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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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UK Announces Reforms to Accelerate Firings of Antisemitic Doctors
Wes Streeting, the British secretary of state for health and social care, is seen in Westminster as he appears on Sunday politics shows, London, England, United Kingdom, Oct. 26, 2025. Photo: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced a series of reforms to empower its General Medical Council (GMC), a key regulatory body, to act forcibly in removing bigots who endanger patients.
The move followed several high-profile cases both in the UK and around the world involving medical practitioners promoting antisemitic beliefs online and even threatening or boasting about their hate for Jewish people as well as Israelis.
John Mann, who serves in the House of Lords and as the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, was tasked in October with reviewing the severity of antisemitism in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and exploring methods to counter it in October.
“There are just too many examples, clear examples, of antisemitism that have not been dealt with adequately or effectively,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said at the time, directing Mann to “root out this problem and ensure perpetrators are always held to account.”
The results of that investigation led to the new reforms unveiled on Tuesday — changes described by the UK government as “key” and “the most significant overhaul of the regulation of medical professionals since 1983.”
Specifically, UK Secretary Wes Streeting and his Department of Health and Social Care focused on three main changes.
First, the GMC should “retain its existing right to appeal decisions made by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) to the courts, ensuring there remains a robust check on fitness to practice outcomes.” The MPTS adjudicates on complaints made against doctors.
Second, the Professional Standards Authority (PSA), which oversees all health-care regulators, will gain expanded authority to challenge decisions from the MPTS.
Third, regulatory bodies must now share information with the PSA when requested, a move intended to provide greater scrutiny of regulatory decisions and potential times to intervene.
“Racism, including anti-Jewish racism, has no place in the health sector or our NHS, and those who engage in it should face swift and meaningful consequences,” Mann said in a statement. “For too long, the system has been too slow and too cumbersome to deliver that.”
The GMC’s chief executive and registrar, Charlie Massey, called the reforms a “long-awaited step” and explained how the changes would work.
“Patients rightly expect assurance that doctors, PAs, and AAs are safe to practice and can be held to account if serious concerns are raised,” Massey said. “These proposed reforms will allow us to respond more quickly and flexibly when patient safety is at risk. They will also allow us to further improve our efficiency and effectiveness, while at the same time enabling us to help patients navigate the complaints and concerns process more easily.”
Mann said the reforms “will help deliver change” and added he was “pleased” the government moved quickly to act on his recommendations.
The UK health-care system has been riddled with cases of alleged antisemitism over the past several months,
The case of Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan, a trainee trauma and orthopedic surgeon, particularly drew public attention. In November, Aladwan was suspended from practicing medicine in the UK for 15 months over social media posts denigrating Jews and celebrating terrorism.
Aladwan had called online for the ethnic cleaning of Jews and celebrated the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. She also described Israelis as “worse than Nazis” and Hamas operatives as “oppressed resistance fighters, not terrorists.”
The anti-Israel activist also made explicitly antisemitic claims, such as labeling the Royal Free Hospital in London “a Jewish supremacy cesspit” and asserting that “over 90% of the world’s Jews are genocidal.”
On a Feb. 7, 2026, episode of the “Blood Brothers” podcast, Aladwan called on Muslims in the countries around Israel to wage a violent jihad.
British law enforcement had arrested Aladwan on Oct. 21, charging her with four counts related to malicious communications and inciting racial hatred.
Aladwan’s arrest followed the GMC’s clearing her to continue treating patients, finding that her conduct had not done anything to “undermine public confidence in the medical profession” and that her comments did not “amount to bullying or harassment.” The MPTS panel concluded that “a reasonable and fully informed member of the public would not be alarmed or concerned” by her being allowed to continue treating patients.
However, following widespread backlash, the GMC said it had re-referred Aladwan’s case to the MPTS for “an interim orders tribunal,” adding that such referrals are made when an interim order “is necessary to protect the public or public confidence in doctors during an investigation.”
The 15-month suspension came about two weeks after Streeting called it “chilling” that some members of the Jewish community fear discrimination within the NHS, amid reports of widespread antisemitism in Britain’s health-care system.
Other incidents in the UK included a Jewish family fearing their London doctor’s antisemitism influenced their disabled son’s treatment. The North London hospital suspended the physician who was under investigation for publicly claiming that all Jews have “feelings of supremacy” and downplaying antisemitism.
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Arabic Wikipedia Riddled With Terror Propaganda and Bias, New Investigation Shows
Avishek Das / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Arabic-language Wikipedia is riddled with systemic bias and extreme terrorist propaganda, a new investigation shows, raising serious questions about the reliability of one of the world’s most widely used information sources and exposing millions of readers worldwide to potentially harmful content.
On Tuesday, the World Jewish Congress’s Institute for Technology and Human Rights released a report revealing that Arabic-language Wikipedia content repeatedly violates the platform’s core neutrality rules, specifically in articles covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Extremist influence runs deep in major Wikipedia articles, with 25 to over 50 percent of citations drawn from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist propaganda sources, spreading radical narratives and terror-supporting content to millions of readers worldwide.
The World Jewish Congress (WJC)’s latest findings also reveal that the terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are often described as legitimate resistance factions, while attacks on civilians are labeled “martyrdom operations.”
Some articles go further, not only referring to designated terrorists as “martyrs” but also celebrating suicide bombings and attacks on civilians as historical “achievements.”
“This report demonstrates that one of the world’s most trusted knowledge platforms is being systematically manipulated to promote extremist narratives,” Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of WJC’s Institute for Technology and Human Rights, said in a statement.
“When terrorist propaganda and hate-driven narratives are allowed to masquerade as neutral information, the consequences extend far beyond Wikipedia itself. These distortions shape public understanding and views of Jews and Israelis across the Arabic-speaking world,” she continued.
In one of its most recent controversies, Wikipedia came under fire last month after a human rights group allegedly linked to Hamas began training Palestinians to edit pages on Israel and the war in Gaza, raising fears of anti-Israel propaganda and antisemitic content on the platform.
According to WJC, the newly released report shows that manipulated Wikipedia content is creating worldwide risks by influencing public discourse and the AI systems that millions rely on, allowing biased information to extend far beyond the site itself.
The report recommends that technology companies and search engines put safeguards in place when using Wikipedia content for AI training and search systems until meaningful reforms are implemented.
“We call on [the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the Wikipedia website,] to take urgent action to restore neutrality and accountability on Arabic Wikipedia, including enforcing existing neutrality standards, removing administrators who enable extremist propaganda, and implementing centralized monitoring mechanisms for terrorism-related content,” the statement read.
Last year, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, opened an investigation into the Wikimedia Foundation, demanding answers over concerns that hostile foreign actors are exploiting the online encyclopedia to insert anti-Israel or antisemitic framing designed to sway audiences.
Months earlier, the US Justice Department warned the Wikimedia Foundation that its nonprofit status could be jeopardized for possibly violating its “legal obligations and fiduciary responsibilities” under US law.
Specifically, US officials expressed concern about accusations that the online encyclopedia has spread “propaganda” and allowed “foreign actors to manipulate information” while maintaining a systemic bias against Israel.
“Wikipedia has long presented itself as humanity’s shared knowledge repository,” Barak-Cheney said in a statement on Tuesday. “Ensuring that this knowledge remains factual is particularly critical as emerging AI platforms increasingly rely on multilingual information sources to formulate responses to user queries.”
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Trump Administration Launches New Probes Into Discrimination at Harvard After Suing School Over Antisemitism
US President Donald Trump delivers an address to the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA on Dec. 17, 2025. Photo: Reuters Connect
The US government has launched two new investigations into campus antisemitism and racial preferences — popularly known as “affirmative action” — at Harvard University, continuing the Trump administration’s legal barrage against the institution for allegedly not adhering to federal civil rights laws.
“Harvard University should know better. Its name will always be tied to the landmark Supreme Court case that found sweeping racial discrimination in admissions and the campus has been in the spotlight for tolerating egregious antisemitic harassment for years now,” US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement on Monday announcing the federal actions. “No one — not even Harvard — is above the law. If Harvard continues to stonewall as we try to verify its basic compliance with antidiscrimination statutes, we will vigorously hold them to account to ensure students’ rights are protected.”
This week’s newly announced inquiries will be led by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
In a press release, the department said Harvard has “refused” to cooperate with OCR’s attempts to verify that it no longer confers admission based in part on racial identity, as stipulated by a 2023 US Supreme Court ruling which said that the enterprise is unconstitutional.
“OCR will investigate whether Harvard continues to use illegal race-based preferences in admissions despite the Supreme Court’s definitive ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard,” the department said in Tuesday’s statement. “OCR will also investigate alleged ongoing antisemitic harassment on Harvard’s campus and the institution’s purported failure to protect Jewish students. The Trump administration will evaluate both complaints and, if continued discrimination is found, take action to hold Harvard accountable for any illegal policies or actions.”
Writing to The Harvard Crimson, the university’s campus newspaper, Harvard said the racial preferences investigation is “the government’s latest retaliatory” move “against [the school] for its refusal to surrender our independence and constitutional rights.”
McMahon announced the probes just three days after the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts arguing that Harvard ignored antisemitism while extreme anti-Zionist activists subjected Jewish students to harassment and discrimination in violation of civil rights laws as well as the institution’s own purported commitment to anti-racism.
The complaint demanded the recovery of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants and other federal support Harvard received during the years in which it allegedly neglected to correct the hostile campus environment.
The lawsuit marked a shift in the Trump administration’s previous strategy of confiscating Harvard’s federal money and then defending the action in court. That policy has yielded mixed results, making a strong political statement while leaving Harvard strong enough to mobilize its GDP-sized wealth to sidestep the worst potential consequences by issuing bonds or bringing the matter before judges who have been sympathetic to their case.
As previously reported, by The Algemeiner, US federal judge Allison Burroughs ruled in September that Trump acted unconstitutionally when his administration impounded more than $2 billion in research grants from Harvard, charging that he had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” Burroughs went on to argue that the federal government violated Harvard’s free speech rights under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
The Trump administration maintains that pervasive antisemitism has been a major issue at Harvard,
“Harvard has been and remains deliberately indifferent to what its own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Bias deemed the ‘exclusion of Israeli or Zionist students from social spaces and extracurricular activities,’” US Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon argued in Friday’s filing. “Harvard has failed to enforce its rules or meaningfully discipline the mobs that occupy its buildings and terrorize its Jewish and Israeli students. Harvard instead rewarded students who assaulted, harassed, or intimidated their Jewish and Israeli peers.”
In a statement, Harvard contested the government’s account of the facts, saying it “deeply cares about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus.” It also argued that it enacted “substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism acknowledged that the university administration’s handling of campus antisemitism fell well below its obligations under both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its own nondiscrimination policies.
Jewish members of the Harvard community have expressed concern about the climate on campus.
Last week, a new report issued by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA) revealed Jewish undergraduate enrollment at the university has plummeted to lows not seen since the eve of World War II and the Holocaust, falling to just 7 percent.
While the report denied that declining Jewish enrollment at Harvard is alone the result of racial preferences in admissions — which, in the name of “diversity,” affords preferential consideration to applicants whose academic achievement and standardized test scores fall outside the range of the typical elite students who schools like Harvard select for membership in the Ivy League — it found a similar trend occurring at Yale University.
Yale infamously adopted racial preferences under the leadership of President Kingman Brewster in the 1960s, despite growing evidence that the practice created an environment of academic maladjustment and racial division. This led to the creation of segregated programming and amenities for African Americans, as well as a summer remedial program for minority students — PROP (Pre-Orientation Program) — that was eventually rebranded in the late 1990s when its apparent subtext proved unpalatable to a new generation of students.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.