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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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Africa Becomes Center of Global Terrorism Amid ISIS Revivals, Al Qaeda Alliances
Islamic State – Central Africa Province released documentary entitled “Jihad and Dawah” covering group’s campaigns in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and battles against Congolese and Ugandan armies. Photo: Screenshot
Both independent analysts and the United States government have identified rising Islamist terrorist threats across Sub-Saharan Africa as a growing concern, now positioning the region at the center of attention regarding global jihadist terrorism.
Gen. Dagvin Anderson, commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM), has started a series of visits to African partners, starting with Ethiopia, Somaliland, and Puntland.
“The whole reason I came here is because we have shared threats,” Anderson said. “I’m not new to this region; I understand what the issues are, and we’re here to help empower our African partners to address these threats in a united way.”
Just last week, AFRICOM coordinated with the government of Somalia to strike Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Shabaab targets.
“As we face the growing security threats, including the rise of terrorist activities in East Africa, the Sahel, and West Africa’s coastal regions, the collective efforts are more important than ever,” Anderson said. “Together we can build a more prosperous and secure future for the United States, for Africa, and most importantly, for our children.”
Anderson’s trip came after the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point released a report last month showing that, last year, 86 percent of all terrorism-related deaths occurred in just 10 countries, with seven of them in Africa and five in the continent’s Sahel region.
The report explained how the Sahel — a belt that runs across the African continent and is also called the Sahelian acacia savanna — dominates the map of terrorism deaths today.
“Where once the global terror threat was concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa, today it is centered in the Sahel, specifically in the tri-border region between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger,” the report’s four authors wrote before noting that, according to the 2025 Global Terrorism Index, the region comprised more than half of all terrorism-related deaths last year.
“The data shows that while countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Nigeria have been largely steady when it comes to significant impact by terrorism over recent years, Sahelian countries (Burkina Faso, chief among them) have experienced a steep increase,” the analysts assessed. “In 2023 and 2024, Burkina Faso was most impacted by terrorism globally.”
Regarding the specific groups responsible for these slayings in the Sahel, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies primarily blamed an al-Qaeda-affiliate, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), which it identified as being responsible for 83 percent of deaths in the region.
In August, a report from the Observer Research Foundation argued that “the African continent remains the principal theater of global jihadist activity.”
Colin Clarke and co-author Anoushka Varma, both of the Soufan Group, described the threat of JNIM. The group “has entrenched its position as the deadliest terrorist group in the Sahel, escalating attacks across Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, while making inroads into Benin, Ghana, and Togo — countries that had largely avoided jihadist violence until now,” they wrote. “In the first half of 2025, JNIM claimed to have carried out at least 280 attacks in Burkina Faso — double the number recorded during the same period in 2024 — and was responsible for approximately 8,800 fatalities across the Sahel that year.”
Another region of the continent drawing the concern of counter-terrorism analysts is the Horn of Africa (HOA), where the West Point researchers identified the “critical case” of the “the triangular confluence that has developed between the Houthis, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and al-Shabaab.”
Despite the Houthis being backed by Shi’ite Iran and operating primarily out of Yemen, the West Point report noted that “there is even evidence that the Houthis have collaborated with Islamic State Somalia [a Sunni group], coordinating on intelligence and procurement of drones and technical training.”
Clarke and Varma also explained the unique threats operating in the HOA in their analysis, explaining that “both the Islamic State–Somalia Province (IS-Somalia) and al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate, al-Shabaab, remain key drivers of regional instability.”
In April 2025, they wrote, al-Shabaab “launched a renewed offensive in Middle Shabelle, regaining territorial control not seen since the Somali federal government’s counteroffensive in 2022.” The analysts also identified that “IS-Somalia has attracted foreign fighters from Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and even among the Somali diaspora in the West.”
In addition to the increased violence in the HOA and Sahel African regions, two other alarming trends in terrorism that West Point’s researchers named are the wide involvement of Iran with organized crime gangs and the decreasing ages of first-time terrorist suspects.
The report stated that over the last five years, Iran has conducted 157 foreign operations, with 22 involving criminal groups and 55 involving terrorist groups. These range from “Hell’s Angels gang members in Canada to the Kinahan Cartel in Ireland.”
Likewise, the age range of terrorism offenders has transformed.
The authors stated that many analysts have identified “a new wave of extremism among children” and that “across Europe as a whole, nearly two-thirds of Islamic State-linked arrests in 2024 involved teenagers. This included the infamous August 2024 plot by three males aged 17 to 19 targeting a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, Austria.”
In 2024, the United Kingdom reported that 20 percent of its terrorism suspects were legally classified as minors.
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Amid campus tensions, CUNY steps up outreach to Brooklyn yeshivas
The City University of New York is boosting its outreach to Jewish high schools as tensions over antisemitism allegations continue to flare on some of its 26 colleges across the five boroughs.
On Tuesday, CUNY chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez and Brooklyn College president Michelle Anderson visited Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School, a Modern Orthodox school in Brooklyn where students study halacha, Talmud, and Tanakh alongside secular subjects.
Their visit focused on promoting a dual enrollment program that allows students to take Brooklyn College courses without leaving the building. Teachers at the high school were hired as adjunct faculty for Brooklyn College to teach college-level subjects including calculus, physics, English composition, algebra II, and “American pluralism.” Students who pass the courses earn college credit.
While CUNY has partnered with New York City public schools to offer the dual enrollment program since 2000, it opened the program to independent religious schools only last year. This fall, 78 students from religious schools participated, including students from Joel Braverman and Magen David Yeshivah School in Brooklyn.
The visit to a yeshiva from top-level CUNY administrators also came amid fallout from an interfaith event at CUNY’s City College last month, where a speaker urged Muslim students to leave in protest because a “Zionist” was present.
“You’re in shock? We’re not, we’re used to it,” a Jewish student says in a recording of the event reviewed by the Forward. “That’s how interfaith goes at CCNY.”
Ilya Bratman, Hillel director for multiple campuses in the CUNY system and the Jewish representative at the event, told the Forward in a phone interview that the incident unfortunately typified the climate Jewish students face at CUNY.
“Whenever the college has tried to create interfaith opportunities, they often end up in this kind of environment — terrible, overwhelming,” Bratman said.
In a statement, a City College spokesperson said the school “has zero tolerance for acts of hate or bigotry of any kind and will promptly take all necessary and appropriate actions to address any such discrimination and remedy its effects.”
During Tuesday’s visit, CUNY administrators did not directly discuss the incident but said the yeshiva partnership reflects a broader commitment to making campuses welcoming to Jewish students.
“The pilot shows that we want to be able to attract students from the yeshivas,” Matos Rodríguez said. “There’s things out there in the world that we have to navigate, but we want to continue to send signals about what we consider to be important.”
Anderson highlighted that Brooklyn College received an “A” from the Anti-Defamation League’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card. She touted the school’s active Hillel, Judaic Studies department and accommodations for Jewish holidays.
Jacob Hanan, a Joel Braverman junior taking four dual-enrollment classes, said Jewish life is central to his college search — and Brooklyn College is currently at the top of his list.
“I look for programs that have a healthy environment, not that much antisemitism going around, as well as other Jewish students on campus I can interact with, and maybe a Hillel to make it easier to practice,” he said in an interview with the Forward.
Rebecca Weinwurzel, another junior in the program, told the Forward she’s been grateful for the opportunity to take more challenging courses. She, too, is considering Brooklyn College, partly because of her experience in the dual enrollment program.
“I do see a lot that Brooklyn College is one of the schools that will knock down any antisemitism that comes their way very quickly,” she said. “And that is a very big plus for me.”
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I was interrogated by Israeli authorities — I know why they’re terrified of peace activists like me
Two weeks ago, I was on my way home from Israel after leading young Jewish activists across the country to meet with Israelis and Palestinians fighting for peace and justice. But just as my plane at Ben Gurion Airport was beginning to board, I was called to the gate desk, where I was told that I would be further questioned by airport security.
I was interrogated and searched for the next hour; one security agent accused me of having suspect political motivations because my checked luggage contained materials sympathetic to Israeli pro-democracy protesters and Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. They were trying to scare me. I felt, viscerally, how much Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government wants to deter American Jews from aiding Israelis and Palestinians working toward peace and shared security.
But it didn’t intimidate me. Instead, it left me feeling more convinced than ever that it’s crucial for Jews around the world to take direct action for equality and justice in Israel and the West Bank. Because for every American Jew who, like me, has to endure a little ordeal with airport security, there are millions of Palestinians and Israelis facing far worse repression. And it is our duty to stand with them.
As the director of young leadership and education at the New Israel Fund, an organization that has spent decades building movements that advance freedom, security and equality for all people under Israeli control, I had led a delegation of young people on a trip through Israel and the West Bank, where we met with Israeli peace activists who survived the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023; Negev Bedouin communities demanding the government given them access to water and electricity; and humanitarian organizations fighting to bring desperately needed aid into Gaza.
In my luggage were materials that reflected my politics, among them a poster I had gotten at a protest in Tel Aviv that said, “Only peace will bring security,” and two books — the graphic novel Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City and Daybreak in Gaza: Stories of Palestinian Lives and Culture — that I had purchased at The Educational Bookshop, a renowned Palestinian cultural center in East Jerusalem that Israeli authorities have raided multiple times since Oct. 7.
The first agent to examine me asked about those materials, as well as some T-shirts that referred to Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, with a profanity. “If you believe in peace and human rights for all people, then why are these messages so one-sided?” the security agent asked.
I said that I didn’t think they were. Israelis want peace: At well-attended protests led by the Hostage Families’ Forum throughout the war in Gaza, attendees demanded a deal to end the fighting in exchange for a return of the hostages. And most Israelis oppose Ben-Gvir, viewing his Jewish supremacist vision — which would see Israel annex the vast majority of the West Bank, and violent Jewish extremists given a pass — as a major threat to the future of their country.
Then, two agents led me into another room with an array of scanners and equipment. I started to sweat. Just before my trip, two Jewish American activists were deported after volunteering in the West Bank. They were slapped with a 10-year ban from entering Israel. Could that happen to me?
One agent asked me if I visited the West Bank, and who I’d met with. I thought of my friend Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian peace activist murdered by an internationally-sanctioned settler in July.
As soon as I had landed in Israel, I’d rented a car and drove to Awdah’s village of Umm al Khair, to visit his family, whom I’d gotten to know when I lived and worked there as a human rights activist in 2022. As Awdah’s three children, all under 5, ran around our feet, I handed a bouquet of flowers to his widow. Awdah’s cousin recounted how he and a dozen other members of the community had been arrested and tortured for days immediately after Awdah’s killing. With tears in his eyes, he told me how he had been forced to miss Awdah’s funeral — which took place only after a bureaucratic standoff with the authorities, who held Awdah’s body for 10 days before finally releasing it to his family.
His killer, in contrast, was detained for a single day. Upon his release, his gun was returned to him. The police claimed that they couldn’t pursue further investigation for lack of evidence, even though there were multiple videos of the shooting, including Awdah’s own.
Yes, I had visited the West Bank, I told the agent. I’d met with some friends who are struggling to be free.
What I didn’t say: Despite my fury over Awdah’s murder, when I visited Umm al Khair, and stood over the stain of Awdah’s blood on the concrete where he was killed, I felt an odd sense of calm wash over me.
Violence and hatred are magnetic: they have the power to call out the evil in all of us. I’ve felt that disturbing call myself. But I’ve also felt how nonviolence can counteract that dark magnetism. I’ve seen thousands of Jews from Israel and the diaspora choose to intercede in situations of oppression, to be a protective presence against settler and state violence, and to try to use our bodies to repel cruelty and domination. I’ve seen it work in places like Umm al Khair, and that’s why I have hope.
More people who believe in freedom, equality and security for all people need to engage in this work on the ground. Because the authoritarians and Jewish supremacists who wish to repress our movement are, in fact, scared of Jews and Palestinians who partner together. They’re scared because we are bonded not by blood and soil but values and visions of a shared future.
What we want is simple: a land where all Israelis and Palestinians can live free from repression and violence, build homes and watch their families flourish, and travel with whatever books they want. This is the future that my Israeli and Palestinian friends are fighting for. And I will, too, by any nonviolent means necessary.
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