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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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Iran Has Executed At Least 21 People, Arrested Over 4,000 Since Start of War With US and Israel, UN Reports
A February 2023 protest in Washington, DC calling for an end to executions and human rights violations in Iran. Photo: Reuters/ Bryan Olin Dozier
The Islamic regime in Iran has intensified efforts to oppress the civilian population through arrests and executions since the beginning of the conflict with the US and Israel, according to the United Nations.
On Wednesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) revealed that Iran had executed at least 21 people and arrested more than 4,000 over the last two months, following the launch of joint US-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28.
Allegations which resulted in death sentences included espionage (two), opposition group membership (10), and involvement with protests (nine).
“In times of war, threats to human rights increase exponentially,” said Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Türk called for regime officials to “halt all further executions, establish a moratorium on the use of capital punishment, fully ensure due process and fair trial guarantees, and immediately release those arbitrarily detained.”
Iranian courts have reportedly fast-tracked convictions and sentencing in recent months, citing the war as justification.
According to the OHCHR, those detained face brutal conditions, overcrowding, and even torture to coerce confessions. The bodies of some detainees who have died in custody appear to show possible torture. Those detained also experience weaponized medical neglect, a human rights violation which has reportedly led to the deteriorating health of imprisoned Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi.
In addition to forced confessions, Iranian judges can also resort to the principle of elm‑e‑qazi, a concept in Iran’s Islamic Penal Code which allows a guilty sentence based solely on circumstantial evidence.
Last week, Maryam Rajavi, president‑elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), spoke about the regime’s executions at the European Parliament in Brussels.
“The mullahs are exploiting wartime conditions to resort to relentless executions to block the path of popular uprisings. Today, political prisoners face the threat of mass killing,” Rajavi said. “The silence of European Union leaders and member states is unjustifiable. And today, I wish to once again raise my voice in protest against this silence in the face of these executions.”
Rajavi added that “a number of young people have been arrested in recent weeks on charges of alleged contact with or support for the Mojahedin Organization,” referring to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an Iranian opposition group.
“The names of a group of them have been submitted to and communicated to international bodies,” she said. “By order of the regime’s judiciary chief, pressure and torture on political prisoners have intensified, and their sham trials and the issuance of criminal sentences have been expedited.”
Stating that 11 political prisoners alleged to be members of the MEK face execution, Rajavi implored that “urgent action must be taken to save their lives. Our position is that a halt to executions in Iran, as a demand of the entire Iranian people, must be included in any international agreement.”
Last month, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an independent group monitoring, released a report documenting that from March 2025 to March 2026, police had arrested 78,907 people on ideological or political grounds.
Executions in the last Iranian year (covering much of calendar year 2025) reached at least 2,488, according to HRANA, with 63 of them women and two children. Drug offenses accounted for 955 executions, approximately three killings per day on average.
The Islamic regime chose to conduct 13 of the executions in public.
Earlier this month, the European groups Iran Human Rights (IHR) in Norway and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) in France released a separate joint report finding that Iran executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, a 68 percent leap from the 975 killed in 2024 and the highest seen since tracking began in 2008. All known executions were reportedly conducted by hanging.
Differences in methodology partially explain the discrepancy in tallies. IHR warned in its report that the full body count is likely much higher, as the group requires two sources to confirm an execution.
Iran’s penal code offers a variety of options for killing a human being, including hanging, firing squads, and even crucifixion or stoning. Hanging was the only method used from 2008 until the firing squad execution of Kurdish political prisoner Hedayat Abdullahpour on May 11, 2020.
In executions for murder under a sentence known as qisas, the Islamic regime encourages the family members of the victim to carry out the killing themselves. IHR has received reports of family members taking advantage of what is regarded as a “right” to do so.
In cases of public executions, prison officials use cranes. This brutal method leaves the condemned suffocating and strangling, lifted above the crowds for as much as 20 minutes before their suffering can conclude.
Photographs have documented children in attendance at public executions in Iran to watch the violence and cruelty. A 2006 study found that 52 percent of 200 children who witnessed public executions in Iran later showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with “88 suffering re-experiences, 24 avoidance and 62 hyperarousal.”
IHR has not found any executions by stoning since 2010, following the international outcry of the sentencing of Sakineh Ashtiani whose sentence was commuted, allowing her 2014 release.
Given the historical impact of the global community’s condemnations, Iranian officials have sought to hide human rights abuses from the world, imposing an internet blackout for 61 days since the war with the US and Israel began.
“This is denying people across the country access to vital information, silencing independent voices, and inflicting enormous social and economic harm,” Türk said. “It is exacerbating an already precarious humanitarian and economic situation and must be lifted immediately.”
Concluding her address to the European congress in Brussels, Rajavi called on the gathered representatives to implement a new policy toward Iran.
Rajavi advocated an approach that “provides the necessary technical means to ensure the Iranian people’s access to a free internet. Conditions relations with the clerical regime on an end to the execution of political prisoners and the killing of protesters. Brings the regime’s leaders to justice for crimes against humanity and genocide.”
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Norwegian Holocaust Center Defends Decision to Host Event Drawing Parallels Between Holocaust, Palestinian ‘Nakba’
One of the most famous pictures of Jews being rounded up by Nazi Germans during the Holocaust, this from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May 1943. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies on Wednesday responded to backlash over its decision to host a discussion this week in which parallels will be drawn between the Holocaust and the Palestinian “Nakba” as two “cultural traumas.”
The event on Thursday will focus on the Holocaust, the so-called “Nakba,” and the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as well as the ensuing war in Gaza.
“Nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Activists often invoke the term when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Thursday’s event will feature Nadim Khoury, an associate professor at the University of Inland Norway, who will explore how the Holocaust and “Nakba” are “traumas [that] have shaped Israeli and Palestinian national narratives and how they have functioned as competing cultural traumas,” according to a description of the event.
“[Khoury] will trace their trajectories since 1948 and explore how they are intertwined and how the tensions between them are shaping the path forward in Israeli and Palestinian lives,” the description further states. “What meaning, he asks, does the entanglement of the Holocaust and the Nakba gain in the shadow of October 7 and the war on Gaza?”
The event is part of the lecture series, “In the Shadow of War – the Way Forward,” which is a collaboration between the Norwegian Holocaust Center and the University of Oslo.
In a written statement to The Algemeiner on Wednesday, Jan Heiret, director of the Norwegian Holocaust Center, claimed the event will make no attempts to equate the Holocaust to the “Nakba,” despite the event’s description stating the contrary.
“The question of how the Holocaust and the Nakba as historical traumas can be understood, acknowledged, and remembered, without thereby constructing a kind of competition between trauma and victimhood, is crucial for any path to future peace and reconciliation,” he said. “To find a way out of a destructive spiral of hatred, dehumanization, and violence, we must understand the long-lasting ‘shadows’ of historical traumas. Without equating, or even putting up, the Holocaust with the Nakba – which would be a historical distortion given the events are so different in nature, course, and scope – we acknowledge that the consequences for the individuals and collectives traumatized by them are interconnected, and that the denial of the trauma of the other lies at the core of the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The Israeli embassy in Norway said on Tuesday that the center’s decision to host the event is a “grotesque distortion of Holocaust memory.”
“It dishonors the memory of more than 750 Norwegian Jews murdered by the Nazis and their Norwegian collaborators, and betrays the very purpose for which this institution was established,” the embassy wrote in a post on X. “A center founded to preserve Holocaust remembrance has chosen political activism over historical responsibility. This is not education. It is moral failure. The planned events should be canceled immediately, and the center must return to its core mission: safeguarding Holocaust remembrance and confronting antisemitism – not legitimizing its modern forms.”
Israel’s official X account in French published the same statement on Tuesday.
Khoury teaches classes at the University of Inland Norway about the history of political thought and international relations. He has published literature that repeatedly accuses Israel of committing a “genocide in Gaza,” a “genocidal war,” and a “second Nakba” in Gaza during its war with the Hamas terror group. He has also written articles accusing Israel of “occupation” and “apartheid.”
When asked about Khoury’s anti-Israel comments, Heiret told The Algemeiner that he is invited to speak at Thursday’s event as “an independent scholar” and does “not speak on the behalf of” the institution. “This is a principle that guides all our events and should be well known,” he added.
Heiret added that as part of the center’s lecture series, it hosts speakers “who shed light on important aspects of what may be the consequences of the Gaza war, but also: whether there are ways out of the destructive spirals of violence, oppression, and hatred.”
As part of the series, the institution was scheduled to hold an event titled “Recognizing and Denying the Trauma of the Others,” which was set to take place on March 10 but was pushed to May 7 and then ultimately canceled. Martin Auerbach, former clinical director of the National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support of Survivors of the Holocaust and the Second Generation (AMCHA) in Jerusalem, was invited to be a speaker at the event but had trouble traveling out of Israel due to the war with Iran, according to Heiret. The center will try to reschedule the event for the fall, he added.
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How to Respond to the Moment: After the Rupture, the Rebuild
Reading from a Torah scroll in accordance with Sephardi tradition. Photo: Sagie Maoz via Wikimedia Commons.
I often teach with photographs. In my Politics and geography course, I not only present arguments, data, figures, and charts, I show pictures – of faces, streets, institutions, and the lived texture of how people organize themselves into communities and nations. I keep piles of images, catalogs, and books that I return to each semester, selecting and setting aside, trying to find the picture that will do the work a paragraph of writing cannot achieve.
Wrapping up the spring semester, sorting through those piles, I came back to Maya Benton’s Roman Vishniac Rediscovered. It had been months since I had opened it. I had not used it this term and was prepared to reshelf it, and then I stopped and looked through it.
I paused and I then gasped. I had completely forgotten how hard these photographs hit.
We tend to remember Vishniac for the images he made in Eastern Europe before the war with faces marked by poverty, communities suspended between endurance and fragility, a world that now feels both intimate and impossibly distant. Those photographs read, in retrospect, like a warning. The New York photographs, taken just a few years later after Vishniac arrived in the city on New Year’s Day 1941 having escaped internment in Nazi-occupied France, read like something else. They read like a response.
At first glance, the images are almost disarmingly ordinary. Children sit in classrooms. Boys cluster in hallways. Girls lean over desks. There are games, gatherings, moments of quiet instruction and supervised play. Nothing announces itself as extraordinary. But the longer you look, the more deliberate everything appears. These are not scenes of life unfolding. They are scenes of life being organized.
Benton’s scholarship makes the construction explicit. Many of these photographs were commissioned by the Joint Distribution Committee and other Jewish philanthropic organizations documenting and in some sense justifying the work they were doing in a new American context. Settlement houses, community centers, schools, youth programs: the infrastructure of a transplanted community. The camera was not wandering. It was directed. It was capturing not just people, but systems. As the historian Hasia Diner observes in her essay for the Benton volume, the Jewish child in New York is the emotional and strategic center of this archive; photographed again and again, by a people who understood that the next generation was the plan.
The contrast is unmistakable when you hold the two bodies of work together. In Europe, Vishniac’s subjects often appear precarious even when dignified: children thin, environments worn, futures uncertain. In New York, the children are sturdy, structured, embedded in institutions designed to carry them forward. They are not simply living Jewish lives. They are being prepared for them.
Preparation, here, is everything.
After the Shoah, Jewish life did not regenerate spontaneously. It was rebuilt — deliberately, systematically, and often quietly — through institutions. Schools transmitted identity. Community centers created belonging. Camps, classrooms, and after-school programs became the mechanisms through which a dispersed and traumatized people ensured that there would be a future at all. Continuity and formation was not treated as an inheritance. It was treated as a responsibility. L’dor v’dor – “from generation to generation” – was not taken or considered a sentimental phrase. It is a theory of formation and resilience, and these photographs are what it looks like in practice.
I closed the book thinking about my son. He is coming into his own now and he loves being Jewish. He asks questions; real ones, the ones that may you pause and think about how to answer, the kind that do not settle for a first answer. He is looking for community in a world that has made plain, in the months since October 7, that it is not always on his side. He wants to know where he fits, who his people are, what tradition is asking of him. He wants to belong to something older and larger than himself.
And I find myself asking a question that Vishniac’s New York children never had to ask on their own behalf, because the adults around them had already answered it. Will the institutions be there? Will there be places where my son can practice being Jewish with other Jews, learn the texts, observe the holidays, form the friendships that last, and develop the habits of mind and values that make a Jewish life possible? Being Jewish is not a solo activity. It is inherently social, communal, structured. It requires spaces, budgets, teachers, clergy, tables, calendars. It requires other people showing up, year after year, for reasons that are not reducible to individual preference.
The data are not encouraging. Pew’s 2020 study of Jewish Americans documented significant declines in synagogue membership and attendance, in denominational identification, in day school enrollment, in attachment to Israel. Jack Wertheimer, writing in Tablet, described non-Orthodox congregations as “hemorrhaging members, aging, merging, and closing.” The institutional map that Vishniac photographed has, in many American cities, thinned considerably. Buildings are sold. Schools consolidate. Federations struggle. The scaffolding that was built in the 1940s has not been uniformly maintained.
And yet the UJA-Federation of New York’s 2025 recontact study — conducted after October 7 — found that a majority of Jewish adults in New York reported increased engagement in some form of Jewish life since the attacks. While not a national study, roughly one in five in New York reported increased participation in specifically communal Jewish life: attending Jewish museums, cultural events, adult education, JCCs, Chabad. Synagogue attendance, by some measures, ticked up. People showed up. They wanted to be with other Jews. They wanted to do Jewish things in Jewish places.
That is the Vishniac parallel made present in his images. In the 1940s, the institutions were built before anyone could be certain who would fill them. Today, the people are arriving and searching despite being wounded over the past few years, and the question is whether the institutions are still there, and strong enough, to receive them. The 1940s answer was construction. The 2020s answer has to be the same. Reconstituting. Reformulating. Rethinking and rebuilding what has atrophied and building anew where the old forms no longer fit and apply.
This is often described as resilience. Resilience is too soft a word in today’s situation. What Vishniac documented, and what this moment demands, is something closer to discipline; the kind that prioritizes long-term survival over short-term ease, that invests in institutions even when the payoff is not immediate, that understands community as something to be maintained rather than merely felt. It is the work of people who do not assume that identity will take care of itself.
I want my son to inherit a Jewish life that is thick rather than thin and authentically rooted rather than curated with a focus on the communal and the individual. I want him to walk into synagogues and schools and camps and community centers that are full, confident, and alive and are places built by people who understood, as Vishniac’s subjects understood, that continuity is not ambient or emerges by fiat. It is constructed.
The Vishniac photographs do not tell us what to build. They do something more useful. They remind us that building is the work, and that the work does not end with one generation. The men and women who commissioned those photographs are gone. The children in them are now old or gone. The institutions they built have carried us this far.
Whether they carry our children further is up to us.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.