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In Ukraine, Hanukkah candles are a lifeline in the midst of power outages
(JTA) — In the days before Hanukkah, which starts Sunday night, a few men and women from two Conservative institutions in Israel will travel to the small Jewish community in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, with a supply of needed items.
Amid the power outages stemming from Russian attacks, the volunteers will have blankets and sweatshirts for the cold, as well as menorahs and kippahs for religious observance purposes.
The 300 boxes of Hanukkah candles will do double duty.
These days, the power in Chernivtsi, a city of around 250,000 (before the war) in western Ukraine, is more off than on. So the candles will do more than allude to the story of the Maccabees — they will help light Jewish homes across the city.
“This year it’s really important” to have and use Hanukkah candles, said Lev Kleiman, leader of the city’s Conservative Jewish community, in a recent Zoom interview.
Although the need is urgent, “We will hold onto the candles until Hanukkah,” Kleiman added, his words in Russian interpreted by Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, the Russian-born and Jerusalem-based “circuit rabbi” of the Conservative movement’s Schechter Institutes and executive director of its Midreshet Schechter Ukraine. The organizations are coordinating the transport of holiday supplies to Chernivtsi.
Among a few “couriers” bringing needed items to Jewish communities in Ukraine, Gritsevskaya has made several trips there over the last 10 months. At the start of the war, she urged Jews in other cities to make their way to Chernivtsi, which was far from the intense fighting on the eastern border.
Chernivtsi, which served as a place of refuge for thousands of displaced people from elsewhere in parts of the Soviet Union threatened by the Nazi army during World War II, is again attracting refugees from throughout the country. Earlier in the current war, Kleiman turned his synagogue into a refugee center for some of the millions of Ukrainians fleeing their homeland. The city also became a gathering site for worldwide faith leaders who have denounced the violence and expressed solidarity with the embattled Ukrainians.
In addition to no heat and light in Chernivtsi, lack of electricity means lack of TV and radio use, along with spotty internet service. (Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Located on the Prut River, Chernivtsi (known at one time as “Jerusalem upon the Prut” for the strength of its Jewish community) is 25 miles north of the Romanian border and home to one of the country’s most active Conservative communities. The city’s Jewish population before the war began was estimated at 2,000, including many Holocaust survivors.
And today, following the invasion? The number could be larger or smaller, no one is counting — but some western cities have experienced population growth due to all of the migration.
“No one knows,” Kleiman said. “Many left, but many came.”
As in other Ukrainian cities, many Jews in Chernivtsi — especially women, senior citizens and children, everyone except draft-age males — have migrated. But uncounted other ones have come to a place of relative safety, either renting apartments or staying in ones under the auspices of the Jewish community. Most of the Jews in Chernivtsi now are those exempt from military service, Kleiman said. Others stayed in order to be with their husbands and fathers who joined the Ukrainian army after the war began, or to care for their aged parents.
Despite signs of war — rifle-carrying soldiers and policemen on the streets, empty shelves in stores because of shortages, people hurrying to safety when they hear sirens — Jewish life there has continued, according to Kleiman. The most active organizations in the city are the local outpost of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the JDC-supported Hesed Shoshana Welfare Center and Kleiman’s Kehillat Aviv Synagogue (his official title is coordinator), which sponsors daily Jewish activities.
The synagogue — located near the Chabad center, with which it cooperates on relief activities — is housed in a small, two-story building that contains an office, a kitchen and a large multi-function hall. Kleiman says Hanukkah in 2022 will be more important than in past years because in addition to its ability to bring people together,the holiday also asserts Jewish survival.
“There are a lot of parallels,” Kleiman said of the holiday and his community’s current situation.
Electricity in Chernivtsi flows only a few hours each day, and at night, no street lights are on, thanks to incessant Russian bombing of Ukraine’s infrastructure, and to government-imposed restrictions designed to conserve the little available resources.
A holiday of lights sans lights? “We’ve never done it before,” Kleiman said, adding that the Jews in his city understand the holiday’s symbolism.
Some will come to the synagogue for a communal candle-lighting, according to Kleiman. Others will light their candles at home, in their windows. Like all other buildings in Chernivtsi, Kleiman’s office and apartment are subject to periodic electricity blackouts, often announced in advance.
“With G-d’s help we will soon have a generator” – and 24/7 lights and heat in the synagogue, he said. Until then, he and the other residents of Chernivtsi will shiver. The temperature in the city was 29 degrees Fahrenheit during the Zoom interview, and a light snow was falling.
Lev Kleiman is shown with his community’s Torah ark. (Courtesy of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies)
Though no Russian missiles have fallen inside Chernivtsi itself, some have reached the outskirts, causing damage to the area’s infrastructure and utilities. Other parts of the country have not escaped the Russian onslaught; two months ago more than 4,000 Ukrainian towns, villages and cities had experienced outages, and 40% of the country’s grid was crippled. The bombing of power stations is a major part of Vladimir Putin’s plan to weaponize Ukraine’s weather to bully the country into submission as winter sets in. (In addition to candles and other supplies, some Jewish groups are sending generators and heaters.)
Home in past years to such prominent Jews as actress Mila Kunis, the late Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, former Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein and the late poet-translator Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel), Chernivtsi has an honored place in the country’s history. On the eve of World War II, some 45,000 Jews lived in the city, about a third of the country’s total Jewish population. The collaborationist Romanian authorities, who ruled the area, established a ghetto in Chernivtsi where 32,000 Jews, including many from the surrounding region, were interned; from there, they were shipped to concentration camps in the nearby Transnistria area, where 60% died.
A third of the city’s Jews survived the war. The population grew to about 17,000 when widespread migration from the USSR began in the late 1980s. Like many cities in the former Soviet Union, Chernivtsi has experienced a modest Jewish revival since Communism fell and open expression of Judaism was allowed again. The revival was spurred largely by the arrival of Chabad emissary couples and programs sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
But though Chabad, an Orthodox movement, is the prime Jewish mover in Ukraine, there is also a growing non-Orthodox presence in the country. The Israeli branch of the Conservative movement sent its first full-time representatives to Ukraine a decade ago. The movement’s Jerusalem-based Masorti Olami organization sponsors a network of synagogues, schools, camps, youth groups and kosher certification services across Ukraine. A few decades ago, Kleiman attended the Midreshet Yerushalayim day school in Chernivtsi and Camp Ramah Ukraine.
In addition, the Reform movement’s World Union for Progressive Judaism has established 10 congregations in the country; the movement estimates that 14,000 Ukrainian Jews identify as members.
Even though the need is urgent, Kleiman said his community will wait to use the candles until the start of Hanukkah. (Courtesy of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies)
These are boring days in southwest Ukraine. TV and radio are only available when electricity is available, and internet and cellphone service is always spotty. Kleiman calls the war a test of the people’s mettle, a spur to their growing national unity. As a form of solidarity, many have switched the language of their conversations from Russian — the lingua franca during the Soviet days — to Ukrainian.
Nobody in Chernivtsi’s Jewish community is starving, Kleiman said. Kosher food is available at the synagogue, and volunteers bring supplies to people unable to travel. Overall, the morale of the Jewish community is good, he says. Native-born members of the community “support each other,” while some people from other parts of the country, separated from their families, with fewer personal connections, are depressed, he said.
In the boxes of materials that Rabbi Gritsevskaya is to bring to Chernivtsi from Israel are also some Israeli-style dreidels, whose Hebrew letters stand for the words “Nes gadol haya po”: “A great miracle happened here.” On dreidels used in the Diaspora, the last word usually is sham, “there.”
The linguistic symbolism in a land under siege is clear, said Kleiman, who plans to explain the message to the members of the community taking home a dreidel.
“I understand — they will understand too,” he says. “I hope the miracle will also happen in Ukraine.”
—
The post In Ukraine, Hanukkah candles are a lifeline in the midst of power outages appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab
A new whistleblower report alleges that the Trump Administration’s investigations into campus antisemitism were merely efforts to extract millions from universities, under the pretense of rooting out hate.
The report, written by the Washington, D.C.-based Government Accountability Project on behalf of former Department of Justice Attorney Haley Van Erem, alleges that the administration’s antisemitism task force carried out “politically motivated” investigations that were “unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” The investigations did not follow proper Title VI procedure, she said, adding that they were opened with predetermined outcomes, and did not respect the First Amendment.
The report has prompted Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) to initiate an investigation into the allegations. The Nexus Foundation, a watchdog organization dedicated to combating antisemitism and protecting free speech, released a statement supporting Raskin and Van Erem.
This is not the first time Raskin or Nexus have criticized the administration’s antisemitism task force. Many left-leaning Jewish organizations have long criticized Trump’s efforts, with Raskin describing them as “weaponizing, distorting and exploiting the reality of antisemitism to attack academic freedom.”
In a statement to the Forward, the DOJ denied that Van Erem worked on university investigations. “And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” a spokesperson wrote.
According to the report, Van Erem was involuntarily re-assigned from her role as a DOJ Civil Rights attorney to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in order to investigate alleged antisemitism at medical schools — a probe prompted by a single New York Post article about protesters shouting “Free Palestine” and wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at a medical school graduation.
Unable to find enough evidence of antisemitism at medical schools, Van Erem said, the task force soon expanded its probe to entire universities to increase the chances of finding it.
“This was one of the first major indications to the DOJ assignees that the investigations were not grounded in law or fact,” the report reads.
HHS did not immediately respond to request to comment.
Van Erem also criticized the administration for breaking the protocol of Title VI investigations, pursuing enforcement before first issuing a finding and allowing universities to resolve issues voluntarily. That enforcement: withholding funds.
To restrict funds, the administration used a separate legal mechanism that allows them to do so “for convenience” and for “not satisfying purpose.”
“The funding suspensions were meant to be coercive irrespective of investigative findings,” according to the report.
Van Erem and colleagues found no evidence at Brown of “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, the report said. But a supervisor allegedly discouraged sending Brown a closure letter stating those findings. According to the report, the administration settled with Columbia before an investigation was finished. Harvard sued the Trump administration, before its own investigation was complete, claiming the funding freeze was unlawful.
Van Erem said she observed findings of discrimination that she believed were actually “protected First Amendment activity” and believed that the task force’s settlement “content-based conditions” violated free expression.
Brown and Columbia both settled with the administration to restore federal funding, with Columbia paying the government $200 million and Brown agreeing to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. A federal judge recently dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, saying antisemitic incidents were “too isolated and episodic” to constitute a Title VI violation.
The post Whistleblower claims Trump’s campus antisemitism crackdown was a cash grab appeared first on The Forward.
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An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English
(JTA) — Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander who led the killing of more than 50,000 Jews, was sitting in a cell in Warsaw awaiting his own execution.
Before he met the gallows, Stroop described in unrepentant detail his ascent as a Nazi, his destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and his daily prosecution of mass murder. He gave his account to Kazimierz Moczarski, the journalist, Polish resistance leader and veteran of the Warsaw Uprising who shared Stroop’s cell in Mokotów Prison for 255 days in 1949.
Though he is now remembered as a hero for fighting the Nazi occupation, Moczarski was villainized by Poland’s postwar Communist regime, which viewed his resistance group as a threat to their monopoly on power. His unlikely imprisonment alongside a former Nazi officer he’d once tried to assassinate gave Moczarski the chance to document Stroop’s confessions in an influential book, “Conversations with an Executioner.”
This book, despite being censored for years by the Polish government, proved revelatory about the psychology and motivations behind Nazi ideology. After decades of being translated into over 15 languages and adapted for the stage and screen, “Conversations with an Executioner” was published Tuesday for the first time in an uncensored English translation by Steerforth, an imprint of Pushkin Press.
The book’s champions say it’s about time.
“On the one hand, this book is a central historical source for this really important event in the modern history of the world,” Sean Casper Bye, the book’s English translator, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And at the same time, it’s one that has continually struggled to get fully into publication.”
The book’s revelations about Stroop, the rise of Nazism and the psychology of genocide is reaching English readers after a long deferral. Moczarski made many unsuccessful attempts to publish “Conversations with an Executioner” after his release, but found little interest from publishers in Communist Poland.
The book did not align with Communist ideological narratives about the Holocaust, which deemphasized tragedy in favor of total victory over the Nazis. And the government’s crackdown on Polish resistance members — which led to Moczarski’s imprisonment with Stroop — remained a taboo subject.
A serialized version of the book first appeared in the Polish magazine Odra from 1972 to 1974, and Moczarski died the following year at age 68. He never saw the first censored edition in 1977, which removed references to the reasons behind his own incarceration. Nor did he see the publication of “Conversations with an Executioner” as an uncensored book in 1992, after the fall of Communism, when it became a bestseller.
Now, the book has “canonical status” in Poland, said Bye. It has been included for years on required school reading lists, shaping how generations of Polish people remember the Holocaust.
Moczarski’s account also faced an uphill battle to reach English readers. During the Cold War, censorship, disrupted communication and closed archives in Eastern Europe made it difficult to publish books from Poland in English, said Bye. That lowered the focus on Eastern European sources and languages for years in Holocaust scholarship across English-speaking countries.
The new English translation was championed by Clare Bullock, the book’s editor in the United Kingdom, who has Polish Jewish heritage. She spent years pushing for it to appear in English at multiple publishing houses, said Bye.
Moczarski and Stroop’s fates were intertwined long before they shared a cell. During World War II, Moczarski joined the Home Army, the main Polish resistance force, where he worked for the Office of Information and Propaganda.
Identifying local Nazi officials and collaborators as targets, Moczarski and his associates assassinated Stroop’s predecessor, Franz Kutschera, nicknamed the “Butcher of Warsaw” for his mass executions of Polish civilians. They also made a failed attempt to kill Stroop, detailed by Moczarski in their cell.
Though he was not Jewish, Moczarski supported and liaised with the Jewish Fighting Organization, known in Polish as ŻOB. The Home Army provided ŻOB leaders with weapons and technical instructions for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest Jewish revolt against the Nazis.
A year later, Moczarski fought in the Home Army’s citywide Warsaw Uprising. The Nazis also brutally crushed this revolt, which led to the deaths of over 160,000 Poles, including some 17,000 Polish Jews who took part in the fighting or were discovered in hiding.
Instead of being rewarded after the war, Moczarski was arrested in 1945 as the Communists consolidated their power in the aftermath of Nazi rule. The new regime baselessly declared the Home Army a quasi-fascist organization, claiming they had collaborated with the Nazis rather than fighting against them. Moczarski spent 11 years in prison, where, he would later recount, he endured 49 methods of torture.
His confinement with Stroop made for another form of torture, according to Bye, who said it was “symbolically equating him, a brave Polish patriot, with a Nazi war criminal.”
The men had a third cellmate: Gustav Schielke, a German former policeman turned low-ranking SS officer who resented the police’s subordination to the Nazis, but did not resist them. In prison, these enemies lived under a code that required equality and confidentiality for survival. They slept on the floor together on three pallets, and Moczarski spent nights huddled between Stroop and Schielke to stay warm.
Moczarski made it his mission to understand the war criminals.
“If I succeed, I have the chance — if only to a certain extent — to answer my own question,” he wrote. “What historical, psychological, sociological mechanism led some Germans to come together into a gang of mass murderers who governed the Reich and did their utmost to introduce their ‘Ordnung’ — their Order — in Europe and the world?”
He unraveled in Stroop an average German middle-class man of his time, with a low level of education, a drive to rise through military ranks, a reverence for order and obedience and a penchant for parroting Nazi ideology.
As his defenses wore down, Stroop gave Moczarski a day-by-day account of his orders to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Over nearly a month, his forces battled Jewish guerilla fighters and eventually burned down the ghetto block by block. He referred to the operations as “neutralizing” Jews or “cleansing” the Warsaw Ghetto of “subhumans.”
When Moczarski asked Stroop whether he pitied the women fighters whom he captured and killed, he said the commander responded, after a long and “worked up” silence, with Nazi clichés.
“Finally, the general straightens up, smooths down the hair at his temples and replies, in a chanting rhythm,” Moczarski wrote. “‘Anyone wishing to be a true man in those days, meaning a strong one, had to act as I did. Gelobt sei was hart macht!’” The German phrase by Nietzsche, meaning “Praised be what hardens,” was taken from Nazi propaganda.
In this portrait of Stroop, Bye saw a man who was motivated primarily by moving up the Nazi Party hierarchy. While Stroop repeated Nazi tropes and adapted his beliefs accordingly — upon becoming an SS officer, he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself “Gottgläubig,” a Nazi religious term — much of his testimony amounted to a boastful account of personal victories.
“This was a type of Nazi,” said Bye. “Not everybody was a completely 100% committed idealogue. There were lots of people who were just ambitious and unscrupulous, and that was part of the engine that kept the Nazi machine going.”
The idea that the Holocaust could have been willingly committed by everyday, career-minded people, not just Nazi ideologues and sadists, has been echoed in other landmark works of scholarship and culture, from Hannah Arendt’s 1963 “Eichmann in Jerusalem” to the 2023 film “The Zone of Interest.”
“Conversations with an Executioner” has been challenged as an authentic document, since Moczarski had no materials to take notes in the cell, yet recounted years of dialogue in vivid detail. Moczarski claimed that he honed an exceptional memory in prison and could write the book in his mind. After being released in 1956, he verified facts by obtaining Stroop’s reports from the Polish Commission for Researching Nazi War Crimes and information from the U.S. Pentagon archives.
The limitations of the book as a firsthand account also make it a precious resource, said Bye. Stroop’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was so effective that “Conversations with an Executioner” provided a rare surviving window into what occurred.
Bye said that voices like Moczarski’s are becoming ever more crucial as the last generation of survivors die out and the Holocaust fades from living memory. He hopes the new English translation will give readers a counterweight to current-day narratives about the Holocaust, emerging in politics and elsewhere, that mold the past to fit ideological messages.
“There are so many people who have a vested interest in getting us to look at the Holocaust in a particular way, who want to instrumentalize the Holocaust as this hugely emotionally weighty event for their own purposes,” he said. “One of the ways that we can keep in touch with the reality of the Holocaust is by going back to primary sources like this — going back to the people who did see it with their own eyes and who wrote about it themselves.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post An influential book of a Nazi leader’s confessions is now available in English appeared first on The Forward.
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California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic
(JTA) — AIPAC and its allies have poured millions of dollars into a California special election, transforming a race between two Democrats into a battleground over the pro-Israel group’s place in Democratic politics.
The spending in the Bay Area’s 14th congressional district is aimed at boosting Melissa Hernandez, a moderate Democrat and president of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board, over Aisha Wahab, a progressive state senator who supports ending U.S. military aid to Israel.
Wahab replied “yes” during an April debate when asked whether Israel’s war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In contrast, Hernandez declined to give a yes-or-no answer, instead saying that Israel had a right to defend itself following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, but that the “destruction into Gaza has gone too far.”
Wahab remains the favorite heading into Tuesday’s election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell, a reliable supporter of Israel in Congress who resigned in April amid sexual misconduct allegations that he has denied. Wahab finished ahead of Hernandez in the election’s June 16 special primary, receiving 42.8% of the vote compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%.
The United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s main super PAC, has poured close to $2.5 million into boosting Hernandez and attacking Wahab this election cycle, while Bold America, another group that has received funding from the United Democracy Project, has spent roughly $1.8 million, according to The Hill.
When asked about the AIPAC spending in the race by the Pleasanton Weekly, Hernandez replied, “I have no say over independent expenditures. That is the law, and I see them when you do.” She added: “I have thousands of donors and not one of them sets my agenda.”
But while the Bay Area race has become one of the the latest focuses of the pro-Israel lobby, following a costly defeat by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Israel has hardly been a defining issue in the contest, and Wahab has not neatly fit the mold of other progressive candidates the group has targeted this election cycle.
Wahab, who is the child of Afghan refugees, has centered her campaign on affordability issues and civil rights. While her campaign website calls for “No More Wars!” it does not specifically reference the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Citing the civilian toll in U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, her site reads, “We cannot bomb our way to lasting peace.”
Hernandez, who previously served as the mayor of Dublin, California, has focused her campaign on lowering costs and her commitments to fighting crime and increasing public safety.
Wahab, 39, has drawn endorsements from a host of labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. Hernandez, 51, meanwhile, has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
During a Thursday appearance on the livestream of Hasan Piker, who has faced accusations of antisemitism, Wahab said that she would have voted for the Stop the Bombs Act and supported ending all U.S. aid to Israel, though she stipulated that “humanitarian aid is important to me too.”
During the livestream, Wahab also touted a September 2025 resolution she co-authored with Jewish state Senator Scott Wiener, which called for the “end to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the immediate release of all hostages.” The resolution was also signed by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
In 2021, Wahab also collaborated with local Jewish leaders on a fundraiser for Afghan refugee resettlement in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from the country.
“I work well with the Jewish community. I’m very proud to support them. They’re my constituents,” Wahab said on the livestream.
“As an Afghan, you know, I really deeply want to ensure that all people feel welcomed and safe and secure in this nation. And we know that there’s a rise in antisemitism. We know all of that,” Wahab continued. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t criticize a foreign nation. You can’t criticize their leadership.”
Wahab attributed the volume of AIPAC spending in the race to “pure racism and prejudice,” saying that her “Jewish Senate colleagues are literally confused as to why they are spending this much money against me.”
As Wahab pushes back on the attack ads, she has also garnered $200,000 in support from American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC that formed as a counterweight to AIPAC.
The liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street Action Fund also announced Thursday that it was spending $100,000 to support Wahab.
Tali deGroot, the group’s vice president of political and digital strategy, said in a statement that AIPAC’s spending against her marked another “cynical attempt” to “defeat a candidate who won’t rubber-stamp their agenda.”
“AIPAC’s super PAC has failed time and again this cycle, and we expect this latest attempt to take Republican billionaire dollars and buy a Democratic primary to fail as well,” said deGroot. “Voters in the 14th deserve better, and they deserve a Member of Congress who will bring the kind of clear-eyed, nuanced and compassionate leadership that Dr. Wahab has shown throughout her career.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post California Democratic primary pits AIPAC-backed candidate against progressive Israel critic appeared first on The Forward.
