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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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Hiroshima, the 10th Plague, and the Strength to Take Decisive Action Against Evil
509th Composite Group aircraft immediately before their bombing mission of Hiroshima. Photo: Wikipedia
In the late 1980s, when I was a student at Ner Yisrael Yeshiva in Baltimore, I had a close friend who took night classes at Johns Hopkins University. One evening, he came back visibly shaken. That night’s guest speaker had been Paul Tibbets, the pilot who flew the Enola Gay and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
My friend told me that Tibbets spoke calmly and deliberately, with the controlled precision of a career military officer. He made no attempt to dramatize what he had done, nor did he flinch from its consequences. Dropping the bomb, he said, was the correct military decision, adding bluntly, “I would do it again.”
His point was straightforward: the atomic bomb ended the war quickly and spared the world a catastrophic invasion of Japan that could have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and untold numbers of Japanese lives as well.
Tibbets did not deny the human suffering the bomb caused, but he rejected the idea that this suffering made the mission wrong. He expressed no regret about carrying it out. In his view, it saved lives precisely because it brought the war to an immediate end.
At the time, I filed it away as an unusual but interesting historical tidbit. This week, as I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the memory of hearing about Tibbets’ talk at Johns Hopkins came roaring back.
The museum is harrowing in ways that are hard to describe. Photographs of survivors, their burned skin hanging from their bodies. Metal objects fused together or melted almost beyond recognition by the heat of the blast. A hauntingly scorched child’s tricycle. A watch frozen at the exact moment the bomb detonated. Photos of victims bearing massive keloid growths years after the war, their bodies grotesquely reshaped by the long reach of that terrible day.
The suffering is overwhelming, graphic, and impossible to ignore. Tens of thousands were killed instantly. Tens of thousands more died from horrific burns in the days that followed, while others from radiation sickness and cancer years later. Most were civilians.
And yet, what struck me almost as powerfully as the horror of what was there was what wasn’t there. There is almost no context. No mention of Japan’s stubborn refusal to surrender. No discussion of the horrific war crimes committed by the Japanese across Asia. No reference to Pearl Harbor, the deadly attack on America launched by Japan in December 1941 without a declaration of war.
In fact, the Americans barely appear at all. It almost feels as if the bomb descended from the heavens – an act of cosmic cruelty, unconnected to history, agency, or responsibility.
To be clear: none of this diminishes the suffering. Nothing could. But the absence of context matters. Because without it, war becomes a morality play with only one role assigned – that of the victim – and no serious questions are asked about how wars actually end, or how they begin in the first place.
And that question is unavoidable in the 21st century: how do we reconcile our horror at the impact of war with the reality that wars sometimes must be ended decisively – because not ending them can be the worse of two evils?
Public attitudes toward the atomic bombings of Japan reveal just how uneasy we have become with that question. In 1945, immediately after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a Gallup poll found that 85 percent of Americans approved of the decision, with only a small minority disapproving.
By 1990, approval had fallen to 53 percent – but it largely held steady through the early 2000s. A 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center found a clear majority of Americans still saying the bombings were justified.
But over the past decade, something has shifted. A Pew study published last August, marking the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima, shows a public deeply conflicted. Only 35 percent now say the bombings were justified. A full third are unsure. Nearly 70 percent believe nuclear weapons have made the world less safe.
To be fair, that discomfort is understandable. It is also historically naïve.
It is no coincidence that I found myself wrestling with this question in the same week we read Parshat Bo – the Torah portion that confronts this moral dilemma head-on.
The 10th plague to strike ancient Egypt, Makat Bechorot, is unlike anything that comes before it. Until that point, Egypt has endured economic collapse, environmental devastation, disease, and widespread suffering. Pharaoh has been warned, pleaded with, negotiated with. None of it works. He absorbs each blow and refuses to consider surrender.
And then, in a single night – in one devastating, irreversible moment – the war ends. Every firstborn son in Egypt dies. There is not a single home untouched by the plague. Pharaoh summons Moses in panic – he himself is a firstborn and fears for his own life – and in the dead of night the terms of redemption are agreed. By morning, the Israelites are on their way out of Egypt, free and unchallenged.
The Ramban makes an essential point that is often missed: the final plague was not merely punitive. It was decisive. The earlier plagues failed precisely because they were survivable. Pharaoh could absorb the damage, regroup, and convince himself that he could endure one more blow.
The death of the firstborn changed all that. The shock of this final plague was so absolute that Pharaoh could no longer entertain defiance.
Ramban is clear and unsentimental: gradualism is not merciful – it is ineffective. As long as Pharaoh believed Egypt could stagger on, Israel would remain enslaved. Ending the conflict required an act so overwhelming that the very idea of continued resistance collapsed.
The Maharal of Prague goes even further. He explains that Egypt was not merely an enemy nation – it was a corrupt moral system built on dehumanization and cruelty. Incremental punishment could never undo it. Only a shock powerful enough to reorder reality itself could break Egypt’s grip on history and end its cruelty. The 10th plague was not about vengeance. It was about ending Egypt’s capacity to perpetuate evil.
Seen through that lens, Hiroshima looks different – not less tragic, but more intelligible. By the summer of 1945, Japan had lost its navy, its air force, and much of its urban infrastructure. Still, it refused to surrender.
US military planners warned that a ground invasion would lead to catastrophic casualties on both sides, with civilians trapped in the middle for months or even years. The atomic bomb ended the war almost immediately. Like Makat Bechorot, it was horrifying – and precisely for that reason, it worked.
This is not an argument for cruelty. It is an argument against moral theater – against pretending that drawn-out wars fought “humanely” are somehow kinder simply because their brutality is dispersed over time and geography. There is a difference between loving peace and being unwilling to confront the cost of ending war.
The Torah never asks us to celebrate Egyptian suffering. On the contrary, our Seder night rituals deliberately acknowledge it. But the Torah also refuses to sanitize redemption. Freedom did not come through endless diplomacy or moral posturing. It came through decisive, devastating force – after every other avenue had failed.
Standing in Hiroshima, surrounded by reminders of the unimaginable pain caused by the atomic bomb, I felt the full weight of that tension. But on reflection, Paul Tibbets understood something we in the 21st century have grown uncomfortable admitting: grief and justification can coexist. Mourning and moral clarity are not opposites.
Parshat Bo teaches us that sometimes, when evil refuses to let go, we are forced into terrible choices – not because we want to make them, but because there is no other way forward. It is a lesson worth remembering in an age that fears consequences more than it fears the endurance of evil.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Iran: IAEA Must Clarify Stance on June Attacks Before Inspecting Bombed Sites
Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), speaks at the opening of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Sept. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
The UN nuclear watchdog must clarify its stance on US and Israeli attacks on Iran‘s nuclear sites last June before inspectors are allowed to visit those facilities, Iranian media on Friday quoted the country’s atomic chief as saying.
Mohammad Eslami said the inspections so far had been limited to undamaged sites and he criticized the watchdog for letting Israeli and US pressure influence its actions.
Eslami made his comments in response to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, who said on Tuesday that the standoff over inspections “cannot go on forever.”
Grossi has not explicitly condemned or criticized the attacks nor has he formally outlined a protocol for inspecting the damaged facilities.
Access to sites that were attacked needs “a specific protocol,” Eslami said, adding: “When a military strike occurs and there are environmental risks, it must be defined and a guideline must be designed.”
“The agency has to clarify its position regarding the military attacks on the nuclear facilities that have been registered by the agency and are under its supervision so we can understand what role they play,” state TV quoted Eslami as having told reporters in Tehran on Thursday.
He said Tehran had submitted a statement at the IAEA‘s General Conference last September demanding that attacks on nuclear sites be prohibited. But it was not placed on the agenda and was ignored, he said.
“It is unrealistic, unprofessional, and unfair that, because of pressure from Israel and the US, he [Grossi] is putting pressure on us,” Eslami said.
Grossi told Reuters on Tuesday that the IAEA had inspected all 13 declared nuclear facilities in Iran that were not targeted last June but had been unable to inspect any of the three key sites that were bombed – Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan.
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Syrian Kurds Hand Over New Prison to Govt Troops as Truce Deadline Looms
Syrian security forces stand guard outside al-Aqtan prison, where some Islamic State detainees are held, in Raqqa, Syria, Jan. 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Karam al-Masri
Syria’s government took over a prison in the north on Friday after the negotiated exit of Kurdish fighters from the facility in what a senior official said was a positive sign that a truce between the two forces could hold.
Government troops have seized swathes of northern and eastern territory in the last two weeks from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in a rapid turn of events that has consolidated President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s rule.
Sharaa’s forces were amassing around a last cluster of Kurdish-held cities in the northeast earlier this week when he abruptly announced a ceasefire, giving the SDF until Saturday night to come up with a plan to integrate with Syria’s army.
The deadline is aimed at pushing through a sweeping deal agreed on Jan. 18 that would see the semi-autonomous institutions run by Kurdish forces in the northeast over the last decade join the central state, something the SDF had resisted over the last year.
The agreement also stipulates that the government would take control of a string of SDF-run prisons and detention camps holding fighters and civilians linked to Islamic State, the ultra-conservative Sunni Islamist group that the SDF fought for years with US backing.
This week, one prison and one detention camp fell to the government after chaotic withdrawals by the SDF, in which some IS-linked individuals briefly escaped. Seeking to avoid a security breach, the government negotiated the pull-out of Kurdish fighters from the al-Aqtan prison in the northern province of Raqqa overnight.
A senior Syrian government official told Reuters on Friday the negotiations over al-Aqtan gave hope that Saturday’s deadline would yield a political solution instead of renewed fighting.
However, he said the government had not yet received a response from the SDF on its integration plan or its candidate for deputy defense minister, a post for which Sharaa had asked the SDF to nominate someone.
MILITARY PREPARATIONS UNDERWAY IN CASE TALKS FAIL
SDF sources said on Friday the deadline for their response could be extended, but the Syrian official said there was no discussion of an extension at this time.
Despite hope for a negotiated resolution, both sides have ramped up military preparations.
Syrian military officials say they are readying forces for a fight and Reuters reporters have seen army vehicles and buses of fighters arriving near the Kurdish-held city of Hasakeh, where Kurdish forces have also reinforced positions.
Senior officials from primary mediator the United States and France, which has also been coordinating ceasefire talks, have urged Sharaa not to send his troops into remaining Kurdish-held areas, diplomatic sources told Reuters.
“We are calling on the Syrian authorities to assume their full responsibility in protecting all civilians, including Kurdish civilians,” French foreign ministry spokesperson Pascal Confavreux said.
The US, which long backed the SDF but now sees Sharaa as its primary partner in Syria, has been helping transfer detained IS fighters from Syria to Iraq.
The SDF withdrew on Tuesday from al-Hol, which along with another camp, Roj, houses 28,000 civilians, mainly women and children who fled Islamic State’s strongholds as the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate collapsed. They include Syrians, Iraqis and 8,500 nationals of other countries.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR was able to access al-Hol camp on Friday with Syrian government officials and established contact with some camp residents, said deputy UN spokesperson Farhan Haq.
“Essential supplies have also resumed. Trucks carrying bread entered the camp today, facilitated by UNHCR following a three-day interruption caused by the volatile security situation inside the camp. In addition, water trucking services organized by UNICEF … were delivered yesterday, helping to partially restore access to basic services for the camp population,” Haq said.
The rapid loss of territory by the SDF in recent days is the most dramatic shift in Syria’s control map since Sharaa’s forces toppled longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
Sharaa vowed to rule for all Syrians but minorities, including Kurds in the northeast, Druze in the south and Alawites in the west, remain deeply distrustful of him.
In a bid to improve ties, Sharaa issued a decree on Jan. 16 that designates Kurdish as a national language alongside Arabic.