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Embodying a story of trauma and liberation, Ukrainian Jews celebrate Passover amid a new normal
KYIV, Ukraine (JTA) — Yuliia Krainiakova fled her home in Kharkiv, Ukraine, after Russian troops invaded last year and made her way to Berlin, where she and her daughters settled for 10 months with the help of Jewish organizations.
After returning to Kharkiv several months ago, she hoped to experience some of the Jewish gatherings that had been a beacon during a time of turmoil — but her city, Ukraine’s second-largest, has continued to be shelled regularly, making safety a more pressing priority than Jewish communal life.
“Due to the war, it is difficult to find in Kharkiv,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Tuesday. “So we decided to come to Kyiv for Passover seder, so we could have a Jewish experience here.”
Krainiakova, her husband and her two daughters were among dozens of Jews from Kharkiv who made the roughly six-hour train journey to Ukraine’s capital on Tuesday for a seder organized by Midreshet Schechter, which in partnership with Masorti Olami operates all the Conservative communities in Ukraine.
On Wednesday, they sat down at a large U-shaped table, festooned with all the trappings of the traditional seder, for a festive meal whose main concession to the war was that few attendees were in their home city.
Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya directs Midreshet Schechter and has traveled to Ukraine multiple times over the last year from her home in Israel to support holiday celebrations there, while also teaching classes throughout the year online to students at Shaalvim Jewish Day School in Kharkiv. She said the Passover story, or maggid, was especially resonant for Ukrainian Jews who have endured more than a year of war.
“The maggid is going to be centered on going to trauma, because Pesach is actually a story of going through trauma, through the trauma of losing our Temple, our Beit Hamikdash,” Gritsevskaya said. “Now we are dealing with a different trauma, so the question is, how can we learn from the story that happened many, many years ago and connect it to today so we learn the lessons of hope and rehabilitation.”
Last year, Passover took place less than two months into the war, meaning that families were dispersed, supplies were hard to come by and any planning could easily be thrown into disarray as conditions changed. Still, between Chabad and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, the country was home to multiple public seders, some held in hotels or earlier in the day to accommodate emergency curfews.
Yuliia Krainiakova, left, and Alla Gusak sit together at a Passover seder in Kyiv, Ukraine, April 5, 2023. (Marcel Gascon Barbera)
This year, life in Ukraine has settled into a new normal in which Ukrainians can reasonably plan for the future, despite continuous blackouts and ongoing shelling in some cities. Passover observances will take a more typical form, with Chabad, the main organizer of Jewish life in many Ukrainian cities, holding 90 community seders and distributing Passover supplies to 30,000 people.
Adding to the new normal is the fact that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who left in the frightening early days have returned home.
That includes some of the families at Kharkiv’s Shaalvim school, which remains online because of the ongoing threat of shelling. Their trip to the Conservative synagogue in Kyiv offers a rare opportunity to be together.
“The idea to meet and spend time with each other is very exciting for them after all this time staying at home,” their teacher Svetlana Maslova said shortly after the group arrived on Tuesday.
Besides forcing the kids to receive their education remotely and secluded at home, the 120 children enrolled in the Shaalvim school have been experiencing recurrent blackouts for months, caused by shelling or by Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. “At some point we had two full days without power,” Maslova said.
Shaalvim has provided a source of stability during a year of upheaval, parents said. Alla Gusak, who traveled to Kyiv with her 11-year-old daughter, lived before the war in Chuhuiv, a town about 25 miles southeast of Kharkiv that was a prime target for Russian troops because it houses a Ukrainian air force base. Russia briefly occupied the city early in the war.
“We were bombed and survived and managed to get out by miracle,” said Gusak. She added that their family home was heavily damaged and said another property in the family, in Izium, was rendered unusable along with the local medical clinic and schools while the Russian army occupied that city. “We cannot even go there because there are mines everywhere.”
Gusak and her husband worked in agriculture, but now there are mines strewn across the fields they once sowed. So even with its classes online, the Shaalvim Jewish school is of great help for her daughter to go through the horrors of this war, she said.
“What Jewish school gives us is actually family,” said Natalya Kupin, whose 11-year-old daughter attends the school. “It unites our kids, it gives us tradition and that’s what other people and nations also need, a basic tradition, because that’s what gives us the ability to be together.”
In the room where preparations were underway for the seder Tuesday, a costume Pharoah headdress hung in a corner, ready for a festive meal with lots of flourishes. Gritsevskaya said she had discussed the seder in advance with her students, and they would have an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of liberation in their own lives. She also said that while the preparation for the journey and the seder had been extensive, she didn’t know everything that would happen.
“The kids also prepared a show, a spectacle, about Yetziat Mitzrayim [leaving Egypt], which I have not seen,” Gritsevskaya said. “That’s a surprise for me.”
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Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges
(JTA) — The man charged with firebombing a Boulder, Colorado, march for Israeli hostages in 2025 will plead guilty to killing one person and attempting to kill others in the incident, according to documents filed in the case over the weekend.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was arrested at the scene of the June 1, 2025, attack, is asking for his ex-wife and children to be able to remain in the United States as a condition of his guilty plea, according to the documents.
His ex-wife and five children, like him all Egyptian nationals who came to the United States in 2022 via Kuwait, were arrested by immigration authorities shortly after the attack. They were detained until Thursday, when they were released from a detention center in Texas, then briefly detained again on Saturday in Boulder and, their attorneys say, put onto a plane bound for Egypt before being freed once again. His ex-wife, whom he divorced in April, has not been charged with a crime and said she did not know about Soliman’s planned attack.
Soliman is reportedly pleading guilty to all state charges but still faces federal charges in relation to the attack, which he allegedly said he staged to “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” according to an earlier court filing. He has previously pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, for which prosecutors could seek the death penalty.
Thirteen people were physically injured in the attack, which took place on a pedestrian mall in downtown Boulder where supporters of the Israelis then held hostage in Gaza marched weekly. One, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died weeks later of her injuries.
The post Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges appeared first on The Forward.
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Her body has been unidentified for decades. Her Ashkenazi DNA may explain why
Murder investigators in Arizona are encountering a stubborn obstacle to solving a decades-old cold case involving an unidentified dead body: The woman’s Ashkenazi Jewish DNA.
In 1989, an unclothed dead body was found on the side of a highway in northwest Arizona. The woman was never identified, though small details offered clues about her life: red nail polish on her fingers and toes, faux diamond stud earrings, and a handmade floral blouse found under a nearby tree.
The woman appeared to have been beaten, found with a broken nose and possible hematoma on the left side of her skull, though the medical examiner did not determine a cause of death. An autopsy determined the woman was between 25 and 30 years old.
In 2021, authorities reopened the case and uploaded the woman’s DNA profile to genetic databases available to law enforcement, hoping for a breakthrough. Instead, they hit a wall.
“Investigators learned that the victim was 96% Ashkenazi Jew, which made it extremely difficult to trace her ancestry and locate family members,” the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Ashkenazi Jews who try to track down relatives through genetic testing are familiar with the problem that the sheriff encountered: DNA testing, usually a powerful tool for finding relatives, often does not yield usable results for them.
Adina Newman, a professional genealogist and co-founder of the Holocaust Reunion Project, which uses DNA testing to help connect Holocaust survivors and their relatives to lost family, says two factors explain why genetic testing has limited use for many Jews. One is what’s known as the founder effect, when a population can be traced back to a small number of ancestors — as few as 350 people in Ashkenazi Jews’ case. The other is endogamy, the practice of marrying within a community over many generations.
As a result, a person with 100% Ashkenazi DNA can have more than 200,000 DNA matches in popular genetic databases, according to Newman. From such a large pool, it can be difficult to pinpoint close relatives.
“Ashkenazi Jews are all DNA cousins. But am I going to find it meaningful in a [family] tree?” Newman said. “Mostly no. We’ve just kind of accepted that it convolutes things.”
Investigators, however, aren’t giving up. The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office enlisted the help of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in New Jersey, which last week released an artistic rendering of what the woman may have looked like based on her remains.
“This doesn’t mean that cases of Ashkenazi Jews are impossible to solve,” David Gurney, director of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center, told the Forward. “It just is going to take a lot more effort.”
Jewish Jane Does
The 1989 case in Arizona is not the only time Ashkenazi DNA has posed a challenge in identifying remains. Another active case, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman whose dead body was found in 1981 in Olympia, Washington, remains unsolved.
Other cases have taken years to crack. In 2024, investigators working with the DNA Doe Project finally identified the body of a Jewish woman found murdered in a California vineyard in 2011 as Ada Beth Kaplan. It also took more than a decade to identify Mitchell Mendelson, a Jewish man whose body was found in a wooded area near his home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2012.
In both cases, the deceased’s Ashkenazi DNA made the process more laborious for investigators, though DNA also eventually led investigators to be able to make the identifications.
To be sure, Ashkenazi Jews are not the only population that exhibits endogamy, which is also common among Pennsylvania Dutch communities, Icelanders, French Canadians and other tight-knit societies.
But the combination of Ashkenazi Jews’ genetic overlap and a complex historical record can make Jewish identification especially difficult cases to crack, Newman said.
For instance, in Newman’s own family, records changed from listing Vilna as being located in Russia, then Poland, then Belarus over a short period of time. But her family members hadn’t moved; the borders were changing around them. Last names in her family were also altered to sound more anglicized.
“You have to know these things. And it’s hard because a lot of genetic genealogists, even the best ones, are not familiar with that,” Newman said, “They need people who understand the Jewish genealogy aspect.”
Even when genealogists have such expertise, limited data can slow progress. Lingering trauma from the Holocaust has made some Jews hesitant to upload their DNA to public databases, Newman said.
Others have privacy concerns: In 2024, 23andMe settled a class-action lawsuit for $30 million in which customers accused the company of failing to notify customers with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage that they appeared to have been specifically targeted by hackers, who sold their information on the dark web.
Yet unless they have a search warrant, law enforcement agencies are constrained to cross-referencing DNA profiles with just two databases: GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, which collectively host about 3 million profiles. By contrast, Ancestry.com has more than 29 million DNA profiles, according to its website, and 23andMe has roughly 15 million.
Ancestry.com and 23andMe users who wish to make their profile visible to researchers can upload their information to GEDMatch or FamilyTreeDNA for free.
“We always depend on members of the public taking consumer genetic genealogy tests to solve any case,” Gurney said. “That’s even more important in cases of endogamy here.”
Those challenges compelled Rabbi Mendel Super, who leads Chabad of Lake Havasu City in Mojave County, Arizona — about an hour’s drive away from where the woman’s body was found in 1989 — to spread the word about the case in the Jewish community. After Super learned of the woman’s Jewish ancestry, he contacted the local sheriff’s department to offer his help.
He’s since connected authorities with experts in Jewish genealogy and is publicizing the case on social media, hoping his Jewish network can help identify a relative.
“There’s millions of people who it could be, but there’s only a few million Jews in the world, and fewer in this country,” Super told the Forward. “So I think there’s got to be someone who knows something.”
Newman, too, sees broader participation as key. She encourages Jews to share their DNA profiles, noting that researchers view far less information than many expect — just the amount of shared DNA needed to construct family trees, not a complete genetic profile. People can even upload DNA profiles anonymously, she said, giving researchers the option to contact them only if there’s a notable match.
“These people deserve dignity, to have their names,” Newman said. “It could really be you, especially in the Jewish community. You could be the one that helps solve the case and gives us her name back.”
The post Her body has been unidentified for decades. Her Ashkenazi DNA may explain why appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli Restaurant Owned by Syrian Repeatedly Attacked in Germany
Illustrative: Graffiti reading “Kill All Jews” was discovered on a residential building in Berlin-Pankow on April 26, 2026, part of a wave of antisemitic vandalism reported across the German capital over the past week, including swastikas and other hate-filled slogans scrawled on multiple sites. Photo: Screenshot
An Israeli restaurant in Germany has been repeatedly attacked while its Syrian Kurdish owner has been subjected to relentless harassment, underscoring a broader climate of hostility faced by Jews and Israelis across the country.
Restaurant owner Billal Aloge, a Muslim from Syria, has been subjected to escalating hatred and violence after publicly expressing support for Jewish life in his city by opening restaurants aimed at fostering dialogue and coexistence.
Shortly after opening his Israeli restaurant “Jaffa” in Freiburg, a city in western Germany, Aloge faced immediate hostility and a wave of online abuse.
Even after filing multiple police reports, the harassment did not stop, with unknown individuals continuing to target the restaurant. This included incidents of vandalism such as throwing rotten eggs at the premises, prompting the owner to repeatedly seek police intervention.
Then last Tuesday, the restaurant’s newly deployed food truck was vandalized after being parked for just a single day in Colombipark in the heart of the university town, according to German media.
The food truck was extensively damagd, with paint thrown across its exterior, Israeli symbols defaced with Palestinian flag stickers and antisemitic slogans, and its door kicked so forcefully that it was left visibly dented.
Three days later, Aloge and his wife were preparing to open the food truck for Labor Day, when they discovered a broken side mirror.
“The food truck was brand new. I bought it for the new season and had it lovingly refurbished,” Aloge told the German newspaper Bild.
“Once again, I had to file a police report and now I estimate the total damage from the two attacks at approximately 30,000 euros,” he continued.
Freiburg Mayor Martin Horn strongly condemned the attacks, stressing that the city would not tolerate such acts of hatred and would take them seriously, with full efforts to ensure accountability and protection for those targeted.
“There is no place in Freiburg for antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism, or any other form of hatred and incitement,” the German official said in a statement.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to recently released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the capital city Berlin reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials warn that the real number of antisemitic crimes is likely much higher, as many incidents go unreported.
In one of the latest antisemitic incidents in the country, a synagogue in Cottbus, a city in eastern Germany, was defaced with a swastika painted on its facade, marking the second time in just four days that the Jewish house of worship had been vandalized.
Separately, authorities also discovered antisemitic graffiti across several apartment buildings in Berlin-Pankow, including messages reading “Kill all Jews,” a swastika, and the statement “Only a dead Jew is a good Jew,” in a series of disturbing incidents over the week.