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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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How New York Jews made pickles a big dill
The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles
By Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder
Chronicle Books, 224 pages, $27
“Pickles are a favorite food in Jewtown,” muckraker Jacob Riis, referring to the Lower East Side, wrote in How the Other Half Lives, his seminal exposé on poverty. “They are filling and keep the children from crying with hunger. Those who have stomachs like ostriches thrive in spite of them and grow strong — plain proof that they are good to eat.”
Other thinkers from the turn of the last century disagreed, one lamenting, of the children of New York who got their meals from pushcarts, “it speaks volumes for their digestive powers that they don’t die at once.” That was Teddy Roosevelt.
But appropriately for a preserved foodstuff, pickles have had a remarkably long cultural shelf life. The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles, a new coffee table book about the ubiquitous cukes, reaches deep into the barrel to chronicle the rise of the pickling industry, giving pride of place to the Jewish immigrants who sealed the business for posterity.
The book is the work of Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder of the Dutch branding company Mattmo, and is a successor to their previous book De Zure Stad (The Sour City) about the pickle history of the Netherlands, pioneered by a different set of Jewish immigrants who were, overwhelmingly, murdered in the Shoah.
The Pickled City is a brighter work, though in the early going its emphasis on Jews, stated early and often, is a bit of a head scratcher. Going back to Mesopotamia for early pickling practices, and outlining the largely gentile-owned pickle businesses in the U.S. (the first American pickle outfit, the William Underwood Company, trademarked devilled ham) the Jews appear to be relative latecomers. It was Dutch settlers in what was then New Amsterdam who kickstarted the process of farming and preserving cucumbers.
An earlier wave of German immigrants brought pickle culture to Manhattan before Eastern European Jews took to their pushcarts. But the Jews brought a piquant innovation to their pickles, brining them not in vinegar, but salt water with dill and garlic: the kosher pickle we all know. That variety soon became a bestseller even among the goyische operations like Heinz, a business that was early to apply for kosher certification.
The Jewish love affair with pickles was itself not novel. The Talmud mentions pickled veg as a symbol of abundance and survival and, per van Ravestein and Mulder, the “transformation through pickling — turning a simple, earthy root into a tangy, vibrant dish — was often seen as a metaphor for renewal and the endurance of the Jewish people through adversity.”
We see the enterprise, in pages of archival photos and maps of the pickle shops of yesteryear alongside long-running institutions like Russ & Daughters and Katz’s.
At times, beyond the handsome packaging of the book, the branding agency origins of the authors stick out: A primer on B&G pickles reports their $2.16 billion in net sales, and calls it a “testament to entrepreneurial spirit and innovation in the food industry.” But there are just as many colorful stories that don’t read like investor reports.
We learn, for instance, that Izzy Guss, of Guss’ pickles, beat out the competition after a neighbor in his tenement offered to hook his cart up to electricity with an extension cord, giving the cart a light and allowing Guss to sell at night. (We’re told the cord was cut when Guss refused to marry the neighbor’s daughter.)
The book also touches on the pickling history of Long Island, with a mention of a Samuel Ballton — Pickle King of Greenlawn, a formerly enslaved man and Union veteran who produced 1.5 million pickles in a single season. The industry in Syosset was dealt a major blow with a blight called the “white pickle” disease, and subsequently pivoted to potatoes.
Even with these New York histories, the book often crosses Delancey into a wider world, making a kumbaya case for pickles as a conduit for cultural exchange.
Japanese pickled plums, Indonesian atjar and Indian chutneys are given space toward the back, but their current imprint in New York, on the same streets that once held tenements and peddlers, is oddly glossed over. (I could have tipped them off to the Astoria bagel shop that serves beef bulgogi and kimchi sandwiches.)
“For Jewish families fleeing persecution, pickling was more than a way to save food — it was a way to preserve identity and heritage,” the authors write.
This is not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon. There are 8 million stories in the pickled city. This book cracks the lid, but only skims the surface.
The post How New York Jews made pickles a big dill appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli-American soldier Moshe Katz, killed in Lebanon rocket strike, laid to rest on Mt. Herzl
(JTA) — Hundreds gathered on Sunday night at Israel’s military cemetery on Mt. Herzl for the funeral of Moshe Yitzchak Hacohen Katz, an American-born Israeli soldier who was killed by a rocket strike on Saturday in southern Lebanon.
Katz, 22, from New Haven, Connecticut, is the fifth Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon since Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, resumed attacks on Israel following a 2024 ceasefire, after Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran last month.
“With unspeakable tragedy I regret to inform you that my 22 year old son Moshe Yitzchak a*h a sergeant in the idf, fell in battle in Lebanon,” Katz’s father, Mendy, wrote in a post on Facebook on Saturday. “My oldest Son with a zest for life and jokes. Burial is tomorrow in israel. Maybe we only share good news. My heart is shattered and the wound is real.”
Mendy Katz had been in Israel when the war began and posted on March 7 about witnessing his son’s graduation from basic training with the Israel Defense Forces before returning to the United States via Egypt.
During the funeral on Sunday, Katz, who was posthumously promoted from corporal to sergeant and was affiliated with Chabad, was eulogized by a host of fellow soldiers who referred to him as a “true friend” who “always used to make sure that anyone around him was always taken care of.”
“Moshe was a brave soldier, we have proof of that, but more than that, he was a loyal friend, he was a hard-working son and a loving, caring brother,” Adina, Katz’s sister, said between tears during her eulogy. “Moshe’s body might be gone, but his legacy is not. He was a proud soldier and a proud Jew, and we are the proudest family.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered condolences to Katz’s family in a post on X and wished a speedy recovery to three other soldiers moderately wounded in the attack.
“Moshe z”l immigrated to the land from the United States, enlisted in the Paratroopers Brigade, and fought bravely for the defense of our homeland,” Netanyahu wrote. “On behalf of all Israeli citizens, we embrace Moshe z”l’s family in this difficult hour and wish a swift and complete recovery to our fighters who were wounded in that incident.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to further expand its operations in Lebanon in order to “finally thwart the threat of invasion and to push the anti-tank missile fire away from our border.”
Menachem Geisinsky, a photographer and friend of Katz’s, also eulogized him in a post on Facebook, writing that he “forever will be my hero” for “his bravery in coming all the way from New Haven, Connecticut to fight for what he believed was right and also for being a man who wouldn’t tolerate a frown.”
“So be like Moshe. Be a hero. Make someone’s day. Make someone giggle or smile,” wrote Geisinsky. “Step up, and be the man Moshe was, and forever will be remembered as.”
Katz is survived by his parents, Mendy and Devorah Katz; siblings Adina, Yehuda, Shua and Dubi; and grandparents.
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A second poll of US Jews finds the same result: Most oppose the war in Iran
(JTA) — For the second time in a day, a nonpartisan poll has found that most American Jews oppose the U.S. military campaign against Iran — even as 90% of them say they oppose the Iranian regime.
The new poll, conducted by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, found that 60% of U.S. Jews say they oppose “the US military action against Iran.”
About the same proportion, 63%, said they believed “the most effective way to address U.S. and Israeli concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and destabilizing regional actions is through diplomacy and sanctions,” not military action.
And the majority of American Jews said they believed the war will not improve Israel’s security, with a third saying they believe the war will weaken Israel’s security.
As with the previous poll released earlier on Monday, the poll found a sharp partisan and denominational split in the results, with Republicans and Orthodox Jews more likely to support the war, which the United States and Israel jointly launched on Feb. 28.
A press release from J Street touted the survey as “the first methodologically sound poll of Jewish American opinion since the conflict began,” positioning the results as an antidote to findings from the Jewish People Policy Institute, which surveys “connected” U.S. Jews and has found that a majority of them support the war, even though the proportion has fallen since the war’s start.
“This data is a wake-up call for anyone claiming to speak for the American Jewish community while beating the drums of war,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in a statement. “Most American Jews see this war for what it is: A reckless, unforced error by a President who has no clear, achievable goals or an exit strategy. This poll proves that the ‘pro-Israel’ position is the pro-peace position – and that means stopping this war before more lives are lost.”
The survey of 800 Jewish registered voters was conducted March 24 to 26 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
The J Street survey also asked respondents about other issues related to Israel. It found that 70% of U.S. Jewish voters said they are more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to multiple polls finding an even split or slight edge for the Palestinians among Americans overall.
It also found that 70% of American Jews oppose unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel — reflecting a mounting political consensus that is at odds with the priorities of AIPAC, the traditional pro-Israel lobby.
The post A second poll of US Jews finds the same result: Most oppose the war in Iran appeared first on The Forward.