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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.”
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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger appeared first on The Forward.
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Attacks on Mamdani test Jewish efforts to confront Islamophobia as 9/11 anniversary nears
The image was vintage AI slopcraft: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his trademark black suit, holding a sealed cardboard package labeled 9/11 MEMORIAL.
“Honey,” the cartoon Mamdani calls, “where’s my box cutter?”
The cartoon, shared Sunday on social media by the Orthodox Jewish comedy account Heimish Humor and referencing the weapon used in the 9/11 hijackings, reflected an increasingly caustic attitude toward Mamdani, Muslim elected officials and Islam itself in some Jewish spaces as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approaches — with much of the charged rhetoric tied to Sept. 11.
Jewish groups that staged an anti-Mamdani protest in downtown Manhattan Tuesday invoked the mayor’s religion on a flyer for the event, which was sponsored by the Lawfare Project, the Israeli-American Council and a slew of other Jewish groups. The flyer depicted Mamdani with his eyes blotted out and read, “Islamist ideology was not defeated. It was normalized. In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.” One speaker at the event said Mamdani believed law enforcement was “haram,” Arabic for forbidden.
To some who saw it, the poster — and many of the Jewish attacks against Mamdani — contained anti-Muslim dog whistling, if not downright Islamophobia.
“This is coded language to smear all Muslim leaders as terrorists to hold them accountable for 9/11,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “The same way that we as a community rightfully push back when we hear people using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative — that’s what’s happening here. We should be calling it out if we expect people to call it out when it happens to us.”
The wave of antagonism in the Jewish community comes amid a broader Republican backlash to high-profile victories for Muslim elected leaders. Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, called incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is Catholic, “tone deaf” for wearing a hijab at a mosque so close to the 9/11 anniversary. Islamophobic posts targeting Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, surfaced by The Washington Post, found copious 9/11 references.
But no politician has attracted as much vitriol as Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor. His antagonism toward the Israeli government and his leftist politics have made him a target for many pro-Israel New Yorkers. Some have used his religion as a cudgel in joining calls for him to skip Friday’s memorial service at Ground Zero.
Spitalnick said such rhetoric was coming from a small, non-representative portion of the Jewish world that wanted to advance a conservative political agenda — but that Jews “should be concerned that this is ostensibly being done in our name.”
“We can be concerned for multiple reasons,” she added. “One, bigotry is wrong regardless, and two, it actually makes our work to fight the real and rising antisemitism our community is facing that much harder.”
Yet posts like the cartoon also revealed the resistance to growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Jewish spaces. Heimish Humor’s post drew a number of critical replies from Jewish accounts. “Incredibly racist, you should delete this,” wrote one. “Not funny,” said another. As anti-Muslim rhetoric escalates, Jewish voices are among those fighting hardest to combat it.
Echoes of history
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the rise in Islamophobic rhetoric has resurfaced old memories of its aftermath.
The end of 2001 was a dangerous time for Muslim Americans, who faced being conflated with the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the hijackings. Despite President George W. Bush’s admonition that the attacks were committed by extremists who did not represent the religion, anti-Muslim violence spiked across the U.S. A number of mosques were burned in arson fires, and eight Arabs or Muslims were killed in the three months following 9/11 in what some believed to be Islamophobic murders.
Relations between Jewish and Muslim American communities, already strained by the Second Intifada, bottomed out in some places after 9/11. But in the ensuing years, Jewish-Muslim relations took a surprising turn. By 2006, news media were describing an “unprecedented swell of interfaith activities” — including dialogue groups, “peace walks” and joint Israel trips — even as agreement on Middle East politics remained elusive.
And while the 2010 proposal for a mosque and Muslim community center at Ground Zero reignited some old tensions — with the Anti-Defamation League headlining the opposition — broader trends of Muslim-Jewish mutual aid held: When a St. Louis Jewish cemetery was defaced in 2017, Muslim groups raised tens of thousands of dollars to repair it. Jewish groups anchored the opposition to President Donald Trump’s 2017 immigration ban targeting Muslim countries. And in 2021, the ADL apologized for its earlier stance on the mosque near Ground Zero.
The day everything changed
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, however, caused many Jewish-Muslim partnerships to collapse. Israel’s response in Gaza only deepened resentments, as opposition to the war on college campuses and in public protests coincided with an increase in antisemitic incidents.
Then in 2025, Mamdani rode into office on the back of the pro-Palestinian movement. Mamdani vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was reluctant to disavow the slogan “globalize the intifada” — a phrase many see as calling for violence against Jews. Though Mamdani has repeatedly condemned antisemitic violence in the city, some Jewish New Yorkers say his anti-Israel invective has nevertheless exacerbated a dangerous environment for the city’s Jews.
“The DSA is a movement of hate, pro-terror anti-American and anti-minority ideology,” said Brooke Goldstein, the founding director of the Lawfare Project, which organized Tuesday’s anti-Mamdani protest. She said it was the DSA and the mayor who were promoting division, extremism and racism — not groups like hers, who were holding the mayor accountable.
The prominence of the Democratic Socialists of America is one key difference between today’s political environment and that of late 2001.
But the environment around Israel has also changed. “The response to 9/11, including from most Jewish organizations, was an American response,” said Jonathan Jacoby, president of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism — whereas the response to Mamdani today, he said, is “coming from a quote-unquote ‘pro-Israel’ space.”
Jacoby said Mamdani’s election in particular had elicited an unprecedented level of panic among some pro-Israel groups. He pointed to the ADL’s Mamdani Monitor as an example, saying that there was a throughline between the efforts to undermine his candidacy and the calls for him to not attend the 9/11 ceremony. (The ADL has not commented on whether Mamdani should participate, and declined to comment for this story.)
Some of the people who have pushed back against the anti-Mamdani rhetoric consider themselves among the mayor’s critics.
“I’m not happy with the atmosphere he’s brought into New York City since being elected,” Avital Levene, a Jewish influencer who called the Mamdani cartoon “not funny,” said in an interview. “However, he’s stood with the Jewish people since taking office. People literally call him a terrorist and use terms like ‘yemach shemo’ (may his name be erased). There’s a way to criticize someone’s political views without using racist slurs.”
Like Levene and Spitalnick, Jacoby said he disagreed with some of the mayor’s beliefs about Israel. But he said those disagreements “pale in the face of the danger of authoritarianism, neo-fascism and white nationalism in this country.”
The post Attacks on Mamdani test Jewish efforts to confront Islamophobia as 9/11 anniversary nears appeared first on The Forward.
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Argentine court orders return of Nazi-looted painting to Jewish collector’s heir
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – A Dutch journalist hunting for art treasures belonging to an Amsterdam Jewish art dealer spent years trying to get answers from Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of the Nazi financier who had made off with some of them, with no luck. So last year he went to her house in Mar del Plata, a resort city on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
No one was home, but the journalist, Peter Schouten, noticed a “for sale” sign outside the property from Robles Casas & Campos, a local real estate agency.
Schoten went to the agency’s website, where the house was listed for $265,000. As he scrolled through the listing, he noticed something in a photograph of the living room. Schouten recognized the painting hanging above a sofa: “Portrait of a Lady,” most likely the work of the 18th-century northern Italian painter known as Il Pitocchetto.
On Friday, Argentine federal judge Santiago Inchausti authorized the restitution of “Portrait of a Lady,” which belonged to the collection of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, to his daughter-in-law and sole heir, Marei von Saher.
“The property had been listed for sale on a real estate agency’s website, and one of the photographs showed a painting in the living room that matched one of the works from Goudstikker’s collection that had been sought for years,” Inchausti wrote in his ruling.
Goudstikker was one of Holland’s most prominent Jewish art dealers before World War II. In 1940, he fled the Nazi-occupied Netherlands with his wife and son, carrying a black notebook listing some 1,400 artworks. After his death during the voyage, his widow preserved it, and the notebook later became key evidence in the family’s restitution efforts.
His gallery and collection fell under Nazi control. Hermann Goering, a powerful deputy to Adolf Hitler, acquired hundreds of paintings from Goudstikker’s collection in a forced sale that Dutch authorities later determined was directly linked to Nazi persecution.
Herberto Robinson, von Saher’s lawyer who specializes in estate planning and asset protection, described what happened after Schoten’s sleuthing in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At that point, the journalist contacted attorney Yael Weitz in Freedman Normand Friedland of New York where she specializes in art and cultural property law,” he said “She then contacted us and asked us to take on the case. The family’s sole intention was to recover the painting. They were not interested in pursuing those who had possessed it or in seeking financial compensation, they wanted the artwork returned.”
Kadgien is the daughter of Friedrich Kadgien, a German financial official who worked for the Nazi regime and later escaped to South America. The elder Kadgien, who had close ties to Goering, fled Germany in 1945 to Switzerland, eventually making his way to Argentina, where he started a business and raised a family. He died in 1978.
Kadgien and her husband at first did not cooperate. The realtor’s listing was removed after the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad published its report. Argentine authorities then searched the property on Aug. 26, 2025, but the painting had been removed and replaced with another artwork, while an outline matching its dimensions remained visible on the wall.
Kadgien and her husband, Juan Carlos Cortegoso, were placed under house arrest for 72 hours while authorities searched the family’s other properties. They subsequently turned the artwork over to federal prosecutors and were charged with aggravated concealment.
Experts from Argentina’s National Academy of Fine Arts attributed the work to Giacomo Antonio Melchiorre Ceruti, known as Il Pitocchetto, and valued it at approximately €250,000. The local and national Jewish communities took a keen interest in the case.
“We are very pleased and hope this marks the beginning of many more restitutions, as we know there are undoubtedly other works out there that rightfully belong to families who suffered this tragic fate,” Clauda Beatriz Malamud, the president of Sociedad Union Israelita Marplatense, the local Jewish community body, told JTA.
Under an agreement Inchausti approved, the criminal proceedings against the couple were suspended for two years, subject to a set of conditions. They irrevocably renounce any right or claim to the artwork, clearing the way for its restitution. The painting will remain in the custody of Argentina’s Supreme Court until the restitution is carried out. They also agreed to pay 4.8 million Argentine pesos — approximately $3,180 — in 24 monthly installments to the support association of Mar del Plata’s Interzonal Specialized Maternal and Child Hospital.
According to well-placed sources at the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum, von Saher has expressed interest in lending the painting to the museum for a temporary exhibition, possibly for one or two years. The exhibition would help raise awareness of the systematic theft of Jewish-owned art under the Nazi regime and the continuing international effort to return such works to their rightful owners. No final agreement about this has been announced.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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