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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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Musician-ethnographer Michael Alpert to receive Dreaming in Yiddish Award
Michael Alpert, an influential klezmer musician and ethnographer who has played a key role in the global renaissance of Yiddish music and culture, has been selected as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award.
The ceremony will take place at the Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert during the Yiddish New York festival — the largest annual Yiddish culture festival in the world — in December.
Now in its eleventh year, the hybrid festival brings together a global community for in-person events at Hebrew Union College in downtown New York, as well as online programming via Zoom. The festival includes concerts, workshops, lectures, films, Yiddish classes, dance parties and intergenerational community events.
Adrienne Cooper was a popular Yiddish singer, musician and activist who was integral to the revival of klezmer music. The Dreaming in Yiddish Award supports artists who have contributed to the contemporary Yiddish cultural scene.
Michael Alpert, also known by his Yiddish name Meyshke, received an NEA National Heritage Fellowship — the nation’s highest honor in the traditional and heritage arts — in 2015. He has been a pioneering singer, multi-instrumentalist, ethnographer and educator for over five decades. His award-winning work with ensembles including Brave Old World, Kapelye, Khevrisa and Itzhak Perlman’s In the Fiddler’s House has shaped generations of performers and listeners alike.
A native Yiddish speaker and cultural bridge between East European-born tradition bearers and contemporary artists, Alpert is celebrated both for preserving the roots of Yiddish folk and klezmer music and for composing a new body of Yiddish songs that speak to today’s world.
The Dreaming in Yiddish Award Concert — an evening of music, memories, and celebration — is sponsored by Yiddish New York and GOH Productions. It will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2025 at 7 p.m. ET at Hebrew Union College and will be livestreamed as well.
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A new documentary humanizes Israeli soldiers. It also alleges war crimes.
“It feels like a betrayal to be interviewed by foreign media,” an IDF combat veteran says. He’s out of uniform, brow furrowed, plucking nervously at his goatee. His name is Yuval Ben-Ari, and he is here — on camera, using his real name — telling us what he saw in Gaza.
Ben-Ari, who served in an infantry unit, is one of nearly a dozen soldiers who appear in Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, a new documentary from indie production company Zandland which streamed in the U.K. and can be viewed on YouTube. Four of the speakers appear on camera, identified by their real names; the rest are disguised and use aliases. Taken together, their testimonies are a scathing indictment of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the “world’s most moral army.”
If their stories are true — and nearly everything the soldiers say has already been corroborated by other media reports — they are describing war crimes as the rule in Gaza, not the exception. Unarmed civilians are shot or bombed as a matter of course. Homes are torched without cause. Humanitarian aid sites are shelled out of sheer resentment. The people telling us this — young men and women who served hundreds of days in the territory over the past two years — are still reckoning with their role in the destruction.
Breaking Ranks is not the first documentary to be made about the war in Gaza, and it will not be the last. But it may be the only one to focus on the targeting of innocent Palestinians while also humanizing Israeli soldiers. The soldiers outline their belief in the IDF and the importance of the mission in Gaza. The film contextualizes the war, showing footage of the atrocities of Oct. 7 and noting that Hamas leaders, too, have been charged with war crimes in international courts. Palestinian casualty figures are provided, the film notes, by the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; the tunnel network, it explains, is used for smuggling and warfare. It does not avoid discussing the 251 Israeli hostages.
Those elements ultimately strengthen the film’s argument about how the war was conducted. They do not, however, soften the accounts that follow. The picture that emerges is one of lawlessness and cruelty, coupled with a tolerance for collateral damage and a lack of accountability that runs counter to the IDF’s “Purity of Arms” statute. Yet that portrait also shows the rank-and-file — not all, but some — resisting the practices of their superiors.
A tank commander (“Daniel,” an alias) recounts a time his commander informed troops he planned to destroy a humanitarian aid building. The unit warned him the building was off-limits, but the commander shelled it anyway. Then — according to the soldier — the commander made up an excuse to justify the attack: “I had an anti-tank weapon pointed at me.”
A member of a different unit tells a similar story: When a man hanging laundry on the roof of a building is deemed a “spotter,” a commander shells the structure, killing and injuring many people inside. “This kind of thing happened every week,” says the soldier telling us this story. “And that’s just my unit.”
A platoon sergeant, using the alias “Yaakov,” tells how a pair of Palestinian teenage boys came to be his unit’s human shields, sent down into Gaza’s tunnels as scouts. The unit’s objections eventually won out — they cited international law — but Yaakov insists the IDF has a policy sanctioning the practice called “Mosquito Protocol.” (The Associated Press published an investigative report on the practice earlier this year; the IDF denies that it uses human shields.)
“I carried out these things,” says Yaakov. “I hope I can find a way to live without feeling shame with every step I take.”
One soldier says his unit once reported killing 112 people over the course of a deployment. Only one of the 112, he said, was even suspected of holding a weapon.
Not all of the soldiers recalling their enlistment in Breaking Ranks regret their participation. We meet Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who claims to have invented the tactic of razing entire Gaza neighborhoods, block by block, with a bulldozer. Another, given the alias “Lt. Col. F.,” says he would have happily pushed every Palestinian in Gaza into the ocean, given them snorkels and “let them swim to Egypt.”
Their hawkishness puts the defiance and disillusionment of soldiers like Yaakov in stark relief. And it raises questions as to why the IDF — which says it has launched dozens of Military Police investigations into alleged misconduct by soldiers — has not found more wrongdoing.
Ben-Ari, who admits that after Oct. 7 he was “consumed by rage and a desire to fight and avenge,” has since become a peace activist; he was injured last week in the West Bank, attacked by Israeli settlers, while accompanying Palestinians during the annual olive harvest.
He vows to never return to Gaza. But Ben-Ari will not quit the IDF entirely, either. Toward the end of the film, he says he would answer a call to protect Israel’s other borders because that is what he is trained to do, and because he still believes it’s necessary.
“This separation works for me,” he says. “I totally understand if people would say I’m a hypocrite, but this is my decision.”
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AI has a reputation for amplifying hate. A new study finds it can weaken antisemitism, too.
(JTA) — Every day, it can seem, brings a fresh headline about how AI chatbots are spreading hateful ideas. But researchers tasked with understanding antisemitism and how it can be stopped say they have found evidence that AI chatbots can actually fight hate.
Researchers affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Antisemitism Research trained a large-language model, or LLM, on countering antisemitic conspiracy theories, then invited people who subscribed to at least one of those theories to interact with it.
The result, according to a study released on Wednesday: The users soon believed in the antisemitic theories less, while at the same time feeling more favorable about Jews as a group. And the effects were still strong a month later, even without further engagement with the LLM.
The researchers are hailing the finding as a breakthrough in the quest for identifying actionable strategies in the fight against Jew-hatred.
“What’s remarkable about these findings is that factual debunking works even for conspiracy theories with deep historical roots and strong connections to identity and prejudice,” David Rand, a Cornell University professor who was the study’s senior author, said in a statement.
“Our artificial intelligence debunker bot typically doesn’t rely on emotional appeals, empathy-building exercises, or anti-bias tactics to correct false beliefs,” Rand continued, referring to practices frequently employed by advocates seeking to fight antisemitism, including at the ADL. “It mostly provides accurate information and evidence-based counterarguments, demonstrating that facts still matter in changing minds.”
Matt Williams, who has headed the Center for Antisemitism Research since its founding three years ago, says the study builds on a growing body of research that views contemporary antisemitism as primarily a misinformation problem, rather than a civil rights problem.
“We need to think about antisemitism less like feelings about Jews, and more like feelings about Bigfoot,” he said in an interview. “And what I mean by that is, it’s not ‘Jews’ that are the problem. It is ‘the Jew’ as a function of conspiracy theory that is the problem. And the relationship between ‘Jews’ and ‘the Jew’ in that context is far more tenuous than we might want to think.”
Calling conspiracy theories “malfunctions in the ways that we make truth out of the world,” Williams said the study showed something remarkable. “People can correct those malfunctions,” he said. “They really can, which is super exciting and really impactful.”
The study emerges from the ADL’s relatively new effort to come-up with evidence-based ways to reduce antisemitism, working with dozens of researchers across a slew of institutions to design and carry out experiments aimed at turning a robust advocacy space into less of a guessing game.
The new experiment, conducted earlier this year, involved more than 1,200 people who said on a previous ADL survey that they believed at least one of six prominent antisemitic conspiracy theories, such as that Jews control the media or the “Great Replacement” theory about Jewish involvement in immigration.
The people then were randomly assigned three different scenarios: A third chatted with an LLM programmed by the researchers to debunk such theories, built within Microsoft’s Claude AI model; another third chatted with Claude about an unrelated topic; and the final third were simply told that their belief represented a “dangerous” conspiracy theory. Then they were all tested again about their beliefs.
Members of the group that chatted with what the researchers are calling DebunkBot were far more likely than members of the other groups to have their beliefs weakened, the researchers found.
DebunkBot was hardly a panacea for antisemitism: The study found that those who believed in more antisemitic conspiracy theories experienced less change. And Williams notes that the study found only that belief in antisemitic conspiracies was reduced, not rooted out entirely.
But he said any strategy that can cut against what researchers believe has been a widespread explosion of belief in conspiracy theories is a good thing.
The proportion of Americans subscribing to conspiracy theories over the last decade has reached as much as 45%, more than twice the rate that had held steady for 70 to 80 years, Williams said.
“To me, the increase in that level of saturation is far more concerning than any particular conspiracy theory moving through different generations,” he said. “I don’t think that we’re going to ever create a world in which we go under 15% — but going from 45 back to 30 or 25 seems more doable.”
The new study comes as AI models vault into widespread use among Americans, raising concerns about their implications for Jews. When Elon Musk launched a model of his own earlier this year called Grok, it immediately drew criticism for amplifying antisemitism — kicking off a pattern that has played out repeatedly. Soon, the company apologized and said it would train its model to avoid the same behavior in the future. Criticism of Grok is still widespread, but it no longer praises Hitler — though even this week it reportedly told one user that the Nazi gas chambers were not designed for mass killing, prompting an investigation by French authorities.
Chatbot training is seen as essential for delivering high-quality AI results. DebunkBot can be found online on its own website now, but Williams said efforts were underway within the ADL to convince the companies operating major AI platforms to incorporate its expertise.
“There’s far more receptivity than not, by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, while noting that the work was early and he could not share many details.
Whatever happens with that effort, Williams said, the new research demonstrates that combatting what’s sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred is possible.
“AI and LLMs — those are tools, right? And we can use tools for good and for evil,” Williams said. “But the fact that we can subject conspiracy theories to rational conversation and arguments and actually lead to favorable outcomes is itself, I think, relatively innovative, surprising and extraordinarily useful.”
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