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Among Ukraine’s Jews, a year of war has transformed the ordinary into the sacred
TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine (JTA) — Nearly 600 Jews stand shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes trained on the young man leading the service to close out Shabbat. The crowd sings a soulful havdalah tune that lifts up its final words: “hamavdil ben kodesh l’chol” — ”the One who divides between sacred and ordinary.”
It looks like a Shabbat gathering anywhere else in the world, but I’m in the western Ukrainian city of Truskavets, where — from every part of their conflict-scarred country — these Jewish community volunteers have come together for a four-day retreat, energized by the chance to learn from each other and take a deep breath.
I’m back in Ukraine for the first time since the crisis began to learn from these men and women making miracles happen. I came to document and share stories from this gathering. Remarkably, it’s the largest-ever in the former Soviet Union arranged by my organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, which has worked to aid needy Jews and build Jewish life in the region for decades.
With its wine and sweet-smelling spices, havdalah eases the transition from the holy purity of Shabbat to the workaday mundanity of the week. Surrounded by hundreds of Ukrainian Jews, I felt uplifted, as I always do when I travel to this region and see its defiant, vibrant Jewish life.
The usual rules don’t apply. Here, the ordinary becomes sacred.
On this, my 14th trip to the former Soviet Union in 10 years, I’ve come to know it as a place where that switch is truly flipped. Rebuking a painful history, from the Holocaust to Soviet oppression, everyday actions become lifesaving and essential. That’s never been more true than this past year, as Jewish communities here worked overtime to meet the enormous humanitarian needs of this crisis.
Simple flashlights become beacons enabling home care workers to reach the bedridden elderly Jews they serve. Bus trips between cities are transformed into escape hatches for those fleeing rocket attacks. A box of nonperishables is manna from heaven for those faced with empty grocery shelves, and each call from a volunteer is a life raft for the loneliest seniors and most vulnerable at-risk families.
Over the last year, more than 3,000 volunteers engaged in projects affecting 36,000 people. This work is part of our expansive response to this crisis — supported by the Jewish Federations of North America, the Claims Conference, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, individuals, families, corporations and foundations. It includes providing uninterrupted assistance to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and the delivery of 800 tons of humanitarian aid. Among those we help are the elderly and families, internally displaced people, and the new poor who have lost their livelihoods in the devastation.
A song leader leads participants in havdalah at JDC’s volunteer Shabbaton in Truskavets, Ukraine, February 2023. (Arik Shraga)
Not blind to the challenges they face, Jews and Jewish communities here are resilient and resolute in the knowledge that there’s something more important at play. It’s a clarity of purpose that means, against all odds, they’ve grown even stronger.
“My fears were boiling me alive,” said Tatiana Chumachenko, a 34-year-old Odessa mother of two. She started volunteering this summer and now runs weekly cooking classes and art therapy sessions for elderly Jews. “So I made the decision to widen my world — to take on more responsibility, to take care of more people. And volunteering literally saved me.”
Thousands of Ukraine’s Jews just like Tatiana have chosen determination, not despair. They’ve driven through besieged cities delivering medicine and firewood, power generators and portable heaters. They know their Jewish values demand action and compassion, and so they’ve stepped up.
Daria Yefimenko, the head of our network of 25 volunteer centers across Ukraine, is that resolute determination personified. The air raid siren went off the other day as I was interviewing her — a shocking noise, made more frightening by its maddening vagueness: What’s happening? Where? Am I in danger, or is this just background noise?
I learned later that just a few hours before I arrived in Ukraine, a missile had struck Drohobych, only 10 kilometers from the Shabbaton.
Yefimenko seemed unshaken. She and her team — her “family of superhero volunteers” — live here, of course. They must cope with brutal shelling and unpredictable electricity cuts. They have daily fears for their loved ones, and rising anxiety about what the future holds. They help their neighbors even as they share their pain and struggles.
And they keep on going.
Alex Weisler joins the massive group havdalah at JDC’s volunteer Shabbaton in Truskavets, Ukraine, Feb. 18, 2023. (Arik Shraga)
There are so many stories in this part of the world — World War II stories, Soviet stories, stories of rebuilding and reimagining Jewish life after the Soviet Union fell. I’m curious about the one we’ll tell when this is all over.
Will we remember how Jews supported each other in the darkest days? We should.
Before the massive Shabbaton havdalah, I led a smaller version at the hotel down the road where we have housed hundreds of internally displaced people since the earliest days of the Ukraine crisis.
Six elderly Jews from the Zaporizhzhia region joined me for their first havdalah ever. Among the group was 76-year-old Alla Hodak, who fled from a place with significant devastation.
Alex Weisler leads a group of internally displaced Ukrainian Jewish community members in their first-ever havdalah ceremony, Feb. 18, 2023. (Arik Shraga)
Here, observing Jewish rituals in a third-floor alcove, she had begun to form a makeshift community—not quite home, but not alone either. “You made sure we were never abandoned to fate,” she told me.
In that moment of stark intimacy, our small group blessed the wine, smelled the cinnamon, and felt the warmth of the braided candle. It bound us together and reminded us that drawing a distinction between then and now can be holy, too.
As we take stock of a year of grief and grit, we must guarantee that the next one is a kinder one. We must recognize our own hands as sacred tools and each member of our global Jewish family as holier still.
There’s nothing ordinary about that. Each person and each day has become an opportunity to do good for those who need us most and build their future together. That’s the only way forward.
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Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance
From the beginning, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil denied claims that the protests at Columbia University after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel were antisemitic.
In his book, No Land to Stand On, released Tuesday, he stands by that.
Khalil, who became the face of the anti-Israel campus movement after he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2025, reiterates his anti-Zionist stance in the book while detailing “a life of exile, refuge, and resistance.”
Recounting the endless interviews with journalists that made him the face of a campus movement, he writes that the question of whether the protests were antisemitic kept coming up.
“I explained, repeatedly, that the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a strategy to stifle righteous criticism of Israel,” writes Khalil, who added that many Jewish students were involved in the protests. “Such weaponization of antisemitism was designed to place a state and its crimes beyond criticism by wrapping them in the protections owed to a faith and its people.”
The memoir weaves Khalil’s beliefs and frustrations through stories from his life, from where he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and fled to Lebanon at age 18, to the protests at Columbia, his detention and finally his release. He uses the book as an opportunity to say his detention was unjust, and to critique the government’s case against him.
He notes a memo from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that states his detention was a result of “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States,” adding those activities were “otherwise lawful.”
“Otherwise lawful,” writes Khalil. “They had written it themselves. My beliefs were lawful, and they wanted to deport me for them.”
Khalil argued that the administration was disingenuous in deporting him for alleged antisemitism, pointing to Trump’s personal visit with the openly antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. He also accused the administration of platforming “white supremacist rhetoric and symbolism.”
Further, Khalil claimed pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Despite his status as a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, the federal government apprehended him on March 8, 2025. Khalil spent 104 days in ICE detention, famously missing the birth of his first child.
His imprisonment sparked a fierce debate over free speech, along with a debate over what his beliefs were to begin with. Khalil clarified his stances in an April interview with the Forward saying he acknowledged “a Jewish connection” to Israel, but that “rejecting the self-determination of the Jewish people on the Palestinian land in itself is not antisemitism.”
He reiterates in the book that he does not “endorse” Hamas, though he told the Forward he was unsure if Hamas targeted civilians on Oct. 7, something that has been widely documented and substantiated.
While he expressed disdain for the way the university handled the protests and its messaging after Oct. 7, Khalil said the university was failing its Palestinian students long before 2023. He pointed to the school’s Tel Aviv Global Center, which opened this past summer despite protest.
“Columbia wanted to open an institutional outpost, funded in part by our tuition, in a place that had a policy of refusing entry to people like me, and call it a center for global learning,” he wrote.
He also took aim at Columbia’s dual degree program with Tel Aviv University.
“The dual-degree stream was largely built around Jewish Israeli students who had served in the Israeli army,” writes Khalil. “I couldn’t stop thinking that if I were in Palestine, some of these students would be stopping me at checkpoints, raiding my university, piloting the drones surveilling my community, killing my neighbors.”
Returning home to New York from the ICE detention center in Louisiana, he wrote that he was met with praise — and harassment.
When people approached him asking if he was the Khalil they’d seen in the news, he was unsure: “Whether they wanted to shake my hand or spit in my face, say ‘Thank you for what you’re doing’ or follow me through Midtown yelling ‘Am Yisrael Chai.’”
He saw all of those reactions and more, he wrote.
The 208-page book is dedicated to Khalil’s wife, to the Columbia students who participated in the protests, to ICE detainees and “Palestine, until you are free.” He will launch a book tour on Tuesday at a shop just two blocks from Columbia’s campus.
The post Mahmoud Khalil’s book reiterates his anti-Zionist stance appeared first on The Forward.
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Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion?
Jewish internet spaces are alight this week with reports that actress, model and political lightning rod Sydney Sweeney was spotted in the pews on Rosh Hashanah.
According to GreenwichTime and The Free Press, Sweeney — who is not Jewish — attended services at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Connecticut, with her boyfriend, music mogul Scooter Braun (who grew up there). Gossip rag DeuxMoi has since claimed that Sweeney, who has been linked with Braun since at least June 2025, is also contemplating conversion.
One can speculate on whether the most in-demand actress on the planet might be leaning a bit too hard into her Marilyn Monroe character arc. At the Forward, though, we’re wondering whether Sweeney’s Jewish beau picked the right holiday to bring her to shul.
After all, there’s a wide range of experiences when it comes to prayer services, and you want to make a positive first impression. You’d want their day in shul to be accessible, fun and not too long. That’s a Sydney Sweeney movie, though, not Rosh Hashanah services. So without further ado, here’s the official undisputed rankings of Jewish calendar days on which to bring your non-Jewish partner to shul.
Going from least to most desirable:
Erev Tisha B’av
I would have to respect the audacity of someone bringing their partner to synagogue for the first time on Tisha B’av, the day Jewish people grieve the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. It’s an intentionally unpleasant time to be in shul — you’re sitting on the floor, reading Lamentations. Also, you’re not supposed to greet people at all, which would almost certainly be awkward for a first-timer, considering how uncomfortable it is for regulars. On the flip side, if you’re Sydney Sweeney, that rule means no one can bother you for a selfie, either.
Shemini Atzeret
We pray for rain, which is an ancient word that means sustenance, but at this point everyone’s running on fumes for the High Holiday season, so you probably won’t get your senior rabbi delivering the sermon. Some years (including this one), your synagogue might be reading Ecclesiastes, which is both melancholy and long. Hard sell.
Passover
Passover isn’t known for its prayer services — the main event is, of course, the seder. If you’re taking a non-Jewish partner to services for the first time on Passover, it usually means one of two things: 1) You don’t want anyone to meet this person, because nobody goes to shul on Passover or 2) You didn’t have enough fun at the seder, because if you did, you’d be sleeping in with the rest of us.
One Passover plus: On the Shabbat that falls during the holiday, services also include the reading of the Song of Songs, the most risqué text in the Jewish canon.
Shavuot
In the height of summer, we read the story of Ruth — Judaism’s great conversion story. (Hint hint.) We also celebrate the receiving of the Ten Commandments, which your partner may already be familiar with from the movies, if not public school.
Shavuot morning is also a good service to go to because — at least in synagogues that observe two days of the holiday — the first day’s early services are led at a breakneck pace so that people who stayed up all night studying Torah the night before can go straight to sleep. No sermon! You’ll be out of there faster than you can say Na’aseh V’nishmah.
Simchat Torah
Like Sukkot, but swap out the lulav and etrog for Torah scrolls, which don’t smell as good or shake as well. Many synagogues (over-)serve alcohol on this holiday, which is a double-edged sword for a day you’d prefer everyone to be on their best behavior.
Yom Kippur
I’m gonna call this one underrated. There are surprisingly some things going for the Jewish day of repentance. The themes of atonement and forgiveness have universal appeal, and Jewish people do them well. You’ll probably get one of the rabbi’s strongest sermons of the calendar cycle. There’s a strange ecstasy that comes from being trapped in a room with hundreds of fasting people; the story of Jonah and the whale is one of our highlights. (This is also the only holiday I can attest to: My parents had their first date — ever! — on Yom Kippur services, and they’re still together.)
At the same time, Yom Kippur tends to have the longest prayer services of the year. It’s a fast day, so there’s no free food at the end of afternoon services (though you might get bagels at the break-fast). You usually have to pay to get in, plus there’s often a fundraising appeal woven into the service. And due to the prohibition on wearing leather shoes, you’d also be surrounding your partner with people wearing Crocs with dress clothes, which may scare them away from Judaism even if you try to explain it.
Sukkot
People like to call this our most pagan holiday, but marching around in circles with a giant asparagus and lemon is objectively fun, and the Four Species can represent basically anything you want. Let’s just hope your partner isn’t a willow.
Rosh Hashanah
Scooter Braun isn’t the first person to drag their partner to shul on Rosh Hashanah, and for good reason. Everyone wears their finest clothing, the shul will be beautifully decorated and the prayers are musically extravagant. The rabbi’s sermon will emphasize renewal and the commitment to doing better. There’s a decent chance apples dipped in honey will be served in the lobby. And above all else, the shofar blowing — done right — is arguably the highlight of the year in shul.
Plus, everyone’s there, so you can introduce your partner to everyone they need to know in one fell swoop. The only downside is you usually have to buy a ticket. (And on behalf of synagogue offices everywhere, if you’re the Jewish partner in the relationship, don’t try to arrange this over email 24 hours before the holiday.)
Purim
This is one thing Nobody Wants This got right: Purim is the ideal holiday for introducing a non-Jewish partner to the community. What better way to show up than in costume? You learn a foundational story of Jewish survival, a tradition that transforms our vulnerability into comedy. It’s also a family-oriented holiday — kids in face-paint, everyone with their graggers — which makes it a perfect picture-this set piece.
But the best thing about Purim? Thanks to the tradition of drinking ‘til you drop — if the relationship doesn’t work out, no one will remember a year later.
The post Sydney Sweeney went to shul. But did she choose the right occasion? appeared first on The Forward.
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How Toronto Jews spread the Gospel of ‘Godspell’
To wander into a screening of You Had to Be There, Nick Davis’ documentary about the famed 1972 Toronto production of Godspell, is to have a Jewish come-to-Jesus moment.
The first thing you hear, after the voice of a 22-year-old Martin Short, testing a microphone in a furtive recording taken at the Royal Alexander Theatre, is a shofar sounding a tinny tekiah. It’s maybe not what you’d expect from a musical built around the Gospel of Matthew. But the film, which features interviews with original 1972 cast members Eugene Levy and Victor Garber, composer Stephen Schwartz and the production’s musical director Paul Shaffer, makes a strong case for Jewishness being the secret sauce that made the show take off.
Davis, who grew up in a secular Jewish home, began this project as a Godspell skeptic, trying to understand how so many subversive comedic talents broke out in a “hippie-dippy musical about Jesus.”
“I could imagine SCTV ripping Godspell apart with the Godspell that I knew,” Davis said in a video call from Chicago, where he was in town for a screening at the Music Box Theater. “Almost from the very beginning, they were like, ‘You don’t understand what Godspell was.’”
The show was picketed by Christians who took exception to the apostles, and Jesus himself, depicted as clowns clad in overalls. The key to the success of the Toronto Godspell, one of a number of regional productions that sprang up in the 1970s, was its invitation to performers to improvise within a sacred text.
“My feeling now is they were attracted to this material because this material encouraged them to be their biggest, best, most brilliant comic selves,” said Davis.
In the case of Hamilton, Ontario-native Eugene Levy or Gilda Radner, who came over from Detroit to audition, this meant introducing a Jewish sensibility to a work that was rooted in the writings of a First Century Jew. Whether they knew it or not, the cast was soon following a Jewish schedule of worship.
Perhaps more legendary than the show, composed by an early career Schwartz, later to write Wicked, with a book by his Carnegie Mellon classmate John-Michael Tebelak, were the after-parties, dubbed “Friday Night Services” and held at the shared home of Short and Levy.
It was here, with some chemical assistance — that the cast and their friends, among them John Candy, developed bits and worked on characters. (Thankfully, they had the presence of mind to record these confabs, which can be heard in the film and are animated in a style a la The Brady Kids.)
It wasn’t quite Bible study, but in his interviews, Eugene Levy briefly reflects on the significance of his turn as Jesus, following Victor Garber and Don Scardino, who later became a prolific comedy director for shows like 30 Rock and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
“I think I was the first Jewish-looking Jesus that any of the productions had,” Levy says in the documentary. “They went more Ronald McDonald with that look but I definitely was sporting my ethnicity and a little hair.”
Levy refused to manscape for the role of Jesus, who traditionally makes his entrance in just his boxers, and so he had to wear an undershirt. At one point the actor considers if, in the moment after Jesus is “crucified” on a chainlink fence, and lifted by the company in a sort of resurrection, he was doing something sacrilegious.
In the end, he concludes, it just felt like good theater.
The call of Godspell remains strong, Davis said. Not every member of the company — some of whom are related by marriage — still sees each other in person, but they’re all on an email chain. Davis embarked on the film thinking it would be a study on “the fickleness of fame,” with the cast of 10 about evenly divided between household names and ones who didn’t quite hit, but from the first interview he found people asking when he’d arrange a reunion.
The moment finally arrived in 2025, which, due to the exigencies of scheduling, happened to be the first night of Passover. There was a cake, but you can see Paul Shaffer electing to snack on matzo. (When cast member Valda Aviks asks him if he shouldn’t be at a Seder, he simply says “eh.”)
“I did bring a Seder plate that we had, a little fun thing for them to play with if they wanted,” said Davis. “All they wanted to do was sing by the piano.”
Davis considers Godspell, the Jesus musical written by a “nice Jewish boy from Long Island,” an example of the way Jews succeed through assimilation and entertainment. While he came in thinking the show was cornball, he now understands how it paved the way for the barrier-breaking comedy its alumni would produce
“There’s something Jewish fundamentally at the core of it,” Davis said. Like the Jewish teacher at its center, it is “radical.”
The post How Toronto Jews spread the Gospel of ‘Godspell’ appeared first on The Forward.
