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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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The post Embodying a story of trauma and liberation, Ukrainian Jews celebrate Passover amid a new normal appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The cheesy way to do teshuvah
To Europeans, cheese culture in the United States is not quite ripe.
The Kraft company, for good and for ill, has defined American cheese in high-gloss orange. But if you’ve been to a grocery store or farmer’s market in recent decades, guided by tatted-up slicers ready to educate you on musky bouquets and runny rinds, you know this is only part of the picture.
Sara Joe Wolansky’s The Big Cheese follows Adam Moskowitz, a third-generation cheese importer as he coaches Team U.S.A. to compete at the Mondial du Fromage in France — the Olympics of cheesemongers. He’s the one in the cow suit, leading a group chant of barnyard noises he calls a “mooditation.” You might mistake his bootcamp in Queens as a joke, but he’s not kidding.
“For me this is redemption,” he says.
Moskowitz, equal parts Tevye the dairyman, George S. Patton and the Beastie Boys, credits cheese with saving his life. At first he was resistant to enter the family trade, begun by his immigrant grandfather, Ben, who started in the business as a kid with a pushcart in Washington Market in Tribeca and became one of the first Americans to import now familiar cheeses from abroad. Adam’s father, Joseph, expanded the market, debuting Jarlsberg and Boursin in our supermarkets.
An ambitious workaholic, Adam forged his own path, earning his first million dollars as a salesman at Yahoo! in the 1990s, and losing it almost immediately when the dot-com bubble burst. When his flirtation with a rap career fell flat (you’ll see why), he joined the world of cheese at the family firm, Larkin Cold Storage, and brought the party there, founding the Cheesemonger Invitational, a booze-soaked celebration he emceed, between bumps of coke in the bathroom.
The invitational Moskowitz founded in 2011 helped inspire the Mondial, a competition that pits the world’s best cheesemongers against one another in blind taste tests, oral presentations pitching a specific cheese and statue displays. By 2023, no American had ever placed in the competition. A newly sober Moskowitz was determined to crumble that Roquefort ceiling.
In Moskowitz’s journey is a tale of Tillamook teshuvah. He is indebted to the cheese community for letting him make amends. Throughout, he reflects on his behavior as an addict, leading to some heavy moments in an otherwise frothy endeavor.
The documentary is also focused on two competing cheesemongers, Sam Rollins and Courtney Johnson, who Moskowitz and a panel of experts picked to challenge the snooty Europeans. It’s a compelling look at a slice of an industry whose experts get shorter shrift than their oenological counterparts. (A monger is a cheese sommelier, make no mistake.)
I won’t spoil the ending, except to say events cooperated with the film’s feel-good vibe, though you may end up wishing Wolansky stayed on a bit longer for the following year’s competition, which saw a major win for the underdogs.
The film may just bring out the patriot in you, as you root for American soft (cheese) power to prevail. It could just be the perfect thing to watch this coming Shavuot.
Sara Joe Wolansky’s The Big Cheese makes its world premiere at DOC NYC. In person and online dates can be found here.
The post The cheesy way to do teshuvah appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu, Touting Push Toward Greater Self-Reliance, Denies Report Israel Seeking 20-Year US Military Aid Deal
US President Donald Trump greets Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied reports that his country is seeking a new 20-year military aid deal with the US, insisting that the Jewish state is working to wean itself off American assistance.
“I don’t know what they’re talking about. My direction is the exact opposite,” Netanyahu said on “The Erin Molan Show” on Thursday when asked by the Australian journalist about a new Axios report saying Israel was pursuing the security agreement.
According to Axios, the deal under discussion would include “America First” provisions to win the Trump administration’s support. The current 10-year memorandum of understanding between the two countries — the third such agreement signed — expires in 2028. It includes around $3.8 billion of annual military aid to Israel, which spends nearly all the assistance in the US to purchase American-made weapons and equipment.
The report comes amid growing criticism in the US among progressives and, increasingly, some conservatives over American military support for Israel, especially among younger Americans.
“Now, I want to make our arms industry independent, totally as independent as possible,” Netanyahu said on Thursday. “I think that it is time to ensure that Israel is independent.”
Netanyahu added that US defense aid to Israel is a “tiny fraction” of what Washington spends in the Middle East.
“We have a very strong economy, a very strong arms industry, and even though we get what we get, which we appreciate, 80 percent of that is spent in the US and produces jobs in the US,” he continued, saying he wants to see “an even more independent Israeli defense industry.”
The Israeli premier went on to stress that his country has never asked a single American solider to fight for Israel.
“Israel does not ask others to fight for us,” he said. “Israel is the one American ally in the world that says, ‘We don’t need boots on the ground, we don’t need American servicemen fighting on the ground for Israel or around Israel. We’re fine.’ We fight our own battles, but in doing so, we serve important American interests, like preventing countries that chant ‘Death to America’ from having nuclear bombs to throw at America.”
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South African President Says ‘Boycotts Never Really Work’ Despite BDS Support
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa attends the 20th East Asia Summit (EAS), as part of the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Oct. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa insisted that “boycott politics doesn’t work” following the Trump administration’s announced absence from a summit in his country later this month — despite his ruling party’s ongoing support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
On Wednesday, Ramaphosa urged US President Donald Trump to reconsider his decision to boycott the G20 Leaders’ Summit, scheduled for Nov. 22-23 in Johannesburg, northeastern South Africa.
Ramaphosa criticized Washington for “giving up the very important role that they should be playing as the biggest economy in the world” in its decision to skip the summit — the first to be held in Africa.
“It is unfortunate that the United States has decided not to attend the G20. All I can say in my experience in politics is that boycotts never really work. They have a very contradictory effect,” the South African leader told reporters outside parliament in Cape Town.
Trump, who has previously accused the South African government of human rights abuses against white minorities — including land seizures and killings — called the decision to host the G20 summit in the country a “total disgrace.”
“No US government official will attend [the summit] as long as these human rights abuses continue,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
However, the South African government has strongly rejected any claims of genocide, saying such accusations are “widely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence.”
Ramaphosa reaffirmed that the summit will proceed as scheduled, regardless of Washington’s absence.
“The G20 will go on. All other heads of state will be here, and in the end, we will take fundamental decisions. And their absence is their loss,” he said.
“The US needs to think again whether boycott politics actually works, because in my experience, it doesn’t work. It’s better to be inside the tent rather than being outside the tent,” he continued.
Despite such claims, Ramaphosa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has officially endorsed the BDS campaign against Israel for years.
The BDS movement seeks to isolate the Jewish state internationally as a step toward its eventual elimination. Leaders of the campaign have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
In 2012, the ANC announced its full backing of the BDS movement, urging “all South Africans to support the programs and campaigns of the Palestinian civil society which seek to put pressure on Israel to engage with the Palestinian people to reach a just solution.”
Following Ramaphosa’s comments this week, it remains unclear why he continues to back anti-Israel boycotts if he believes they don’t work.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, actively confronting the Jewish state on the international stage.
Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Hamas, hosting officials from the Palestinian terrorist group and expressing solidarity with their “cause.”
In one instance, Ramaphosa led a crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Since December 2023, South Africa has also been pursuing its case before the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.