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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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Purim gets creative in Israel, with festivities driven underground
TEL AVIV, Israel — On the corner of a sun-bleached side street in Tel Aviv’s Shuk Levinsky, costumed mannequins stand guard over a half-dark shop, their painted eyes fixed on a street gone strangely still. Cardboard boxes of sequined capes and feathered wings spill onto the sidewalk, untouched. The neighboring businesses are shuttered, heavy padlocks fastened across their metal doors.
On any weekday, the quiet would feel unusual in this bustling pocket of south Tel Aviv. But this is Purim week — normally the market’s most frenetic stretch of the year. In ordinary times, the sidewalks would be clogged with parents and teenagers clamoring for last-minute costume details, with vendors shouting prices over the din.
That was precisely the scene just 48 hours earlier, on the Friday before the Purim madness was set to begin. Despite weeks of speculation about a looming confrontation with Iran, most Israelis pressed ahead with their plans. Hamentaschen were baked, school carnivals assembled, parties confirmed. A meme circulated in school group chats: “Can someone let us know if we are supposed to be buying costumes or canned goods?”
Early Saturday morning, an answer came via the piercing trill of the emergency alert system. The United States and Israel had begun what officials described as “preemptive strikes” against Iran. Within hours, thousands of reservists were called up. Citizens scrambled for shelter plans. WhatsApp groups filled with instructions and anxieties. And as Iran launched retaliatory rockets, Israelis absorbed a different blow: Purim was officially canceled.
Hence, the shuk’s current ghost town atmosphere. Inside the darkened shop, Rotem Avidan sat at the register, scrolling on his phone.
“There’s no real reason to be open,” he said. “Mostly I was just bored at home. I’ll probably close up in a couple of hours.”
Avidan has been selling costumes in the shuk for more than 15 years and relies heavily on Purim sales. The day before the holiday is typically his busiest of the year. Instead, he estimates he’ll make about 80% of his usual income.
“It’s not terrible,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s just one more irregular year. We had corona. We had two years of war. This was supposed to be the year things finally went back to normal.”
The past two Purims were indeed subdued, shadowed by the war in Gaza and the fight to bring hostages home. Even celebrations that went ahead felt muted. With the last living hostages returned in October, many had hoped this would finally be an uncomplicated holiday.
To fully grasp why the cancellation hit so hard, one must understand Purim in Israel. This is not a single-event celebration. It is a multi-day spectacle that spills from nursery school classrooms into city streets. Municipal adloyadas — elaborate parades with floats and marching bands — draw families by the thousands. Teenagers roam in coordinated group costumes. It is not uncommon to find yourself seated on a bus beside an elderly woman in full clown makeup, or handed paperwork at the bank by a teller wearing butterfly wings.
None of which would be happening this year.
Children feel the loss most acutely. For many, Purim is the highlight of the school calendar: themed dress-up days, costume parades, parent-run carnivals, and the exchange of mishloach manot before a three-day vacation. On Sunday morning, children across the country woke to the bad news.
Teachers scrambled to salvage what they could. Virtual parades were arranged over Zoom. Students were asked to send photos in costume. Mishloach manot became neighborhood drop-offs.
In some cases, the children made their own Purim joy. In one Tel Aviv apartment building, the kids organized a costume party, complete with printed invitations for guests. Playgrounds around the country — at least those equipped with shelters — were filled with rambunctious children dressed as superheroes and princesses, their bleary-eyed parents dragging slightly behind them.
If children are Purim’s most visible protagonists, they are hardly its only devotees. For young adults, the holiday is the high point of Israel’s nightlife calendar — a sanctioned blur of themed raves and packed bars. This year, the bomb shelter became a stand-in for the nightclub.
Within hours of the first rocket fire, twentysomethings in Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood had organized an impromptu party in a public shelter, complete with makeshift costumes and an amateur DJ. When video of the event went viral, social media flooded with young people asking about the nearest mesibat miklat — a “shelter party.”
Not everyone approved.
“Wow. How disconnected can you be?” one commenter wrote. “People have been killed and you can’t give up your Purim party for one year?”
By nightfall, hundreds had gathered — some in small, shared building shelters for private parties, others in larger municipal bunkers — determined to carve out a pocket of joy, even as Iranian missiles soared overhead.
Shahar Rubin, 24, hadn’t planned on going to a party when he and his friends noticed a stream of people heading into the Dizengoff Center parking garage. “We figured, why not?” he said.
Four stories underground, in one of the city’s largest public shelters, a DJ blasted music as costumed revelers danced beneath the fluorescent lights and exposed concrete.
“This is exactly why we come to Tel Aviv,” said Rubin, who is originally from the north. “There’s nothing like the Purim atmosphere here.”
After more than 400 days of wartime reserve duty in the Israel Defense Forces, the celebration felt like a rare exhale — and perhaps a brief one, before he is called up again. “It was a last hurrah of sorts,” he added, as he and his friends headed off in search of their next mesibat miklat.
Beyond the costumes and parties, Purim is anchored in four religious obligations: a festive meal, the exchange of food gifts, donations to the poor and — most famously — the public reading of Megillat Esther.
“According to Jewish law, men and women are required to hear the reading of the entire Megillah from a kosher scroll,” said Rabbi Nadav Berger, head of Hadar’s Beit Midrash in Jerusalem. “Because the obligation is about publicizing the miracle of Purim, there is a strong preference to do it in public, in a group of at least ten people.”
That preference became complicated as soon as Home Front Command restricted public gatherings.
By the time Shabbat ended, observant Jews were organizing small readings in private homes and shelters. Hadar put out a call for community members who owned kosher megillot.
“Owning a personal megillah isn’t as rare as owning a Torah scroll,” Berger explained. “Many people inherit one or receive one for a bar mitzvah or wedding. Hearing the Megillah in person is still our first recommendation, so we wanted to help facilitate that safely.”
For those unable to attend, Hadar is also offering Zoom options, drawing on halachic guidance developed during the pandemic. “The rulings get into the technical question of how to understand electronically transmitted sound,” Berger said. “But it goes without saying: no one is required to risk their life to hear the Megillah — or to fulfill any other Torah commandment. Safety overrides everything.”
He added: “Typically, one would perform a mitzvah all in one sequence, from beginning to end. But if a siren goes off while you are reading the megillah, it is perfectly acceptable to pause the reading, even for a few hours, until it is safe to return.”
For Berger, the tension between caution and celebration may be truer to Purim than one might expect for a holiday typically associated with pure, unadulterated joy. When he sent out Hadar’s revised Purim plans, he opened with Mordechai’s words to Esther: “Who knows. Perhaps it was for just such a moment that you attained royalty?”
“Meaning, you have to be responsible right now,” Berger explained. “You have to think about your situation and respond accordingly. That’s what we’re trying to do in light of all that’s happening.”
He went on, “If you read the Megillah, most of it is actually anxiety-provoking. It is a very tense story. The joy comes only at the end.”
“The hope,” he said, “is that this, too, is only the middle — and that Israel will once again return to celebrating Purim happily, joyously, as we do every year.”
The post Purim gets creative in Israel, with festivities driven underground appeared first on The Forward.
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Fears of Iranian Sleeper Cell Retaliation Grow in the West as Middle East War Escalates
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei listens to the national anthem as Air Force officers salute during their meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Fears of Iranian-backed terrorism are intensifying across Western countries, with officials warning Iran could mobilize terrorist sleeper cells and proxy networks in revenge for the unprecedented US-Israeli strikes on Saturday that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — prompting governments to raise threat levels and bolster security for Jewish and Israeli communities abroad.
Sleeper cells are covert operatives or terrorists embedded in rival countries who remain dormant until they receive orders to act and carry out attacks.
As the war in the Middle East continues to spread and escalate, officials in Germany have warned of potential Iranian retaliation targeting Jewish and Israeli institutions nationwide, prompting several federal states to step up protections and issue alerts as threat concerns mount.
“Retaliatory measures — including the possible activation of Iranian sleeper cells in Europe — cannot be ruled out,” Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the parliamentary oversight committee of the intelligence services in Germany, told the local newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.
“The Iranian regime has repeatedly shown that it extends its use of terror beyond its own borders,” Henrichmann said. “Federal and state security authorities remain on the highest alert level and will adjust protective measures whenever necessary.”
Roman Poseck, the interior minister of the German state of Hesse, added to German outlet Die Welt that it should “be assumed that there will be an increase in the abstract threat situation, especially for Jewish, Israeli, and American institutions.”
Meanwhile, Felix Klein, the German government’s commissioner for combating antisemitism, warned to the Funke media group that, following the outbreak of conflict with Iran, “we must assume an increased threat to Jewish life in Germany.”
In France, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez also issued a heightened alert, warning of potential threats and urging regional authorities to reinforce security around Jewish places of worship.
“In light of the current international situation in the Middle East, I reiterate my instructions to remain vigilant and ask you to immediately implement enhanced security measures for Jewish places of worship and religious gatherings,” Nuñez told French newspaper Le Figaro.
The United States and Israel carried out a series of strikes on military and leadership targets across Iran — including senior officials and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders — after negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs failed to yield results.
Shortly after reports emerged that the US–Israeli joint operation may have killed Khamenei, US President Donald Trump released a message urging Iranians to consider a future beyond the current regime and expressing guarded hope that the moment could lead to meaningful change.
The escalation came weeks after the Iranian regime killed tens of thousands of civilians in a sweeping crackdown on last month’s anti-government protests. The outbreak of fighting also followed last June’s 12-day war between Iran and Israel, which concluded after the US joined and bombed Iranian nuclear sites.
Beyond Europe, fears of Iranian retaliation are rising in the US, as counterterrorism agencies warn that additional resources are being rushed into efforts to detect and disrupt potential revenge attacks on American soil.
Although no specific credible threats have been publicly disclosed, FBI Director Kash Patel said Saturday that US counterterrorism and intelligence agencies were operating under heightened alert, with personnel “working 24/7 … to address and disrupt any potential threats” on US soil.
“While the military handles force protection overseas, the FBI remains at the forefront of deterring attacks here at home – and will continue to have our team work around the clock to protect Americans,” Patel wrote in a post on X.
Amid growing fears of possible retaliation, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem also said authorities are “in direct coordination with our federal intelligence and law enforcement partners as we continue to closely monitor and thwart any potential threats to the homeland.”
Concerns over the activation of Iran’s sleeper cells have surged even further after a deadly mass shooting in Austin, Texas involving a suspect with alleged support for the Islamist regime and a separate gun attack on the gym of an Iranian dissident in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Both incidents stoked fears of politically motivated violence linked to the broader regional crisis in the Middle East.
On Sunday, a gunman opened fire at a bar in Austin’s West Sixth Street district, killing two people and injuring 14 others before being shot and killed by police.
Authorities later reported finding a flag of the Islamic Republic and photographs of Iranian leaders inside the suspect’s apartment, deepening concerns about potential links between the attack and broader political or ideological influences.
According to the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, there were indicators that could suggest a possible terrorism link.
In Canada, hours after the announced death of Khamenei, a boxing gym run by Iranian-Canadian dissident activist Salar Gholami was struck by gunfire overnight.
Tehran’s ability to coordinate or inspire attacks on American soil has long been a concern for US law enforcement and intelligence officials — a fear that only deepened after Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
Amid the 12-day war in June, NBC News reported that Iran had privately warned the United States that it could activate sleeper cells on American soil in response to military action. While no specific plots were publicly disclosed, US authorities increased domestic security measures and intelligence monitoring in anticipation of possible attacks. Vice President JD Vance said the Trump administration was examining the possibility of an Iran-backed homeland attack “very closely.”
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‘Death to America’: Campus Student Groups Express Solidarity With Iran, Call for Uprising Against US
A pro-Hamas activist wears a keffiyeh while marching from the City University of New York to Columbia University. Photo: Eduardo Munoz via Reuters Connect
Anti-Zionist student groups across the US proclaimed solidarity with the aims of Islamism and jihad following a joint military operation between the US and Israel which killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of other high-level regime officials on Saturday.
“Death to America,” posted a group which calls itself Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff which serves as an umbrella group for a consortium of revolutionary organizations, some of which are formally recognized by the university. “We yearn for the end of the US settler colonial project. This should not be a controversial position.”
In other posts, the group shared an April 24 tweet in which Khamenei told pro-Hamas college students, who were in the middle of convulsing higher education institutions with illegal building occupations and antisemitic hate crimes, that they are “on the right side of history” and another which said “Iran has every right to defend itself against zionist [sic] warfare.”
A torrent of criticism followed the comments, leading Columbia University to denounce CUAD for falsely claiming to be a university entity.
“The group that calls itself ‘CUAD’ is not a recognized student group, or affiliated in any way with the university,” the institution said on the X social media platform, pointing to a July 2025 statement by former interim president Claire Shipman which formally proscribed any official correspondence or communication with CUAD. “There is no evidence that anyone currently in control of their account is a current Columbia student, staff, or faculty member. They are illegally using the Columbia name.”
Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, said American officials should take CUAD’s rhetoric seriously.
“Cheering on Hamas and supporting Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism that has scores of American blood on their hands, surely warrants consequences,” he said. “We already have a great and sensible law on the books which says that while we welcome anyone who wishes to come here, attend university, and get an education, we do not permit people who openly support and advocate for terrorism. Actively supporting terrorism while calling for death to America and chanting ditties that advocate the annihilation of the world’s sole Jewish state should be a red line that warrants expulsion and deportation for those on student visas.”
CUAD is not the only group which denounced what the US dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.” On Sunday, New York University’s SJP chapter announced an anti-US demonstration to “demand an end to this criminal war that benefits no one other than US corporate interests.”
Meanwhile, DMVSJP, a network of SJP groups operating in Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, implored socialists and other revolutionary groups to attend a demonstration outside the White House on Monday, charging that “another US-backed war would mean death and displacement abroad and repression at home.”
The University of Chicago’s SJP chapter cheered Iran’s retaliatory strikes against US assets in Bahrain.
Some protests have kicked off already, according to social media reports, and have seen members of Yale’s SJP chapter brandishing “Death to America” signs. Prior to the demonstration, the group parroted propaganda confected by what remained of Iran’s political leadership following this weekend’s strikes, accusing the US of “killing children, including civilians.”
In the United Kingdom, the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society of University College London said, “This is not the end to resistance. The Shia in the west [sic] must remain aware and ready.”
Writing to The Algemeiner on Sunday, Sabrina Soffer, research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, said SJP’s statements are indicative of an ideology which contradicts itself.
“Even after the death of one of the Middle East’s most brutal butchers, they cannot offer even a scintilla of credit to Israel or the United States for confronting a regime that has terrorized its own people for decades,” Soffer said. “They brand themselves ‘anti-war’ yet refuse to recognize that the only genuinely anti-war force in this equation is the one dismantling the infrastructure of terror and repression. Israeli and American actions aimed at weakening a violent theocracy are not acts of aggression against the Iranian people — they are part of a rescue operation on behalf of a population held hostage by its rulers.”
She added, “What is truly un-progressive is the arrogance of presuming to speak for Iranians while ignoring those who have risked imprisonment and death resisting the regime from within. It is entitlement masquerading as solidarity.”
Students for Justice in Palestine’s national office has previously discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US in a now-deleted tweet that was posted to X in September 2024.
“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was at the time the latest in a series of progressive revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, CUAD distributed literature calling on students to enlist in a holy war against Israel and the US.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” it said. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the literature were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place in December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.