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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.
—
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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Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why?
(JTA) — After Rep. Mike Collins won a hard-fought Republican runoff election in Georgia Tuesday for the party’s Senate nomination in November, his opponent wasted no time going on the offensive.
“Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate Mike Collins is a notorious bigot, antisemite, and extremist,” Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff posted on social media on Tuesday night.
Ossoff, who is Jewish, did not elaborate on the antisemitism allegation in the post, which continued with other attack lines against Collins. But Collins and some of his senior staff members have faced well-documented past allegations of antisemitism in a state that’s home to an estimated 100,000-plus Jewish adults.
“Whether he’s socializing with a known Nazi, speaking in antisemitic dog whistles, or doubling down after targeting a Jewish reporter, Mike Collins’ record of bigotry and antisemitism speaks for itself,” Valeria Rivadeneira-Crandell, a spokesperson for Ossoff’s campaign, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement.
The Collins campaign did not return a request for comment for this article.
The Ossoff campaign provided links to multiple incidents. In one instance in 2024, Collins came under hot water after replying favorably to a tweet from an antisemitic account that appeared to reference a Washington Post reporter’s Jewish background. “Was never any doubt,” Collins, who has said he runs his own X account, wrote at the time.
Following backlash, including from some Georgia state lawmakers, Collins doubled down, writing, “I guess pointing out that a Washington Post journo excusing crime because she believes USA is on ‘stolen land’ makes her a garbage human is anti-Semitic? Y’all just see stuff that ain’t there.”
Collins, a Trump-endorsed MAGA loyalist with a trollish social media streak in a closely watched swing state, won his runoff with more than 55% of the vote, according to Associated Press tallies. His win came the same night as Trump’s preferred pick for governor of Georgia lost his own GOP primary runoff.
Collins has leaned heavily into nativist proposals and language, including sponsoring a bill to end birthright citizenship. He also approvingly shared a 2024 video of a University of Mississippi fraternity mocking a Black pro-Palestinian protester with monkey noises.
Collins also defended the New York Young Republicans shortly after that organization’s antisemitic group texts were leaked to the press. “I don’t care about some group chat,” Collins tweeted in October, accompanied by a picture of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student whose 2024 murder by an undocumented immigrant spurred a GOP-led push for harsher penalties on migrants.
Collins went on to attend a New York Young Republicans gala that also honored far-right German politician Markus Frohnmaier and featured appearances from several antisemitic figures, including the livestreamer Sneako.
The congressman has also come under scrutiny for some of his current and former staffers’ behavior.
Last month a report in Slate, citing leaked text messages, found that Collins’ chief of staff Kip Talley had participated in a group chat with white supremacist influencers Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Talley wrote in December chats that his goal was to “try and use the levers of the legislative branch” to help Holocaust denier and right-wing activist Charles C. Johnson, who was then incarcerated on contempt of court charges related to falsely presenting himself as an FBI informant.
Talley told his chat mates that he was “reaching out to my people at FBI and DOJ” and “trying to get him out,” referring to Johnson. At the time, Talley was Collins’ deputy chief of staff. He was promoted to chief of staff in January. Johnson was released from prison in February.
Talley, who remains in his role with Collins, told Slate he had “acted solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.” He added that he “did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat.”
Collins also formerly employed William Paul, who last month made a series of antisemitic comments to Jewish GOP Rep. Mike Lawler. Paul, son of Sen. Rand Paul, had been Collins’ digital director in early 2025 but had not been on the congressman’s staff for nearly a year at the time of his altercation with Lawler.
Amid such comments and associations, Collins has also maintained a resolutely pro-Israel stance within a MAGA movement that is quickly fracturing over Israel. He spoke at a memorial event in his home state marking the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, vowing to “make sure that Israel has the resources to defend themselves,” and he has continued to refer to Israel as “our ally.” Prior to the 2024 election, he tweeted, “I bet money Iran wouldn’t be attacking Israel if Trump was president.”
Ossoff, too, has positioned himself as an Israel supporter, but he has recently voted against some weapons sales to the country. That has upset many Georgia Jewish organizations, who in 2024 penned an open letter — signed by several synagogues, Jewish schools, the local Anti-Defamation League and other groups — opposing the senator’s vote against arms sales.
The post Georgia’s Jewish senator called his newly minted GOP opponent an antisemite. Why? appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him.
(New York Jewish Week) — Alex Bores, who’s running to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler in Congress, is threading a very delicate needle.
On the one hand, Bores, a two-term New York State Assembly member from the Upper East Side, has garnered support from a number of Jewish leaders and political moderates who tout his support for Israel. He marches annually in the city’s Israel Day Parade and has resisted growing calls for Democratic politicians to support conditioning military aid to Israel.
At the same time, he’s being backed by a number of the left-wing groups and individuals calling for those very conditions.
Those two camps seldom coexist on a single candidate’s list of endorsements, especially as Israel has become a major wedge issue this midterm election cycle. But Bores, who has put a promise to regulate artificial intelligence at the center of his campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District, has managed to maintain the coalition.
“You could make a sitcom,” said Cameron Kasky, a former candidate in the race who’s now backing Bores, referring to what he called the “Boalition.” “If you put 12 Alex Bores endorsers in a mansion together and showed up with a reality TV crew, you could make the most must-watch television in the entire world.”
Scroll through the “Endorsements” page on Bores’ campaign website and you’ll find Chi Osse, the democratic socialist City Council member who’s called for divesting city pension funds from Israel bonds, just a couple rows down from Carolyn Maloney, the former Upper East Side representative who was a staunch supporter of Israel in Congress.
Progressive groups such as Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution and PSC-CUNY, the City University of New York’s staff-faculty union, are backing the same candidate who drew the support of ActJew, which supports more centrist candidates and calls itself “a response to a political and social landscape that normalizes antisemitic and anti-Israel activity and rhetoric.” (ActJew endorsed both Bores and Micah Lasher in the race.)
Bores’ endorsers include some of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political allies, such as failed City Council candidate Lindsey Boylan, and vocal critics of the mayor including Fabien Levy, a Jewish spokesperson for Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams.
“I can’t imagine the Bores campaign hasn’t occasionally looked at each other and been like, ‘What is happening right now?’” Kasky said.
So how is Bores pulling it off?
For progressive groups, the answer lies, at least in part, in Bores’ work on AI.
“He put forward the country’s strongest regulation of the AI industry to protect Americans from those who want no rules and only care about unfettered power and profit,” wrote Our Revolution’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, in an endorsement announcement. Geevarghese was referring to the RAISE Act, a state law that Bores introduced to impart transparency and safety regulations on AI models.
As an elected official, Bores is no political outsider, though the 35-year-old’s background in the tech industry differentiates him from fellow frontrunner Lasher, who’s spent decades working for politicians such as Nadler, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor.
Bores’ resume includes a nearly five-year stint at the tech company Palantir, starting as a data scientist in 2014 and working his way up to become the U.S. government lead. That gig has complicated how some progressives see Bores, given Palantir’s work with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that Bores himself has called to abolish. He has repeatedly said that he quit Palantir over its contract with ICE back in 2019, and that he chose “principle over my career and millions of dollars.”
Pundits such as center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias — who has also joined the Bores coalition — say there is a “unique value” to him winning because of his promise to enforce AI regulations and the message that it would send to the anti-regulation PACs that have been spending against him. Yglesias added that Lasher, too, would be “an above-average House member.”
But in a race with little daylight between the two frontrunners — particularly regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship — Bores’ AI focus is setting him apart. And rather than sit out the race due to differences on Israel, a number of progressive groups are backing him anyways.
“I think progressives see something in Alex that is a testament to a resolve he’s going to bring,” said Kasky, who has advocated for policies such as an arms embargo on Israel. “And I think that that is enough for progressive groups to cede ground on the issue of Israel-Palestine, and frankly the issue of Israel and the Middle East region as a whole, which is getting increasingly severe.”
The makeup of the district itself plays a role as well: As one of the country’s most heavily Jewish districts, NY-12 is seen as less hospitable than other deep-blue districts for a “Squad”-type insurgent candidate. John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg is the only major candidate who calls for conditioning aid and blocking weapons sales to Israel, but he has dropped in recent polls as he’s faced questions over his lack of experience.
Bores, Lasher and Schlossberg are all listed as “primary approved” candidates by J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization.
Bores has confirmed that Our Revolution asked him about Israel and gave him its endorsement despite not being aligned on the issue. During a candidate forum in May, he said that “we need to make it acceptable for there to be people in progressive spaces that still believe in the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself.”
Michael Miller, who was CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York for 36 years, is endorsing Bores and wrote in a Facebook post that Bores is a “steadfast supporter of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
In an interview, Miller — whom Bores named in a recent Temple Emanu-El forum as a Jewish American that he admires — said he felt assured that Bores’ support from groups such as Our Revolution had mostly to do with his AI work.
“The fact that he’s receiving support from a coalition that includes decidedly left-wing supporters doesn’t trouble me for as long as the issues of central concern to me — antisemitism and support for Israel — are those issues where he has given his support, and with which he has identified,” Miller said.
Miller added that he believes Bores’ Jewish family — his wife, Darya (who recently appeared in a campaign ad), and son, Charlie, are both Jewish — plays a “large role in how he thinks about matters of concern to the Jewish community.”
A number of Jewish celebrities in the district have embraced Bores. The Oscar-winning songwriter Benj Pasek and Jewish cookbook author Jake Cohen posted photos on social media showing them at a Bores event in a private home that included a conversation with journalist Laurie Segall about AI.
On the same day, Miller and more than 20 other local Jewish leaders and elected officials signed a letter endorsing Bores. The letter emphasized his record of combating antisemitism, pointing to measures such as securing funds for Holocaust survivor programs, funding security for synagogues and Jewish institutions, and organizing trips for students to Jewish museums.
But for some Jewish groups, Bores’ support from left-wing groups critical of Israel has given them pause.
Moshe Spern, a board member of the group ActJew, called on Bores to drop his PSC-CUNY endorsement back in March, saying the union is “consistently calling for divestments from Israel” and has “downplayed and ignored Jewish students/faculty experiences since 10/7.” PSC-CUNY revoked a pro-BDS resolution against Israel in February 2025, after its initial passage sparked backlash, including from Hochul and CUNY itself. Spern told JTA he pushed for the group to rescind its endorsement, but was outvoted.
Bores replied to Spern’s tweet, writing that “every major candidate pursued” PSC-CUNY’s endorsement, and that his endorsement interview focused on funding public education and regulating AI. Bores added that he has “spoken out against antisemitic incidents on campuses (including CUNY specifically) and will continue to do so.”
Meanwhile, some progressive groups have refrained from endorsing Bores because of his pro-Israel politics.
“It’s pretty much a non-starter for us to endorse someone who wouldn’t sign on to the Block the Bombs,” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of communications of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, referring to the Block the Bombs to Israel Act that would prohibit certain weapons sales to the country. She added that Bores also voted for a statewide “buffer zone” bill meant to curb protests outside houses of worship, which Lasher introduced, and which JFREJ has vehemently opposed throughout the year.
According to the latest polling data, despite Bores’ greater support from the left, there’s been little difference in the number of voters who are responding to each candidate.
“You go into any Jewish WhatsApp chat — I see this as an Upper East Side resident myself — and there’s no consensus,” said Michael Harris, ActJew’s CEO. “The consensus is Bores or Lasher.”
The post Alex Bores’ supporters disagree on Israel. They agree on him. appeared first on The Forward.
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Organizers of London Israeli real estate fair apologize after West Bank properties surface despite denials
(JTA) — Organizers of the Great Israeli Real Estate Event held in London on Sunday have apologized amid revelations that the event showcased offerings in the West Bank, contradicting their assurances that it would not.
The owner of a real estate agency that had a booth at the event, meanwhile, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she had obscured the name of a city in the West Bank from a poster but also passed “two flyers under the table” to attendees who expressed interest in properties in contested areas of Jerusalem.
Ahead of the event, the organizers along with the synagogue that hosted the event and the Board of Deputies of British Jews publicly rejected claims by pro-Palestinian activists that properties beyond Israel’s internationally recognized borders would be promoted.
They had faced sharp pressure over the claims from dozens of British lawmakers and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and had to find a new space after the venue that was initially set to host the event pulled out abruptly.
Following a protest outside the synagogue where the event took place, the Board of Deputies’ acting president, Adam Cohen, said the event organizers had “publicly refuted claims that it was marketing real estate over the Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank and alleged that the claims were being used to justify antisemitism.
The “false pretenses seem to be little more than an excuse to harass and intimidate members of the Jewish community,” he said.
The Board of Deputies declined to comment on the subsequent revelations that West Bank properties were advertised at the event.
But the organizers, who have staged similar events in the United States, issued a statement to the U.K.’s Jewish News that both apologized for mentions of East Jerusalem settlements in a brochure distributed at the event and rejected the idea that British Jews should face constraints in where they are offered property.
“We would like to re-emphasise that the venue made it clear to us that we were not in any way to promote the sale of Israeli real estate over the Green Line, and all participating vendors agreed to abide by that requirement,” the statement said. “At the same time, we believe it is outrageous that in this day and age, anyone would seek to deny British Jews the right to purchase property anywhere in the world, whether in Paris, New York, or Israel.”
The statement also described social media claims that “stolen Palestinian land” was being sold at the event. “These allegations are simply untrue. No one at the event promoted or spoke about properties in the ‘disputed territories’, such as Givat Zeev or Kfar Eldad,” two East Jerusalem settlements, the statement continued. “Their mention in the event brochure was made in error for which we apologise.”
The revelations came after attendees photographed flyers promoting West Bank settlements and posted them on social media.
The Guardian reported that it had obtained brochures from the event advertising properties not just in Givat Ze’ev and Kfar Eldad but also in Ma’ale Adumim and Teneh Omarim in the West Bank and Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem.
Guy Zilberman, a member of the pro-Palestinian group Jewish Anti-Zionist Action, posted a video showing footage from inside the event where he received brochures from companies selling homes in several of those locations. He said a salesman “directly offered us properties in ‘Judea and Samaria,’” the Israeli term for the West Bank.
The footage showed Zilberman then revealing himself in a conference room and denouncing the event while exhorting attendees in Hebrew not to steal, before being removed by security.
REVEALED: Jewish activists @JAZA_UK have shown us material from inside an Israeli property event in London yesterday, which shows that illegal settlements on Palestinian land were on sale in the UK.
Activists gained access to the event, spoke to numerous developers about the… pic.twitter.com/WsJ1hC1GlZ
— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) June 16, 2026
An unnamed member of Jewish Anti-Zionist Action told Sky News, “I visited Tivuch Shelly’s stall and was given a leaflet advertising properties in Ma’ale Adumim, which is an illegal West Bank settlement.”
The locations cited highlight the complexity of Israel’s geography — and the pressures facing those trying to sell property in the region.
The U.K. considers expansions of Israeli settlements as a violation of international law, posing potential legal challenges to efforts to sell homes there. The United States does not consider the settlements illegal, making real estate events there less vulnerable to legal scrutiny even as they have drawn fierce protests.
Settlements that are part of the municipality of Jerusalem, such as Ramat Eshkol and Givat Hamatos, pose another wrinkle. While Israel recognizes that the West Bank is disputed territory, it does not consider any part of Jerusalem as such. East Jerusalem was incorporated into the State in1980, and under Israeli law both West and East Jerusalem form the state’s complete and undivided capital.
Ma’ale Adumim, meanwhile, is a city of approximately 40,000 that is located in the West Bank and has long been seen as likely to remain under Israeli control if a Palestinian state is created through negotiations in the future.
Tivuch Shelly’s owner and founder, Shelly Levine, told JTA in a phone interview that her company never actively promoted properties in Ma’ale Adumim at the event. She said the words “Ma’ale Adumim” were covered up with tape on their booth.
But she said they gave out “two flyers under the table” with Ma’ale Adumim properties because the company had received emails in advance of the event from people who said they were specifically looking for properties in that area. She said she did not recall the names of the people but said she had handed over the brochures “in a bag and we told them they were not allowed to take them out or look at them in this building because we are not selling Ma’ale Adumim at this event.”
Levine said she now believes those emails were “a setup” to trick her into sharing incriminating material that could be handed to the media.
Unless people went to Tivuch Shelly’s website, Levine said, “Nobody would know that we advertise in Ma’ale Adumim. We did not break our word to the event organizers; we posted no brochures, put nothing out on our tables.”
Even before the revelations, the lead-up to the event had been fraught for weeks, with the original venue pulling out of hosting less than 48 hours before Edgware Synagogue agreed to host it. And while the venue remained secret until less than 24 hours before the event, almost 1,000 demonstrators showed up outside the synagogue — from both the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel camps.
Despite police being deployed to the scene to keep the groups separate, 14 people were arrested, including seven pro-Israel and six pro-Palestinian supporters, for offenses including ncluding violent disorder, assault and public-order offenses.
More than 100 members of parliament and peers wrote to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper ahead of the event, calling on her to halt the event because selling properties in the West Bank is a violation of international law.
On Tuesday, Cooper told members of Parliament that the government had asked a national regulator to look into complaints connected to both the advertising of the event and promotional material.
“We have asked the authority to urgently look into the matter and reassure us that, if there is any evidence of the advertising or promotion of property in illegal settlements at that event or any others, it will uphold the law, regulations and guidance that apply,” Cooper said in response to a question from a local lawmaker about why the government had allowed the Great Israeli Real Estate Event to go on.
“It is extremely important that those standards are met in the UK, and that is exactly why we have raised the matter so seriously with the Advertising Standards Authority,” she continued.
That was not enough for Zack Polanski, the anti-Zionist Jewish leader of the Green Party, who sent a letter later on Tuesday to Khan demanding action, including from London’s police force.
“This needs to be escalated to the Metropolitan Police Service immediately,” Polanski wrote. “Anything less fails to reflect the seriousness of the situation.”
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