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Kyiv Jews celebrate their 2nd wartime Purim with renewed resolve and optimism
KYIV (JTA) — In a historic building in the most industrial part of Podil, the hipster district of Kyiv that once was the heart of the Jewish trading community, a senior and passionate Esther seduces a much younger Ahasuerus. She flirts with the handsome king to the raucous giggling of the audience, which breaks into applause when the Purim shpiel comes to an end.
A year and a few days into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Jews in Kyiv and the rest of the country have celebrated Purim in precarious economic and emotional circumstances, under the continued threat of Russian attacks. Still, many of them are in much better spirits than in 2022, when the Jewish holiday of joy found Ukrainian Jews in a frantic state of worry and uncertainty about their immediate future.
“A year ago you could see the fear in people’s eyes; now they are very proud because Ukraine has resisted, and Jews are fully involved in the cause,” Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during the movement’s Purim celebration in Podil. She is an Israeli rabbi who is the executive director of the Masorti movement-affiliated Schechter Institutes and periodically travels to Ukraine to serve the country’s Masorti communities. Masorti Judaism is similar to the Conservative movement in the United States.
“Last year it was very, very hard, because people were in shock, afraid, and they didn’t know what to do,” said Ariel Markowitz, Kyiv’s most senior rabbi from the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement, which held its own Purim celebration Monday night. “But now we know that we have a strong army, that we have a chance, and many people have actually returned to Kyiv.”
Rabbi Ariel Markowitz of Chabad Kyiv reads from the Megillah during his community’s Purim celebration, March 6, 2023. (Courtesy Markowitz)
The year-old war has shaken up Ukraine’s Jewish community, with members leaving the country or moving within it to avoid Russian shelling and its effects.
“Everyone has pretty much made a decision on whether to stay or to leave and we are reorganizing our community,” said Gritsevskaya.
Although at least 14,000 Ukrainians have moved to Israel since Russia’s all-out invasion started, and many more thousands have found refuge in Germany and other European countries, Gritsevskaya wants to focus on those who stayed. Estimates of the Jewish population in Ukraine ranged before the war from just under 50,000 to up to 400,000, depending on who counted.
One of the people who left the country was the former Masorti rabbi in Ukraine, Reuven Stamov, who moved with his family to Israel. Currently, the Masorti movement — whose Ukrainian following Grivtseskaya estimates in the thousands — does not have a rabbi permanently in the country. But the community keeps active in Kyiv and other cities, such as Kharkiv in the east, Odessa in the south and Chernivtsi in the southwest, thanks to activists, volunteers and rabbinical students, plus the visits by Gritsevskaya, who first returned for Purim last year.
“Community life has never been so important,” she said.
Gritsevskaya pointed to the difference that having access to material help, connections and emotional and spiritual support makes for those who arrive in new cities from places in the south or the east occupied by Russia or close to the front.
She acknowledged that some Jewish organizations have ceased their operations in Ukraine and stressed the need of strengthening the work of those who are committed to remain, so Jewish life in Ukraine could be as “diverse” as before and people “have options” to choose the way they practice their Judaism.
Among the Ukrainian Jews that decided to stay is the director of the MILI Foundation, the entity that organizes the Masorti community in Ukraine. Maksym Melnikov moved to Kyiv from his native Donetsk in 2014 after Russian-backed separatist militias declared the independence of part of the region and war broke out in Eastern Ukraine.
Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya poses with community members of the Masorti community in Kyiv, March 6, 2023. (Marcel Gascón Barberá)
“I came when they started to occupy our land in Ukraine,” Melnikov told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the Masorti Purim celebration in Kyiv, just before taking the stage to help Gritsevskaya read the Purim Megillah. “Almost a decade later, war came after me to Kyiv, and I don’t want to move this time, I’m staying.”
Since 2014, many of Melnikov’s friends and acquaintances from Donetsk have moved to Kyiv. While Russia’s full-scale invasion has pushed many Jews from Kyiv to move westwards or leave the country, the western city’s communities have received a new infusion of people from the eastern cities more affected by the war.
“Communities are changing constantly countrywide, and we are trying to reach out to those who arrive, both to help them start a new life and to build our community stronger,” said Grivtsevskaya.
She said the Masorti community in Chernivtsi has experienced a notable revival. Situated near the border with Romania, Chernivtsi is one of the few Ukrainian provincial capitals that has not been bombed by Russia, and thousands have moved there. “They have received another family and are very strong right now,” she said about the once-dwindling community in this historical Jewish center, where she hosted a Purim celebration after making her way into Ukraine in March 2022.
The massive uprooting of entire Jewish communities has been experienced keenly by Chabad, which has the largest Jewish presence in the country, with hundreds of emissaries serving Jewish communities in dozens of cities.
“We’ve seen a huge increase in those who come looking for help,” Markowitz told JTA hours before the start of Purim at Chabad’s community center in Kyiv. Many of them, he said, had come from Mariupol, a city bombed into submission by Russia at the beginning of the war.
Scenes of the Purim shpiel at the Masorti community in Kyiv, March 6, 2023. (Marcel Gascón Barberá)
Chabad is one of several organizations providing aid to Ukrainian Jews, including support in obtaining food, medical care and generators that keep power flowing amid widespread outages.
The rise of the demand for these services is not only driven by refugees, but by families and individuals who have lost their source of income due to the economic disruptions caused by the invasion.
“There is inflation, there are less jobs, a lot of companies closed and people lost their jobs or are unable to help their family members,” Markowitz said.
Besides the demographic and economic shake-ups, the war has brought changes in the way Jews relate to their Ukrainian identity. Perhaps the most striking has been a rapid shift away from speaking Russian, the first language of many Ukrainian Jews until recently.
“Even I started learning and speaking Ukrainian and you can definitely see how a new sense of national identity is being born,” Maria Karadin, a Russia-born Israeli who moved to Ukraine with her husband in 2005, said at the Masorti Purim event.
Maiia Malkova is 15 years old and one of the most active young members of the Masorti community in Kyiv.
“Last year I didn’t even think about Purim so much because I was so frightened,” she said while wearing a necklace with a tryzub, the trident that symbolizes Ukrainian statehood and independence. “But we kind of got accustomed to this situation. And it is great to be able to celebrate Purim again.”
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Rep. Seth Moulton Silent on Reported Qatar Funding Amid Outrage Over Returning AIPAC Donations
US Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol. Photo: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) has refused to answer whether he would forgo funding from Qatar days after he announced he would no longer accept financial assistance from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Moulton announced last week that he would no longer work with AIPAC, the preeminent pro-Israel lobbying firm in the US, accusing the group of harboring close ties with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative government. Moulton, who has recently entered the Democratic primary for Senator, added that he would return all funds to AIPAC. However, the representative stressed that he continues to support Israel’s right to self defense and existence.
The representative, however, has accepted financial assistance from the government of Qatar, according to reporting by the Washington Free Beacon. Moulton accepted a lavish trip to the gulf state paid for by the Qatari government and accepted campaign donations from a Qatari-linked lobbying firm, according to documents reviewed by the Free Beacon. During Moulton’s 2020 four day excursion to Qatar, in which the government covered food and housing, he visited the Qatar Foundation. Moulton praised Qatar, predicting that the terror-aligned state has “great potential,” and that he foresees “the friendship between the two countries to grow in the future.” Moulton also accepted roughly $11,500 from Nelson Mullins, a lobbying firm with operatives connected to Qatar, according to documents reviewed by the outlet.
Moulton’s announcement comes on the heels of his newly-launched Senate campaign. According to various polls, Israel has plummeted in popularity with Democratic voters, with a majority believing that the Jewish state has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza. Some speculate whether Moulton’s refusal to accept AIPAC funding is part of a calculated effort to distance himself with the Jewish state and neutralize potential confrontations with party activists.
Although Moulton has vowed to return funds donated by AIPAC, he has yet to declare that he would no longer accept funds from those connected to the Qatari government. Moulton’s office did not return requests for comment from The Algemeiner on whether the representative would stop taking funds from Qatar.
Qatar, a small Gulf nation in the Middle East, has extensive and well-documented connections to the Hamas terrorist group. The Gulf nation hosts several Hamas political leaders in Doha and has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza, which critics say has indirectly bolstered the militant group’s control. Israel, along with several Western states, have accused Qatar of serving as a lifeline for the terrorist group.
Moreover, many skeptics argue that Qatar has a growing influence in the United States, pointing to the gulf nation’s expanding footprint in government, higher education, media, and entertainment.
The gulf nation has spent roughly $72 million on US lobbying firms since 2016 with the goal of improving the country’s image, according to a report by the Middle East Forum.
Through multimillion-dollar donations to leading universities, high-profile lobbying efforts in Washington, and partnerships with major media and sports organizations, the Gulf nation has positioned itself as a key player shaping narratives and policy debates.
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Cornell Newspaper Publishes Nazi Symbol in Anti-Israel Essay
Illustrative Cornell University cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Cornell University took center stage in another campus antisemitism outrage on Thursday, as its student newspaper published an anti-Zionist opinion piece which promoted Holocaust inversion by melding a Nazi symbol with the Star of David.
The article, titled “Thousand & One Eyes for an Eye” and written by indigenous studies professor Karim-Aly Assam, argued that Israel’s military strategy for the Gaza war against Hamas prioritized revenge for the Oct. 7 massacre over security “under the pretext of obtaining justice.” The article further accused Israeli officials of describing Palestinians as “animals” to justify “ruthless destruction and killing” — a gross distortion of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s describing the Hamas fighters who murdered, raped, and maimed women, children, and men on Oct. 7 “human animals” two days after the atrocities transpired.
Assam’s article implied an equivalence of Israel’s military objective to eradicate Hamas from Gaza with the Nazi genocide of Jews across Europe during World War II, a trope which anti-Israel activists and antisemites traffic to foster negative public opinion against Israel’s efforts to secure its borders and quell jihadist activity in the Palestinian territories that has sabotaged efforts to reach a two-state solution and achieve peace with Israel’s neighbors.
The tactic — Holocaust inversion — is one part of a triad of Holocaust-skepticism, the other two components of which are “denial” and “distortion” — used to defame Jews and deny that they are and have been victims of hatred. Once reserved to neo-Nazi media, Holocaust inversion, experts say, is being increasingly embraced by other more mainstream segments of society.
Assam’s attempt to erase Jewish suffering during the Holocaust is clear, Cornell University professor William Jacobson said in an interview with the New York Post.
“It reflects the normalization of Holocaust inversion, both on the internet and now on Cornell’s campus,” Jacobson said. “This [SS lightning bolt] graphic is specifically inside a bloody Jewish star. No reflection of it being even related to Israel. And it clearly is pursuing the idea that Jews are the new Nazis. And so I think it’s obviously highly offensive.”
Following the incident, Cornell unpublished and then re-published Assam’s essay. Later, Eric Han, a Daily Sun editor — claiming not to speak for the organization but as an individual — defended publishing the drawing, arguing that it “clearly depicts that the Palestinian subject has been violently (i.e. bloodily) branded with the SS symbol.”
He added, “I would find it very difficult to dispute the claim that that the Israeli government is similar to the Nazi regime” and claimed that criticism of Assam is evidence of rising “threats levied against academic freedom on campus.”
On Thursday, Kassam said that he regrets how “some” people “interpreted” the drawing.
“I am deeply saddened to learn that this portion of the artwork has been interpreted by some as antisemitic,” he told the New York Post. “That was not my intention and I have learned from this experience.”
Cornell University stands with other Ivy League campuses in being plagued by incidents which exhibit a severity of anti-Jewish hatred not seen in the Western world since the rise of the Nazis.
Just last week, a Cornell professor who according to the school violated federal anti-discrimination law when he expelled an Israeli student from class opted to retire rather than serve a two-semester suspension he received as punishment for the incident.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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ADL Releases Report Revealing High Failure Rates for Generative AI Video Apps to Block Antisemitic Prompts
Screenshots taken on October 23, 2025 of three Sora videos created by user “Pablo Deskobar.”
On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) published new research from its Center on Technology and Society (CTS) investigating outputs from artificial intelligence-powered video generating programs. Analysts found that “at least 40 percent of the time” the programs would generate responses when presented “antisemitic, extremist or otherwise hateful text prompts.”
ADL researched fed certain antisemitic prompts into AI chatbot apps — OpenAI’s Sora 2, Google’s Veo 3, and Hedra’s Character-3 model — to gauge how the programs would respond to racist material.
Researchers described how of all four tools, OpenAI’ Sora 2 “performed the best in terms of content moderation, refusing to generate 60% of the prompts.”
The ADL report stated that out of the 50 problematic prompts “Veo 3 only refused to generate ten, Hedra only refused two and Sora 1 refused none. Sora 2 performed the best of all the tools, refusing to generate 30 prompts.”
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote Friday on X about the threat of antisemitic AI videos that, “throughout history, bad actors have exploited new technologies to create antisemitic, extremist and hateful content – that’s where we find ourselves today as AI video generation becomes more sophisticated and accessible.”
A Growing Threat
West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center has previously warned that terrorist groups have started deploying artificial intelligence tools in their propaganda. A January 2024 paper identified the threat which the ADL’s research has now confirmed, with its abstract stating “specifically, the authors investigated the potential implications of commands that can be input into these systems that effectively ‘jailbreak’ the model, allowing it to remove many of its standards and policies that prevent the base model from providing extremist, illegal, or unethical content.”
The unique challenge presented by large language models which experts identify is that responses generated often do not follow the programmed rules, allowing users to generate dangerous content, even when rules are put into place to attempt to prevent it. The creators can put in safeguards against their tools’ misuse, but they so far do not know how to apply them consistently.
Notably, the ADL said that several it shared with OpenAI following initial testing of Sora earlier this year “were refused in the updated version of the tool.”
This new ADL research into generative AI video apps builds on the organization’s findings released in March into AI chatbot apps, when researchers reported varying levels of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish answers from evaluating Chat-GPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and Llama (Meta).
The ADL called for three policy changes including heavily funding moderation teams, aggressively testing prompts involving hateful stereotypes, and updating keywords in response to real time changes in bigoted vernacular.
“Many of the terms and keywords that are used in hateful or extremist content are obscure and may not be known to engineers or safety practitioners,” the report says. “Video generation platforms should hire research scientists, or other experts within trust and safety teams, who are equipped to keep abreast of the ever-evolving world of extremist rhetoric, which ideally includes partnering with civil society groups who can provide timely analysis and updated language.”
Following the initial Monday report into Sora 2 antisemitic content, The Algemeiner began a further review into material created, hosted, and shared on the app. The videos described here could be found through searching for the terms “rabbi” and “Jews” on the app.
Antisemitism in Action: How Users Navigate Around Safety Features
One way to evaluate how new Sora users are using this technology is through looking at a sequence of videos rather than just one in isolation.
A person with the handle “acm156741” chose to create a series of seven short videos all featuring mixed martial arts star Jake Paul, who allows his likeness to be used in AI videos since he is a self-described “proud OpenAI investor.” In the surreal, comedic videos, the AI-generated Paul uses the claim that he was “promised” something “3000 years ago” as justification for stealing a car and taking candy from a child. Then videos identify him as Jewish, a rabbi, heading for Israel, and money-obsessed.
This technique of identifying Paul as Jewish in one video and then in another video associating Paul with an antisemitic stereotype then overcomes the program’s safety features.