could matter for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a possible 2028 presidential candidate who has made his Jewish faith central to his public life and service.
The Politico poll of 2,002 U.S. adults showed that Democratic voters were less likely to vote for a candidate who regularly attends synagogue than for a candidate not practicing a religion or attending services once a year. Among Republicans, however, a candidate who regularly attends synagogue performed better than one who attends only once a year.
The survey, conducted online in partnership with the London-based polling firm Public First between August 8 and 14, asked respondents to choose between hypothetical candidates with different characteristics, including political ideology, age, race, profession, sexual orientation and religious practice. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.2%.
The poll offers a window into how religious observance may shape the way voters view a Jewish candidate. In an earlier poll conducted by the same firm in May, among 2,038 voters, candidates were identified simply by religion rather than how often or where they worshipped. Being identified as Jewish hurt a hypothetical candidate among voters in both parties compared with being identified as Christian.
The findings could be particularly relevant to Shapiro, the popular Pennsylvania governor running for reelection this fall. He maintains a traditional Conservative Jewish lifestyle, keeps kosher and is a longtime member of Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, outside Philadelphia. In his recent memoir, Where We Keep the Light, Shapiro detailed experiences shaped by and tied closely to his Jewish identity, including his vetting as a vice presidential candidate in 2024.
Shapiro has been viewed as a potential first Jewish president since his gubernatorial campaign in 2022 and is one of three prominent Jewish Democrats — along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidates.
Religious identity, particularly Christianity, has become more central in Republican politics since President Trump returned to the White House in 2025. Trump and his Cabinet have made religious faith a prominent part of his administration’s agenda. He created a White House Faith Office to work with religious organizations and established a Justice Department task force focused specifically on what the administration calls anti-Christian bias. At the same time, an increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
The Politico poll does not explain why Republican voters responded differently to Jewish candidates based on how often they attended synagogue. But the gap aligns with the broader split in positions among conservatives who have warmly embraced visibly religious and politically conservative Jews, while criticizing liberal or less observant Jews over their politics and commitment to Judaism.
Trump has repeatedly drawn that distinction himself. During the 2024 election, for example, he said that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats “hate their religion.”
The post Could going to synagogue help or hurt a Jewish candidate? This poll offers a clue appeared first on The Forward.
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Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes
(JTA) — Nazi salutes. A swastika flag. Fights in the stands. They were all part of the scene at a recent combat sports event in Orlando that pitted an Israeli Jew against an avowed racist with SS bolts tattooed on his chest – and ended with the latter mocking his defeated foe as “a short little f–king Jew prick.”
The condemnation that followed the Aug. 29 event was aimed in a number of directions: at Paul Miller, the fighter who performed the Hitler salute after his win; at the attendees who returned the salute and displayed the Nazi flag; and at the Kia Center, the city-owned arena best known as the home of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, which hosted the fight night.
Politicians were shocked by the display and wrote statements condemning the event — but the Nazi symbols were nothing new for Duel, the online cryptocurrency casino behind the promotion.
Founded last year and billing itself as “the first casino that gives a f–k,” Duel has used Nazi symbols and racist language in its gambling programming. And its owner, Ossi Ketola, a Finnish high-stakes poker player, is himself a self-described First Amendment absolutist with his own history of racially charged comments. He celebrated his free speech devotion just one week after the Orlando event, in a social media post featuring a photo of himself with Donald Trump Jr.
One of Duel’s blackjack dealers, Nelli Levonyan, has worn a Nazi outfit with a swastika armband on multiple occasions while dealing cards on the blackjack stream. In a skit from the blackjack table that circulated online, a man, dressed up as an Orthodox Jew and holding an Israeli flag, attacked Levonyan by throwing coins at her. Levonyan’s character then sprayed something at the Jewish man — “Gassing!” he yelled — and said, “Go away from me, you dirty kike.”
In another blackjack stream, the dealer imitated one of the two San Diego mosque shooters, who killed five people in May. Levonyan has sung the lyrics to “Heil Hitler,” the Ye (formerly Kanye West) song, during a stream. She has also appeared alongside Miller while hosting the card game.
Earlier this month, Ketola joined a neo-fascist rally in Helsinki staged by the far-right party Sinimusta Liike, or the Blue-and-Black Movement. Ketola, who was dressed in a Spongebob costume, livestreamed the rally and posted the footage with the title “Saving white Finland.” Speaking about immigrants, he said that people “need to be educated about how the genes work, and how these people realistically cannot be integrated here.”
He then attended an anti-fascist rally held elsewhere in Helsinki simultaneously, prompting left-wing demonstrators to chase him and his video crew back to their car. Ketola could be heard off-camera yelling “Sieg heil” as they drove away.
“What f–king violent pussies. Imagine what f–ing leftists,” Ketola said after taking off the Spongebob costume. “You see? These right-wing people, white people, the most friendly people. I just walked there, we didn’t say anything, we didn’t do anything — we go to these leftists and they try to f–ing attack us. F–ing dumb stupid f–ing n–ers.”
The following night, Ketola attended the dinner with Trump and about a dozen others in Tallinn, Estonia, hosted by Studioworks, a company that develops software for online casino sites. Ketola posted a photo of himself and the U.S. president’s son on Instagram, and wrote that he discussed “Duel, the state of the world and current political climate with him and his staff.”
“The political situations in our respective countries have become increasingly similar, with a rising tide of violence and radical leftism in both America and Finland,” Ketola wrote. “As a firm 1st amendment absolutist and an individual with many values that coincide with Republicans and Donald Trump himself, this was a great chance to align on many things important to both.”
Neither the Trump Organization, Miller, Ketola nor Levonyan responded to requests for comment.
Duel was founded last summer and has featured some prominent personalities on its streams, including boxing great Mike Tyson — who told Levonyan, “You dumb b–h, you like Hitler” — and the “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, who is known as Clavicular.
The fight night that it organized and promoted in Orlando was its first foray into combat sports, and made for the company’s biggest splash yet. It also caught the attention of at least one watchdog and a local lawmaker.
“Right after the event there was a lot of criticism put on the venue, which didn’t have much responsibility in this, and not enough eyes on the people who actually made it happen,” Mark Pitcavage, senior fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (The city had said that, as an operator of public venues, it “cannot deny access because we disagree with the political ideology, opinion or perspective, regardless of the message.”)
State Rep. Anna Eskamani called for the Florida Athletic Commission to revoke Duel Arena’s license. The commission’s members were appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has not commented on the event. The governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from JTA.
DeSantis’ immediate predecessor and fellow Republican, U.S. Senator Rick Scott, posted that the event was “utterly disturbing” and that “Antisemitism has NO PLACE in Florida.”
Pitcavage said that combat sports are “a draw for far-right extremists and white supremacists” who often view themselves as “white warriors.” He noted, however, that they make up a small portion of the participants and fans.
“It’s not at all surprising that some of them will get into various types of what they would consider manly, or warrior-like athletics,” he said.
Duel’s involvement in the Orlando event put the intersection of online gambling sites and far-right ideologies on his radar. “It’s something we’re starting to look into,” Pitcavage said. He noted that Duel is registered and licensed offshore on the autonomous island of Anjouan, making it more difficult to investigate.
Eskamani, who is running for mayor of Orlando, told JTA that Duel should not be allowed to operate in Florida, citing reasons that she says would beat the city’s First Amendment defense.
“These offshore cryptocurrency — I mean, there are so many red flags in how this entity is operating that from a purely financial security position for a public venue, I would not want to accept a reservation,” Eskamani said.
Duel set and promoted the matchups on the fight card, which included the kickboxing match between Miller, who goes by the moniker “Gypsy Crusader,” and his fellow influencer Ben “King” Azoulay.
Miller, who has made numerous appearances on Duel’s casino games streams, has been known to use racial slurs and denigrate minority groups in his online content. He was convicted in 2021 of felony weapons charges, and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison. He had posted about initiating a race-based civil war.
During a livestreamed conversation with Adin Ross, a Jewish streamer who has interviewed or maintained friendly relationships with controversial figures including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, Miller said there are no exceptions in his feelings toward Jews.
“I respect you for having an opinion that is different from the Jews,” Miller told Ross. “But that doesn’t mean that I would not laugh if I see you in a gas chamber.”
Clips from the Orlando event showed Miller performing the Nazi salute twice after his victory — something he has done after winning previous fights — prompting a number of attendees to do the same. One fan brought a Nazi Germany flag and waved it in his seat.
“He’s not a tough guy, he’s not an alpha male. He’s a short little f–ing Jew prick,” Miller declared about his opponent Azoulay in his post-fight interview, eliciting some cheers from the crowd.
U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, the Jewish Republican firebrand whose district includes Palm Coast and Daytona Beach, posted a video of the Nazi flag being unfurled and wrote, “This is not a joke and it is not edgy. The guy who did this is old enough to know exactly what that symbol means and to know that it’s not funny. We will make an example out of him.”
Asked what he meant by making an example of the attendee, Fine told JTA, “We put the video out so he would be recognized and be held publicly accountable. Most folks are unwilling to associate with Nazis.”
Cheering Miller on ringside was Jake Shields, a former mixed martial artist-turned far-right influencer who has espoused conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel. Shields wore a shirt reading “FCK ISRL.” Myron Gaines, a prominent streamer who has spread similar conspiracy theories and performed Nazi salutes, was in the stands, and told Miller before the fight, “You fight for the goyim,” according to clips shared on social media.
Pitcavage said he has been tracking a trend of the far-right getting involved in combat sports since the late 1990s, as mixed martial arts and UFC became a more mainstream phenomenon and amateur gyms became widespread and increasingly accessible.
The ADL has flagged that in recent years “active clubs,” or “localized white supremacist crews” that gather for fight training, have become more common. The ADL writes that these groups “see themselves as fighters training for an ongoing war against a system that they claim is deliberately plotting against the white race.”
As news outlets covered backlash to the Orlando fight night, Duel issued its own statement saying it was horrified “to learn that a group of viewers were displaying symbols of hate at our event.” The company criticized the city’s “shocking remarks that the ‘First Amendment’ applies and that ‘free speech’ is permitted at their arena,” and pledged to “work with local activist groups to push back on this and ensure that this kind of hate does not fester ever again.”
The statement appeared to be an example of Duel trolling with deadpan, buttoned-up language. Before the fight, Ketola had similarly released a promotional video that appeared to be condemning Miller’s views. “Paul Miller is a Nazi. Being a Nazi is bad,” Ketola narrated, over footage of him shaking his head. “We cannot support this. The only reason we are allowing him to fight is to ensure the good guys get to add another victory to their record.”
Then, after Miller’s win, Duel’s Instagram account left a comment that told a different story.
“The good guys won,” Duel wrote.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Nazi imagery nothing new for crypto casino behind Orlando fight with swastika flags and Hitler salutes appeared first on The Forward.
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I want to rescue the word Zionism. We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment.
On Rosh Hashanah, I spoke about my predecessor Rabbi Alexander Kohut. He was the renowned European scholar who gave his first sermon here in 1885 and began with the Gomel prayer, thanking God for bringing him safely to America, to this promised land.
I need to tell you how the rest of that sermon went down. Our new German-speaking rabbi proceeded to warn our congregation about the changes he saw happening in American Judaism that threatened our connection to the Jewish people as a whole.
Two years earlier, when Hebrew Union College ordained its first class of American-trained Reform rabbis, its celebratory dinner included littleneck clams and shrimp salad: the infamous Trefa Banquet. It was a provocative declaration that American Jews were no longer bound by archaic laws that separated us from our neighbors.
Kohut cautioned that discarding tradition would leave Judaism a skeleton “without spirit and heart.” If every Jew could simply pick which rules to follow, what would hold us together as a people?
Kohut illustrated this point with a famous Midrashic parable. A group of people are traveling together on a boat. When one passenger begins drilling a hole beneath his seat, the others cry out, “What are you doing?” He responds, “Why do you care? The hole is only under my seat.” Kohut’s sermon sent shock waves through the Jewish community.
The next Shabbat, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, the leading voice of radical Reform, answered from his own pulpit just eight blocks uptown, arguing, “Judaism is a living faith, not a religion confined to dead letters.” For weeks, the two rabbis traded sermons before packed pews. The Kohut–Kohler debates even made the front page of The New York Times.
Later that year, Kohler helped author the Pittsburgh Platform, defining the principles of a new American Reform Judaism. Its most consequential statement was not about kashrut or ritual garb but about peoplehood, declaring, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community.”
America had offered Jews a radical promise: you could be fully Jewish and fully American. With America gratefully embraced as our new nation, Judaism could just be our religion, like our Protestant neighbors’ down the street. It was liberating, but it also amputated a part of Jewish identity that had been essential for thousands of years.
Of course, Judaism is a religious practice. But for centuries, it was also our law and calendar, our language and literature. Jewish identity runs through how we speak and argue and tell a joke, and through that inexplicable pull that, when something happens to a Jew we have never met in a place far away, we somehow feel it happened to us.
The 20th-century philosopher Martin Buber understood why. Most religions, he noted, begin with an individual revelation. A prophet or a spiritual teacher has an encounter and shares it with others. But Judaism’s defining religious encounter is different. At Sinai, revelation happens to an entire people. Buber wrote, “In the hour of faith, the group becomes a nation. Only as a nation can it hear what it is destined to hear.” Jewish faith and peoplehood cannot be pulled apart.
But we kept trying. Modernity asked us to check a box. Religion, race, nationality: What are we?
The author Dara Horn gives the best answer I’ve heard. She says, “It’s not complicated. It’s just old. Jews are a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture.” That’s a whole sentence in English, but in Hebrew, it’s just two letters: Am. We are Am Yisrael, the people Israel.
Around the turn of the 20th century, just as Reform Jews were loosening their claim on nationhood, Europe told our Jewish brethren, “Not so fast.” Pogroms swept through the Russian Empire. Political movements in Germany demanded the rollback of Jewish rights. Vienna, the glittering capital of European culture, elected an openly antisemitic mayor. And in France, Alfred Dreyfus, a Frenchman by birth, language, and military service, discovered that to his accusers, he was simply a Jew.
Europe kept asking what was called the Jewish Question: What to do with the Jews? Could they assimilate enough to belong, or would they always remain strangers in the lands they called home?
Jewish leaders began asking a different question: How can we take our future into our own hands? Different Jews gave radically different answers. Their answers came to be called Zionism.
The political Zionist Theodor Herzl asked, “How do we save the Jews?” His answer was sovereignty. Jews could no longer depend on the tolerance of other nations for our safety.
The cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am pushed back: “What good is saving the Jews if we fail to save Judaism?” His answer was cultural renewal, a Hebrew spiritual and cultural center that could renew Jewish life everywhere.
The Labor Zionist A.D. Gordon pushed the question further: But what kind of Jews are we trying to become? His answer was labor. Jews would become rooted again by working the soil, remaking not only a homeland but ourselves.
The religious Zionist Rav Kook asked, “How can this national rebirth also be a spiritual rebirth?” His answer was redemption. By rebuilding Jewish national life, even secular pioneers participated in a sacred process larger than they understood.
There was never just one Zionism, and there still isn’t today. Early Zionists disagreed about every aspect of the state they hoped to build. Zionism was a family argument about how an ancient people takes responsibility for its future.
Journalist Haviv Rettig Gur has defined Zionism as a rescue project, because underlying all of those competing visions was one urgent conviction: There has to be somewhere in the world where we do not need another nation’s permission to live as Jews.
The Holocaust made that need undeniable. Even after the world witnessed the Nazis’ machinery of extermination, hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons camps because most nations still refused to take us in. Later, more than 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries such as Iraq, Libya, and Iran, erasing Jewish communities that had endured for thousands of years.
And in the 1990s, Israel took in over a million Jews fleeing persecution from the former Soviet Union, and tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews escaping famine and civil war. After the founding of the State of Israel, Jewish survival never again had to depend on whether someone else would open the door.
And that brings me to a rescue project for our generation. I want to rescue the word Zionism.
A Jewish Federation survey earlier this year grabbed my attention. Nine out of 10 American Jews believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Nine out of 10. But only a third of us are willing to call ourselves Zionists. Why does that matter? Because when a majority of Jews reject the name Zionist, it obscures just how mainstream support for the Jewish state and attachment to Jewish peoplehood is for Jews.
Zionism, simply put, is the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. If you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state, you are already standing inside the Zionist argument.
Let me tell you why I am a Zionist. To me, Zionism is what becomes possible when the Jewish people can fully shape our own lives. In Israel, Jews not only live from January to December, but from Nisan to Adar, from Rosh Hashanah to Tisha B’Av. Children order ice cream in the language of our prophets. Jews have built amazing universities and hospitals where Jewish and Palestinian citizens study side by side and save lives together. Engineers make the desert bloom one drip at a time. And we live again in a land toward which Jews in exile have directed our prayers for 2,000 years.
With that return comes the responsibility to build a society worthy of our deepest Jewish values, always striving for peace. And because I know how essential safety and self-determination are for my people, my Zionism cannot deny those same fundamental rights to another. Palestinians, too, must live with dignity, security, and freedom in that land. That, too, is my Zionism.
Today, I’m not addressing the one in 10 Jews who reject the very idea of a Jewish state, though my door and this synagogue remain open to you. I’m speaking to the majority of Jews who believe in the Jewish state but refuse the Zionist name. And you’ve told me why.
You’ve said, “I don’t want to call myself a Zionist because I can’t support the Israeli government’s or military’s treatment of the Palestinians.” But Zionism is older and larger than any government. Dissent, even contempt for an Israeli leader or policy, does not place you outside Zionism. It puts you alongside Israelis who have filled the streets for years protesting their own government because of their Zionism.
You’ve said, “I’m ashamed of Israeli extremists who commit crimes in the name of religious Zionism.” But all of us should be appalled by extremist settler violence. No one should stand in the same camp with racist ministers who excuse or enable this Hillul Hashem, this desecration. Hundreds of prominent Zionists, including prime ministers, former IDF generals, and heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, have all condemned this Jewish terrorism and demanded an end to the violence and displacement in the West Bank.
You’ve said Zionism has become a slur, “She’s a Zionist” is now shorthand for colonialism, racism, apartheid, even genocide. But these words have a history. In the 1960s, Soviet propaganda deliberately recast the Jewish national liberation movement as a colonialist and imperialist project, while using anti-Zionism to oppress Soviet Jews, even sponsoring a 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The label Zionist has been weaponized against Jews for more than half a century.
We cannot reduce a vast Jewish idea to the politics of the moment. As British writer Howard Jacobson says, “Zionism is not a country or a system of government. Zionism is an expression of a people’s soul. It is a longing and a necessity, a utopian fantasy. It’s an understanding of history and a solution, an act of reasoning, an act of despair, a prayer, a poem, and a song.”
And since when do we Jews let other people do our naming for us? If we refuse the Zionist name because others have smeared it, or because some have stained it with violence, we hand the word to its most fanatical followers and its most hostile opponents. We abandon the Zionists working every day to build a more just, secure, and peaceful Israel for all its inhabitants. And we surrender a word that has carried the dreams, sacrifices, and hopes of Am Yisrael for generations.
One of our young Central members spent the last year in Israel, and he said his time there both increased his love for the Israeli people and his disgust for the current government. He’s not the type to join in protests, but on Fridays he traveled to the West Bank to accompany Palestinian shepherds and farmers so they could work with less fear of harassment or violence from settlers. Israeli groups call this “protective presence.” This young man called it his Zionism.
I especially want the next generation to know that claiming Zionism means believing in Jewish sovereignty and insisting that it’s not exempt from our tradition’s moral demands. It means seeing clearly where Israel has been a beacon and a blessing, and where it has failed to live up to the values stated in its own Declaration of Independence: freedom, justice, and peace, and equal rights for all its citizens.
When we fall short of our promise, as every person and every nation does, the Jewish response is not abandonment. It is teshuvah, a return to who we are meant to be. That is what Yom Kippur asks of us. Teshuvah requires honest accounting and change. But the goal of teshuvah is not shaming. Teshuvah is fundamentally an act of hope, the hope of return.
When the Israelites first returned to Jerusalem in the sixth century BCE after their first exile, they sang.
“When God returned us to Zion, we were like dreamers.” They couldn’t believe it. They were living inside what once seemed impossible: to be back in their land.
Zionism has always required that kind of imagination. Theodor Herzl looked at a scattered, vulnerable people and imagined us sovereign again in our ancestral homeland, saying, “Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.” Less than half a century later, the State of Israel was born. Impossible, until it happened.
And after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israelis regarded Egypt as their most formidable enemy, and the vast majority of Israelis did not believe peace was possible. But soon thereafter, Israel’s mightiest adversary became the first Arab state to make peace with it. Impossible, until it happened.
And in recent memory, after 738 days of despair and fear that we would never see every hostage out of Gaza, on Simchat Torah, two years after their kidnapping, every last living hostage came home. It was a miracle made possible by the relentless work of so many and the prayers of Am Yisrael from around the world. Impossible, until it happened.
Im tirtzu, ein zo agadah. If you will it, it is no dream.
There is so much that still feels impossible in Israel right now. But if our history teaches us anything, it’s not to underestimate what is yet to come, or our responsibility to help shape it.
Rabbi Kohut served this congregation around the time of the birth of the modern Zionist movement. His message to us in 1885 is no less true today. We Jews are in the same boat. Half of the Jews of the world live in the State of Israel. No Jew should say, “Why should I care? The hole is only under their seat.” We cannot walk away from the most important sovereign project of the Jewish people. We must proudly claim the name Zionist and take our place in the unfolding story of Am Yisrael.
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