Features
A story of resistance and courage from Ukraine
By MARTIN ZEILIG In late July, I received a document from a friend, which was sent to him by someone associated with the Beamsville, Ontario-based charitable organization, Friends of the Mennonite Centre in Ukraine , (FOMCU).
The document was part one of a story written by Iryna Lynka, the mayor of Molochansk, a city in eastern Ukraine.
Lynka was captured by the Russians around March 15 after Russia’s unprovoked, illegal and genocidal invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. She was released three and a half weeks later, and is now living in the Ukrainian controlled city of Zaporozhian, Alvin Suderman, the FOMCU Chair in Steinbach, wrote in an email to me.
“It is a horrific story,” he wrote.
“Imagine being held in the prison in Tokmak listening to the screams of people being tortured.”
The report was translated into English by Oksana Druchynina, the FOMCU manager now living in Abbotsford; B.C. Ms. Druchhnina is still translating the second part of Ms. Lynka’s narrative.
Iryna’s story
The former mayor of a town in south eastern Ukraine has finally been released, after nearly four weeks in Russian captivity. What’s more, she is defiant.
“And I didn’t surrender, I was reborn from tears. I was born Ukrainian.” Those words are from a song Iryna Lynka knew before she was abducted by Russian soldiers.
Iryna was elected mayor of Molochansk in Zaporizhzhia. After Russia attacked Ukraine in February, her community was occupied in two days. She says initially, the Russians did not behave cruelly, as it seemed they believed their own propaganda that they would be welcomed. They were wrong. When the security arm of the Russian military arrived, three weeks later, the abductions began.
“On March 31, at 6 am, they came to my home. A search was conducted. My sister and my mother, who is 82-years-old, were staying overnight. I asked them not to disturb my family, and they did not. First, they asked if there were police or Ukrainian soldiers in our house. I could report that there were none.
“Then they asked why I—as a local politician— supported a pro-Ukrainian party called the “Servant of the People” rather than the pro-Russian party called OPZZH. They took away all the papers and work files. They took me outside and the home was searched by five Russian agents. I noticed that there were many fully armed men on the street. They surrounded the house.
“As they were taking me away, we passed a Russian armoured vehicle, and the driver turned to me and scornfully said: ‘Are you disappointed that this is not the Ukrainian Armed Forces!’”
WITH A BAG ON THE HEAD
“Then they put a bag on my head and put me in another car. They drove to the Tokmak police station, 12 km away. My deputy and another town worker were also brought there. I noticed through the fabric covering my face that they also had bags on their heads. Their primary goal was to lure me— as the head of the community— to their side.
They took my phone and passport and said that we know everything about you, that you have authority among the population and that you are very suitable for us. They wanted me to join their side, to make a video of me distributing their “humanitarian aid” and to talk about the advantages of the Russian Federation. I was to tell people to join the Russian side. And I immediately said “No.”
“At first, they seemed to be polite, addressing me with respect. Then later, they were very rude and disrespectful.”
“REAL BANDERA!”
Iryna says she was interrogated by young security services men who were not older than 30. They teased and threatened her.
“They opened my passport and saw my place of birth, which is the Lviv region. But I have lived almost my entire life in Eastern Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia.
“Ah, so you are a true Bandera! “ (a pejorative term for Ukrainians, coined after the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera), they said.
“All the interrogations took place at the police office assembly hall. I had been placed on a chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by six to eight men with machine guns pointed at me. They all wore balaclavas, but I will never forget their eyes. I think I could recognize them now.”
“I was told I had two options: to cooperate or to hope for an exchange. Of course, I wouldn’t want to go with a suitcase to an unknown place where I don’t have anywhere to live. But personally, I did not imagine how it is possible to cooperate with them. Later, the lawyers in Ukraine explained to me that if I had given my consent to cooperate, it would not have been seen as collaboration by Ukrainian authorities, since I was forced under machine guns, and it would not have been a voluntary decision. But I immediately understood that Russians are people with whom there will be no compromise, no dialogue. And if I had agreed to hand out their ‘humanitarian aid,’ then they would have had more orders, they would never stop forcing me to do what they need.”
BLACKMAIL AND THREATS
As a result of refusing to cooperate, Iryna was threatened and told her family and children (she has two adult sons) would suffer the consequences. “They said: ‘You will die and rot here. We will take you to Russia and we will put you before the court and judge you according to Russian laws. No one will find you!’ ”. She understood all this was possible.
“I was interrogated in the evening when it was already dark. They were angry… because they couldn’t get what they wanted from me, they couldn’t do anything with me. But physically they did not touch me.”
Still, Iryna says they used whatever means they could to intimidate and blackmail her. She says when she returned to her cell after the interrogations, everything felt mixed up. She had never written poetry in her life yet, while in captivity, she wrote half a dozen poems.
She did not know what would happen from one minute to the next, and whether she would ever be released.
And she recalled her friend’s song. “When I remembered these lines, I didn’t think about my troubles, but I thought of people who had it much harder than me, and especially our men and women at the front. And I had to survive through all these troubles. I only asked and prayed to God that they would not take advantage of my family, so they would not arrest and torture them.”
OUR GUYS WERE
UNGODLY TORTURED
But Iryna‘s time in her cell was excruciating. She could not bear the sounds she heard coming from men being tortured nearby.
“We, the women, were not beaten up, but what I heard… the window in the cell was opened deliberately so that I could hear what was happening there, how people screamed, how they were mocked. The boys were brutally beaten, which was not done to the women! They were moaning, and screaming, and begging… just horror. Later, one of them told me that they poured water into a bowl and passed an electric stream through his legs, and something was inserted under his nails, and he was pricked.
“And here you are, lying in the cell, no one touches you, but you are tortured by those sounds and screams of terror. I thought how can those who torture people, return to their families, how can they hug their wives and children, be gentle? They were not acting human.”
“KYIV, CHERNIGIV AND
SUMY ARE OURS!”
While in captivity, Iryna had no information from the outside. Taking advantage of this, the security services officials said that the Russians had already taken Kyiv, they had taken Chernihiv and that there would be no Ukraine.
“Somehow, I was able to receive a small package of chocolate and prunes from my sister, Svetlana. Hidden inside, was a note: ‘Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy are ours!’ ”
“God, how I kissed that note! I understood that they were deceiving me, that everything was not so bad. Over time I received a few more notes. How important that was. It broadened my understanding of what was happening.”
“Something I won’t forget is how afraid I was of getting sick. In April, it was very cold in the concrete cell. My feet were freezing. Medicines were sometimes given, but there were times when a doctor was deliberately not called. Once I woke up and I was shaking; I took a pill. I did not know whether my blood pressure was very low or, on the contrary, too high. I called for a doctor, but he never came. And in the evening, they called me for questioning and smiling, asked ‘Well, how are you?’ I said that everything was fine, but I thought to myself, ‘You will not get me!’ For them, all their tactics were acceptable, and I understood that one must never show weakness or fear. I’m not saying that I’m fearless and I was not afraid. No, I was afraid. I understood that anything could happen.”
HOPE FOR AN EXCHANGE
“A week later, I signed a letter of resignation, saying I was no longer mayor. I understood that according to Ukrainian laws, this would not change anything, but the security services wanted me to formally acknowledge I was not the head of the community. Together with the resignation letter, I made a written request to be included in a prisoner exchange and this was handed over to the Molochansk town council.
“Although under the Geneva Convention, civilians cannot be captured and therefore can’t be exchanged, the Russians did just that. They abducted people so they could have an ‘exchange fund’ for their side.
“My name was included on a prisoner exchange list three times. Two Russian soldiers were offered for me. However, I was taken off the list every time. I’m convinced that the man who lost the mayoralty election to me, and who now cooperates with the Russians, helped remove my name.”
MORE THREATS
“One day, a new commander was going around the cells. I asked him about a prisoner exchange. He told me it was ‘in the process.’ That’s when I realized an exchange was very possible. Soon, during another interrogation, an officer offered to record a video of me appealing to my community, with propaganda about the Russian Federation.
“I refused again. ‘Then you will die in the cell!’ And I said, ‘I will be exchanged!’ He replied that they tore up my application and flushed it down the toilet, that there would be no exchange. ‘It will happen,’ I said. ‘There is already a resolution.” He snapped: “How do you know?”I told him that I had been informed. He shouted: ‘That’s it! No more relief packages from your family.’
“I was afraid that they would search the cell and find the notes. As soon as I returned from the interrogation, I tore the notes up. These pieces of paper were so dear to me, I reread them multiple times, but I threw them into the toilet.”
RELEASED, BUT THE FEAR REMAINS
In the end, Iryna Lypka was not exchanged, but released. The Russians did not explain anything. She believes that she was saved because the men holding her captive were reassigned and a new, more compassionate team was brought in.
“I was released in the afternoon on April 23, just before Easter. When I came out, I was so dizzy, that my legs wobbled. I was not weak, but the arrest left its mark. For example, I woke up on Sunday at home, opened my eyes and got scared – why is there so much light in the room?
“Or when a dog barks on the street – I run to the window. If a tractor is driving by, I imagine that I see a tank. If I see Russian military vehicles driving by, I think they must be coming for me.
“Soon after my release, Mayor Kotelevskyi of Tokmak was killed. This is the city where I was held prisoner. Officially it was declared to be a suicide, but the people did not believe that. As the deposed mayor of Molochansk, I did not feel safe and this is when I felt I had to leave.”
In the end, together with her 82-year-old mother and her sister’s family, Iryna left for the nearest Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia.
“IF WE FIND BANDERA –
WE WILL SHOOT EVERYONE!”
Iryna Lypka says it is difficult for Ukrainian people to understand the Russian army.
“The Russian soldiers went from house to house and asked, ‘Do you have Bandera?’, and people laughed at them. The Russians said, ‘If we find them – we’ll shoot everyone!’
“Some Russians made themselves at home in one of the houses. The owner came in and smelled a terrible stench from dirty clothes and socks. She was indignant: ‘You could at least ventilate. They were surprised: ‘Are you saying that your windows open?’ It turns out that they had never seen double-glazed windows, yet they came to Ukraine to ‘save’ us.
“Russian soldiers are amazed that the houses are all built of brick and stone. It appears that they rob households of microwave ovens as they have never seen them before. The occupiers also told her that they have no natural gas in the villages in Russia. That is, the pipeline goes through the village, but there is no access to the gas for the villagers.
“They were amazed at everything – the paved road, natural gas, and streetlights.
“The security services tried to tell me during the interrogations that Ukraine is a mess and that Zelensky is bad. On the contrary, I started telling them about the program… ‘Big construction’ being implemented in the country – roads, schools, gardens, sports complexes—large facilities are being built. We have problems and we need to solve them, but we do not go to Russia to solve theirs.
“Only once, during the interrogation, one of them blurted out that ‘I feel sorry for you because you are a woman.’ And others have no emotions – they just have the orders they follow. And they just have a terrible hatred for us.”
Now Iryna Lypka is in Zaporizhzhia, dealing with issues of financing the community, as well as issuing documents to graduates of the schools in the area. She also organizes the work of the Children’s Affairs Service. In Zaporizhzhia, they are trying to help those who have fled the Russian-occupied area, and they are also arranging humanitarian aid. Those who leave Zaporizhzhia deliver necessary goods to the Russian-occupied community.
The new mayor appointed by the Russians operates in Molochansk. He drives Iryna’s car around the town, the one the Russians seized from her.
“There are people in Molochansk who cooperate with the Russians or seem happy about their new life. There are women who live with the Russian occupiers.
“I cannot understand these people. They see what the Russians do, how they mock the Ukrainians, how they rob and take everything from people. Everyone sees everything with their own eyes, not from the TV screen. And someone goes to bed with that animal. It simply cannot be understood.
“What can be said, of people who are well- off, fighting to get in line for Russian ‘humanitarian aid,’ so that even the Russians laugh and film them? Well, one could understand if people were really bloated with hunger. But each of us has potatoes and vegetable gardens. You should not disrespect yourself like that! I also don’t understand a person who always puts her hand on her chest while singing the National Anthem of Ukraine and today is collaborating with the occupiers. However, there are just a few of them. There are more patriotic people than corrupt ones.”
“I believe in our Armed Forces. I believe that we will definitely win and rebuild our beloved Ukraine. Let’s all believe!”
Features
A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
By Benyamin Cohen May 8, 2026 “This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.”
Benyamin has been reporting for more than a year on the improbable story of Nik Jakobs. Catch up here and here, and stay tuned for a forthcoming piece about a trip they took to the Netherlands to visit the towns where the Jakobs family survived the Holocaust. Yesterday was an important moment in Jakobs’ overall journey, and we wanted to share it with you.
STERLING, ILLINOIS — On Wednesday, Nik Jakobs was planting corn. On Thursday, the 41-year-old Illinois cattle farmer stood in a two-acre cornfield preparing to plant something else: a synagogue.
Around 75 people gathered on the edge of the field this week in Sterling, Illinois, a two-hour drive west of Chicago, where Jakobs and his family broke ground on a new home for Temple Sholom, the small congregation that has anchored Jewish life here for more than a century, and where his family has prayed since the 1950s.
The planned 4,000-square-foot building will also house a Holocaust museum inspired by the story of Jakobs’ grandparents, Edith and Norbert, who survived the war after Christian families in the Netherlands hid them in their homes for years. Jakobs described the future museum as a place devoted not only to Jewish history, but to teaching the dangers of hatred and division. “If you have the choice to be right or kind,” he said, repeating advice from his grandmother, “choose kind.”
A 60-foot blue ribbon — chosen by Jakobs’ wife, Katie, to match the color of the Israeli flag — stretched across the future building site. His four daughters held it alongside his parents, brothers and friends. Then they lifted oversized gold scissors and cut the ribbon as pastors, farmers, city officials and members of neighboring churches applauded.
The synagogue rising from this Illinois cornfield will house pieces of the past.
A nearby storage area holds Jewish objects Jakobs rescued from shuttered synagogues across the country: stained-glass windows, Torah arks, rabbi’s chairs, memorial plaques and wooden tablets engraved with the tribes of Israel. Many came from Temple B’nai Israel, a 113-year-old synagogue that closed down in 2025. It served generations of Jews in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, now a ghost town since the steel mills closed. Its remaining congregants donated sacred objects to Jakobs so their story could live on rather than disappear.
The day before the groundbreaking, the Jakobs family began opening some of the crates for the first time since they were packed away nearly a year ago. Nik’s father, Dave Jakobs, pried open one box with a hammer and crowbar while Nik loosened screws with an electric drill, the family gathered around like archaeologists opening a tomb.
Inside was a stained-glass window with images of a tallit and shofar bursting in jewel tones of blue, yellow and red. Jakobs’ mother, Margo, lifted Annie, the youngest of Nik’s daughters, so the 4-year-old could peer inside. The bright red glass matched the bow in her hair.
Nearby sat the massive wooden ark salvaged from Pennsylvania, topped with twin Lions of Judah whose carved paws once overlooked generations of worshippers.
Faith on the farmland
Temple Sholom — founded in 1910 — was once the center of Jewish life in Sterling, a town of 14,500 surrounded by flat farmland and tall grain silos. Its Jewish community once included a pharmacist, the manager of Kline’s department store and the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise.
Over time, membership dwindled. The roof sagged. The pews emptied.
Last year, the congregation sold its aging building and relocated High Holiday services to a tent on the Jakobs’ farm, where prayers mingled with the smell of manure and cattle lowing nearby.
At a moment when many small-town synagogues are closing, Temple Sholom is doing something increasingly rare: building a bigger new sanctuary from scratch. The synagogue will sit prominently along one of Sterling’s main roads — a highly visible expression of Jewish life in a region where Jews are few.
Thursday’s groundbreaking took place on the National Day of Prayer, the annual observance formalized under President Ronald Reagan, who grew up a few miles away in Dixon, Illinois. Earlier that morning, attendees gathered inside New Life Lutheran Church for a breakfast sponsored by Temple Sholom.
“I was so happy to see bagels, lox and cream cheese,” said Rev. James Keenan, a Catholic priest originally from Brooklyn. “It reminded me of home.”
Inside the church sanctuary, a large wooden cross glowed amber and blue above the dais while two giant screens displayed the National Day of Prayer logo. Jakobs, wearing cowboy boots, jeans and a powder-blue blazer, addressed the crowd.
“Tolerance is not weakness,” he said. “It is strength.”
The new synagogue will sit beside New Life Lutheran Church on land sold to Temple Sholom by farmer Dan Koster, 71, who has known the Jakobs family for three generations.
“We need more religious presence in the community,” Koster said.
For Drew Williams, New Life’s 38-year-old lead pastor, the synagogue and museum represent more than neighboring buildings. His church already hosts food-packing drives, summer meal programs and community events. He imagines future partnerships with Temple Sholom.
“I don’t think there’s any community that is immune to hate,” Williams said. “That just means it’s on us” to be on the other side “spreading peace.”
Sterling Mayor Diana Merdian, who is 41 and grew up in town with Jakobs, said the project reflects a broader desire among younger generations to preserve local history and identity. “If we don’t carry those stories, we lose them,” she said. “Once you lose that, you can’t get it back.”
During the ceremony in the cornfield, Temple Sholom’s longtime cantor, Lori Schwaber, asked those gathered to remember the congregation’s founding members and recite the Mourner’s Kaddish together. Jews and Christians stood side by side in the prairie wind as Hebrew prayers drifted across the open farmland.
Lester Weinstine, a 90-year-old congregant who was the first bar mitzvah at Temple Sholom when the shul was still housed out of a Pepsi bottling plant, looked out across the field in disbelief. “I never thought I would see this,” he said.
For Jakobs, the synagogue project has become inseparable from the lessons his grandparents’ survival taught him. “You sometimes feel on an island as a Jew, especially in rural America,” he said. “But this community — that’s not what I’ve experienced here.”
If construction stays on schedule, the synagogue will open in fall 2027. Its first major service will not be a dedication ceremony, but the bat mitzvah of Jakobs’ oldest daughter, Taylor.
Members of the Pennsylvania congregation are planning a bus trip to Illinois for the occasion, after donating many of their sacred objects to help build Jakob’s synagogue. Their former rabbi has offered to officiate.
“If a farmer can build a synagogue in a cornfield,” Jakobs said, “anybody can do it anywhere.”
Benyamin Cohen is a senior writer at the Forward and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
Ancient Torah Lessons Students Can Still Use Today In Class
Texts don’t survive through age alone; they survive because each generation finds something new and intriguing in them. One such text is the Torah. Students will find it useful in classes ranging from religion to philosophy, literature, or cultural studies, but many of its teachings aren’t confined to the past either. Stories from the Torah touch upon topics like stress, conflict, leadership, confusion, errors, accountability, and meaning. It sounds remarkably contemporary.
A student approaching the study of Torah has several options: religious text, historical source, literary piece, and a basis for philosophical contemplation. They all provide opportunities to explore the text in unique ways. The student writing on ancient texts or ethics can use EssayPro, the company employs experts, including Paul S., a full-time writer, who could assist the student with structuring their research. But great essays on ancient texts require more than just the approach of a museum curator.
The goal is not to shoehorn ancient narratives into a modern form or to look for an easy life hack in every single passage. Rather, students need to think about what made those stories stand the test of time. What did they observe about people? What did they try to warn against? And last but not least, what virtues did they celebrate? As soon as students start asking such questions, the Torah appears much closer.
Ancient Texts Teach Students To Be Patient Readers
Modern students are trained to read quickly. Just skim through the article. Scan all the comments. Read the summary and move forward. It does not quite work with the Torah, though. Many of the passages are rather short but rich in conflict, repetition, silence, and subtle details. Sometimes a person’s name, a long journey, an order given, or even a family squabble means more than expected.
For this reason, it is a great practice for students to deal with, as education is mostly geared toward finishing chapters faster, submitting assignments sooner, and hitting deadlines regularly. However, profound reflection requires patience, and the Torah is the perfect tool.
This type of reading goes past religious education alone. Students who learn to pace themselves with Torah can carry this approach into their literature, legal, historical, philosophical, and even scientific readings. Details are crucial. Contexts are crucial. Silence is equally crucial to speech.
Questions Do Not Denigrate One’s Faith Or Cognition
One of the best lessons for students from the Torah is that sincere people pose serious questions. The texts are full of debates, disagreements, doubts, tests, and misunderstandings. The addressees do not understand the demands placed on them. They argue, they bargain, and sometimes make mistakes.
It is necessary for the reason that many students view good studying as a process of getting clear and immediate responses to questions. It is usually not the case. Learning can start from frustration and confusion, since such a passage can serve better than an easy one.
During lessons, students should not fear questioning why a character did something like that, what their motivation was, what the possible consequences of their actions were, how it was perceived at that time, or how other cultures interpret the passage. Asking questions neither denigrates the subject nor learning itself.
Responsibility Is Greater Than Personal Success
In contemporary educational circles, the discourse of success often revolves around the personal gain that follows from achievement. Earn good grades. Construct your résumé. Land scholarships. Map out your future career path. On numerous occasions, the Torah asks a much larger question: what are our obligations to one another?
Themes associated with the concepts of justice, community, caring for the weak, honesty, and responsibility recur regularly throughout the work. These recurring motifs serve to undermine the narrow understanding of education and suggest that knowledge informs conduct.
To students, this message could be particularly relevant, as they face a daily opportunity to exercise their responsibility as members of the academic community. Education is more than a competitive pursuit, and the values that are promoted by the Torah can manifest themselves in group projects, class discussions, peer interactions, and other facets of college life.
Leaders Need Humility
Many students picture great leaders as people with big voices and confidence, who seem to have power from birth. Torah portrays leaders in a more complex way. They are hesitant, flawed, fearful, impatient, and highly human. Greatness is not portrayed as an absolute quality; rather, it is viewed as an ordeal.
This makes for some valuable insight for all those students who believe they lack “leader type” personalities. Leaders are not necessarily extroverts or people who get along easily with everyone else. Sometimes they speak up against injustice; at other times, they own up to their mistakes. Most of the time, they take responsibility even if it is hard.
This is also a useful perspective for all those people who lead student organizations and groups and manage projects for them. Being in charge doesn’t mean one can afford arrogance. A leader needs to know how to listen and learn, and leadership entails responsibility rather than power.
Memory Allows For Self-Understanding By Humans
There is a reason why the Torah speaks of memories time and again: remembering journeys, vows, commandments, failures, oppression, and liberation. This is not a form of nostalgia. Memories create identity. Memories tell people about their origin and things they cannot forget.
Students can take a lesson from it. In a world where everything keeps changing, memories may appear too slow or impractical. However, memories are useful to a student because they help one understand one’s place within a larger scheme of things. One learns about oneself through family history, national narrative, religious traditions, personal experience of migration, community experience, and culture.
It does not imply that students should blindly follow anything and everything handed down by others. Students should know where they stand and where they come from. Otherwise, they cannot make proper decisions in the present.
Features
Cricket in Israel: where it came from, why it’s barely visible, and who plays it today
Cricket made its way to Israeli soil back in the British Mandate period, and later got a boost from waves of immigration from India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. Despite such a long history, it barely registers in the mainstream: it never found a place on TV, and the rules remain a mystery even to many sports journalists. Today, cricket grounds are used mostly by immigrants and a handful of local enthusiasts, for whom the game has become something far more than just a pastime.
The British trace and the first matches on Israeli soil
The history of cricket in the region goes back to the days when the British flag flew over Palestine. Officers and officials of the Mandate administration brought with them not only bureaucratic traditions, but also the habit of gathering on trimmed lawns with a bat and a red ball. For the local population, used to passionate football and fast-paced basketball, it looked utterly foreign: hours-long matches, strict white outfits, tea breaks.
The “exotic” sport was slow to take root. When the Mandate ended and the new state shifted to completely different priorities, cricket quietly slipped to the margins of the sports scene, surviving only in the memory of a few.
Waves of immigration that brought cricket back all over again
The game was given a second life by immigrants from countries where cricket was an everyday thing. People from India, South Africa, and England, as they settled in Israel, looked for familiar ways to spend their free time and quickly found one another. For them, a weekend match meant not so much sport as a way to unwind and speak their native language.
However, even within these communities, cricket never became a mass pastime. It remained an activity for a narrow circle, like home cooking—made for special occasions, not put on a restaurant menu.
Why cricket didn’t break into the Israeli mainstream
There are several reasons the game remains invisible, and each one on its own would already be enough:
- Competition with football, basketball, and extreme sports, which take viewers’ attention and sponsorship budgets.
- The near-total absence of cricket on TV and in major sports media.
- The complexity of the rules for newcomers: many Israelis still don’t see the difference between cricket and baseball.
- A cultural unfamiliarity with spending half a day on the field for a single match, watching tactical nuances from a blanket on the grass.
Taken together, this creates a situation where even the rare bits of cricket news slip past in people’s feeds unnoticed.
Who takes the field today
The core of the community is made up of students and IT specialists from India, engineers who arrived on work visas, and immigrants from South Africa and the United Kingdom. They’re joined by a small group of locals who discovered cricket while studying or traveling abroad.
For many of them, the ground turns into a space for cultural memory: Hindi and English can be heard, whole families come along, and children run around the field while their parents discuss the finer points of the last delivery. There are no roaring fan sections here, but everyone knows everyone, and the sense of belonging turns out to be stronger than in the stands at any stadium.
Where and how matches happen without a major league
A typical place to play: a park on the edge of town, a rented pitch, hand-marked lines. Organizers combine the roles of coaches, umpires, and commentators. Matches are put together on weekends, and the whole thing feels more like a club scene than a professional structure.
Everyday hassles have become part of the folklore: soccer players take over the field, the ball disappears into the bushes, someone among the key players can’t get away from work. Every attempt to organize a full match feels like tilting at windmills.
Cricket’s prospects: the barriers are stronger than the hype
You can count specialized fields across the country on one hand, government funding is minimal, and media attention goes to sports that are more spectacular and easier to understand.
Even so, things have started to move. Israel’s national team periodically plays in international tournaments, and every win becomes a small celebration for the community. Youth sections have begun to appear within communities—more like after-school clubs for now—and enthusiasts are experimenting with shorter formats to lower the barrier to entry for newcomers.
Does growth in betting activity point to cricket’s popularity?
An indirect indicator of interest in cricket in any country has long been activity in the online betting segment. Industry iGaming portals regularly publish regional statistics, and we reviewed data from several major bookmakers: 1xBet, PinUp, Melbet. On the website, in a review of the 1xBet cricket betting app, we learned that the number of downloads from Israel is still small, but a slight uptick is still being recorded. This matches the overall picture: the cricket community in the country is growing slowly but steadily, and the betting-platform figures only confirm a trend that enthusiasts can see on the ground, in person.
Cricket in Israel is unlikely to turn into a mass sport in the foreseeable future, but it continues to live on thanks to a resilient community of immigrants and local fans who keep the game going despite the circumstances and make it visible at least within its own small, if modest, world.