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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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2025 was deadliest year for Jews in decades, antisemitism watchdogs in 7 countries conclude
(JTA) — A coalition of leading Jewish organizations from seven countries has released a report confirming that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the Jewish Diaspora in more than three decades.
More than 20 people were killed in antisemitic violence last year, according to the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism report released Wednesday. The report confirms an analysis published earlier this year by Tel Aviv University.
The J7 report concludes that it is no longer accurate to say that antisemitism is spiking in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Instead, the report says, Jews around the world face an ongoing, sustained trend of antisemitic violence that requires action from their governments.
“Antisemitism in our seven countries is no longer a surge; it is our new normal,” the report says. “Governments must stop reacting after Jews are attacked and start acting before, with real security funding, stronger laws, and social media platforms that enforce their own rules.”
The findings are from the task force’s second annual report, which documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents during 2025 across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The incidents led to more than 20 deaths in 2025, including 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, two people during an attack outside the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, another two people outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. in May, and one person in a firebombing during a walk for Oct. 7 hostages in Boulder, Colorado in June.
The J7 report identified anti-Zionism as a motivating factor in nearly half of the recorded incidents in Britain and the United States and almost a quarter of the incidents in Germany.
The J7 group of Jewish organizations — including the Anti-Defamation League in the United States and Australia’s Executive Council of Australian Jewry — formed in 2023 to improve cross-border collaboration and coordination in the fight against antisemitism. It plans to release a new analysis of incidents from the first half of 2026 next week.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Ladino-speaking pirates, genies and grumpy demon cats: PJ Library expands bookshelves with Sephardic stories
In 1940s Baghdad, a little girl named Na’ima tries desperately to stay awake all night for Shavuot. In wartime Libya, a young boy embarks on a supernatural quest to find a lost city. In 19th-century Morocco, a father’s frustration with his son’s teacher leads him to a rabbinical court.
Until recently, none of those stories would have been likely candidates for mainstream American Jewish children’s books. Now, they are among the first titles slated for publication through PJ Library’s Sephardic Stories Initiative, a fellowship launched in 2024 to support authors writing tales that reflect Sephardic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish traditions.
For more than two decades, PJ Library has mailed free Jewish children’s books to families around the world. Today, it distributes roughly 670,000 books monthly in more than 40 countries. According to Alisa Koyrakh, the organization’s director of books, those stories have historically reflected a familiar slice of Jewish life.
“There are just a lot of Ashkenormative stories out there—a lot of stories about Yiddish, the Lower East Side and immigration from Eastern Europe,” Koyrakh said. “Those are all really important stories. But we saw gaps. It was kind of obvious.”
The Sephardic Stories Initiative intends to fill those gaps, bringing together Sephardic and Mizrahi writers for a year of workshops, editorial mentorship and critique from their peers.
Arnon Z. Shorr, whose first foray into children’s literature was a fiction book about Ladino-speaking Jewish pirates (yes, those were actually a thing), described his forthcoming graphic novel, Pedahzur and the Quest for the Hidden City, as a supernatural adventure set in Libya in the mid-1940s.
Knowing 1940s Libya is more often associated with Fascist persecution of Jews in North Africa—not talking cats and magical quests – Shorr laughed.
“I just got a kick out of it because it’s so not what anybody ever expects,” he said.
For Shorr, it was important to write a story connected to his family’s Libyan heritage. He spent hours digging into North African Jewish folklore to draw inspiration.
“There are historians and academics who do fantastic work looking into these things,” he said. “But their work doesn’t necessarily get read by 10-year-olds. I try to channel some of that into a fun genre—a desert adventure with genies and grumpy demon cats.”
Israeli author Rinat Hadad Siegel also found inspiration in an unlikely place: the Farhud, the violent pogrom that erupted in Baghdad during Shavuot in 1941, killing scores of Jews.
Her book, Na’ima’s Shavuot Eve, follows a little girl determined to stay awake all night alongside the adults celebrating the holiday that marks when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.
For Siegel, writing about a place she has never been to —and cannot visit—posed a challenge. Once home to one of the world’s oldest and largest Jewish communities, Iraq today is believed to have only a handful of Jews remaining, and travel there by Israelis like Siegel is effectively impossible.
She worked to piece together the Baghdad her family inhabited by interviewing relatives —including an aunt who survived the Farhud—and digging through Iraqi Jewish archives.
“I would go to different libraries and find books about it, and you can see the amount of dust,” she said. “Nobody has touched them for years.”
Although the book doesn’t mention the Farhud directly, it contains subtle nods to the tragedy, including an illustration of a memorial for family members who perished and decorative amulets that Iraqi Jewish children typically wore on Shavuot.
Siegel hopes children will connect with the story’s universal moments—wanting to stay up all night with the grown-ups—as well as its distinctly Iraqi Jewish setting, from sleeping on rooftops overlooking the Tigris River on warm nights to eating kahi, a flaky Iraqi pastry traditionally served on Shavuot.
But expanding the offerings of Jewish children’s literature beyond Ashkenazi narratives is not merely a creative endeavor. It’s also a way to broaden the public conception of Jewish identity at a challenging time, Shorr said.
According to an analysis of the Publishers Marketplace database, there was a 76% decrease in fictional book deal announcements that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel between 2023 and 2024. By 2026, there was an 82% decline.
A July report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression and writers’ rights, found that many Jewish authors have faced challenges publishing openly Jewish work since Oct. 7. Many of the authors interviewed for that report cited publishers’ fears of boycotts of Jewish or Israeli stories, which made getting their work published challenging.
“The narrow view that we get of who Jews are and what Judaism is about through Hollywood, mass entertainment—whatever—leaves too much room for people to invent more of the story for themselves,” Shorr said. “I think that becomes very dangerous for us.”
Koyrakh said getting Jewish children’s books with unfamiliar settings and storylines published by major publishing houses has long been a challenge.
“It’s much easier to get a Hanukkah book published by a major publishing house because that’s an easy story for publishers to know how to sell, put in the market and recognize. But we know there’s so much more to Jewish life than Hanukkah.”
The four inaugural books of the Sephardic Stories Initiative will be published by PJ Library and distributed to the Jewish families it serves. They include Na’ima’s Shavuot Eve, Pedahzur and the Quest for the Hidden City, Shai’s Lesson, set in 19th-century Morocco, and Signs of Magic, which takes place in mid-19th-century Tiberias.
Shorr hopes their publication will inspire the next generation of Jewish storytellers.
“I didn’t want to commit my career to backing myself into somebody else’s tale,” he said. “Because I hadn’t ever seen a story about anybody like me, I couldn’t imagine it.” Looking back, he said, “The lack of mirrors meant it took much longer for me to start creating mirrors of my own.”
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Netanyahu and Lapid vie for a critical title: Who is Israel’s most adept U.S. whisperer?
(JTA) — WASHINGTON – Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the leader of his opposition, are in Washington, ostensibly to attend the funeral of one of the staunchest pro-Israel American politicians, Lindsey Graham.
They are also, as Lapid made clear in an appearance Monday at the influential Atlantic Council think tank, launching a bruising election campaign and are intensely seeking the favor of a constituent who does not vote in Israel on Oct. 27: President Donald Trump.
Or more broadly, the favor of Americans.
Israeli-born Netanyahu, who was raised in Philadelphia, has made a career of defining himself as his country’s best, even inevitable, envoy to its most important ally. He met with Trump on Tuesday. Lapid in his speech sought to portray Netanyahu’s public diplomacy – the defining characteristic of his political career – as busted and harmful.
“The first step is obvious” to restoring Israel’s reputation, Lapid said. “Send into retirement Benjamin Netanyahu and his group of extremists who are tearing us apart at home and abroad.”
Lapid, who speaks in fluent but accented English, says he wants to be the foreign minister in the next government, one led by Naftali Bennett, a security hawk, as prime minister. He, too, claims an intimacy with the American psyche, evident in an essay he just published in The Atlantic about the cross-country road trips he takes every several years.
Netanyahu is on a mission to secure support for continuing and winning the war he and Trump launched against Iran. In remarks in Hebrew he recorded just prior to leaving Israel on Monday, he leaned into his friendship with Trump.
“I am on my way to Washington to a meeting with our friend the president of the United States, Donald Trump,” he said, standing with his wife, Sara, outside the airplane. “This is my eighth meeting with him since he was elected for his second term, more than any other world leader. It is a great privilege, and also a great responsibility.”
Both Lapid and Netanyahu claimed a closeness to Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who helped Netanyahu cajole Trump into the war with Iran. Graham, Netanyahu said, was “a true friend of mine and the state of Israel.” Lapid inserted Graham into his argument that the long term goal for Israel and the United States should be the collapse of the Iranian regime. “The last conversation I had with the late Lindsey Graham was about this,” he said Monday.
Lapid at the outset of his remarks sought to erode Netanyahu’s reputation as an America whisperer, saying the coming election would “be the most dramatic, the most crucial, the most intense the country has ever seen.”
“Here is the not to-do list for the Israeli government if you don’t want to witness the complete collapse of the country’s international status.”
Lapid accused Netanyahu of isolating Israel by caving to extremists in his government and alienating allies. Instead, he laid out a formula for how the next prime minister would govern.
“If a minister in your government says a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza, fire him. If a minister in your government says there are circumstances in which it is acceptable to starve the civilian population, fire him. If a minister stands over a large group of handcuffed activists lying on the floor of a detention facility, waving a flag and mocking them, fire him,” Lapid said.
He was referring, respectively, to controversial statements and actions by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, some of which have been used to fuel the claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the war Hamas launched on Oct. 7, 2023 with deadly raids inside Israel.
Netanyahu’s mission comes at a perilous juncture in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and his own reputation. Trump’s approval ratings are at a low as the war appears to have generated victories for Iran, which now controls the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway critical to the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum. Inflation has skyrocketed, US allies are furious, and Americans in large majorities oppose the war, just as Trump is facing his own electoral test less than 100 days before the midterm elections.
Netanyahu is unpopular in the United States, and for the first time, Americans are more likely to favor Palestinians than Israelis. An Economist poll published Tuesday showed half of Americans supported Netanyahu’s arrest. Trump wants Israel to stay out of the war, crippling Israel’s ability to influence the outcome of the conflict that continues to loom on its border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, hopes to regain its strength.
Lapid’s audience here is mostly left of center: His host at the event was Daniel Shapiro, the Obama administration’s ambassador to Israel. A spokesman for Lapid said that other than his attendance at Graham’s funeral, his only public appearance on his trip to the United States this week would be with a group of Democratic senators.
The Atlantic Council is bipartisan, but its Republican component is made up mostly of the old-school believers in alliances that Trump has all but ousted from the party. Seated in the front row was Stephen Hadley, the national security advisor to former President George W. Bush, who is a board member of the Atlantic Council.
Lapid said reconciling with Democrats would be a priority in the next government, should his dream team emerge victorious: Bennett as prime minister, Lapid as foreign minister and Gadi Eisenkot as defense minister. Eisenkot, who has in recent polls surpassed Bennet and Netanyahu, obviously might have different ideas about who gets which job.
“Elizabeth Warren, John Ossoff and Tim Kaine are not the enemy,” he said, referring to Democratic senators from Massachusetts, Georgia and Virginia who have been critical of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, and who have voted to suspend defense assistance to Israel. “The Democratic Party is not the enemy.“
Bennett and then Lapid were rotating prime ministers during the last government’s eighteen months of tenure in 2021 and 2022, interrupting Netanyahu’s 12 year run launched in 2009. Netanyahu by then was already persona non grata among Democrats for his all-out campaign against President Barack Obama’s Iran policies.
Lapid, like others running against Netanyahu, appeared cowed by Netanyahu’s attempts to tar their past association with Mansour Abbas, the leader of the United Arab List. Bennet and Lapid made history by including the party in the governing coalition. That would not happen again, Lapid said, although garnering enough seats to govern is more daunting without the inclusion of Arab parties.
“I have a lot of conversations about this with Mansour Abbas, who seems to understand this better than some of my Jewish friends, the fact that maybe it’s time for a coalition that will be made of only of Zionist parties,” he said.
Lapid’s greater affinity to Democrats notwithstanding, he took shots at Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump – arguing that he was the better friend to the president’s Middle East agenda. He noted that last year he brought Trump’s 20-point plan for bringing peace to Gaza to a Knesset vote – and that Netanyahu and his coalition partners absented themselves from the Knesset rather than vote for it.
“I passed the 20-point plan, I did it just to bend Netanyahu’s arm into it,” he said. Netanyahu could not afford to back the plan because its provisions anticipating Palestinian self-governance might have cost him his right-wing coalition partners. ”So I got all the compliments from the American administration,” Lapid said. “It was fun.”
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