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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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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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‘Patently Antisemitic’: US Counterterror Chief Quits, Under Fire for Claiming Israel Tricked Trump Into Iran War
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
Joe Kent, head of the US National Counterterrorism Center who had ties to white nationalist figures, stepped down on Tuesday in protest over the joint US-Israel strikes in Iran, claiming in a resignation letter which, according to critics, contained antisemitic tropes that President Donald Trump had been duped by Israel into entering the war.
In the letter, addressed to Trump and posted to the X social media platform, Kent said that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
“Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran,” Kent wrote.
Responding to the claims, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said the argument that Trump had been pushed into war by Israel ignored decades of Iranian hostility and repeated attacks on Americans.
“Every day since 1979, the Iranian regime swore to destroy the United States and, in pursuit of that pledge, sought to develop strategic weapons while committing hundreds of acts of war against Americans,” Oren told The Algemeiner. “President Trump did not need to be dragged into defending the American people from this looming threat and certainly not by a purportedly cunning Israeli leader.”
“Suggestions to the contrary made by Joe Kent and others on both the right and the left are deeply insulting to the president and patently antisemitic,” he added.
In his letter, Kent said Trump was deceived by Israelis and the media “into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory.”
“This was a lie and the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.”
Kent said he could not endorse war with Iran as “a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel.”
Shannon Kent, his first wife, was killed in a suicide bombing by the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria in 2019.
Trump responded by saying that while Kent, who was a top aide to intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard, was a “nice guy,” he was “very weak on security.”
“When I read the statement, I realized that it’s a good thing that he’s out, because he said that Iran was not a threat,” Trump said. “Iran was a threat.”
The American Jewish Committee called Kent’s letter “deeply disturbing” and said that by “falsely blaming ‘Israel and its powerful American lobby,’” Kent had “invoked antisemitic tropes.”
“Such claims echo long-standing conspiratorial narratives about Jewish power and influence that have fueled hatred, discrimination, and violence for generations and should never be amplified by government leaders,” the organization said in a statement.
Gerard Filitti, a legal analyst at the New York-based think tank, The Lawfare Project, said Kent’s letter was “textbook antisemitic dog-whistling dressed up as patriotism,” with a darker agenda that aligned him with the anti-Israel wing of the Republican Party.
Kent was charging that “American officials, American intelligence, and the American president himself were manipulated by Jewish power into a war that serves no American interest,” Filitti noted in an op-ed published in the Times of Israel.
“That is not a foreign policy critique. That is a conspiracy theory with a body count of history behind it, and Americans deserve a full accounting of who Kent is.”
Filitti outlined the repeated scrutiny Kent faced during his US congressional runs in Washington state over links to far-right and white nationalist figures, including Nick Fuentes, who said Kent once told him, “I love what you’re doing.” Kent later distanced himself publicly but was also interviewed by a Fuentes-linked outlet and said American culture was “anti-white” and “anti-straight-white-male.”
The controversy extended beyond Fuentes. The Associated Press reported Kent’s campaign paid a Proud Boys member as a consultant, while critics also pointed to his ties to Patriot Prayer founder Joey Gibson and to Greyson Arnold, a Christian nationalist who called Hitler “misunderstood.” When the connections drew attention, Kent repeatedly said he was unaware of their views.
Kent’s resignation will bolster his standing with the isolationist wing of the Republican Party associated with Tucker Carlson, especially as the Trump administration reportedly braces for a Carlson interview with him, according to Axios.
In his letter, Kent wrote that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation,” framing that as a confident judgment despite having said something very different before taking office, Filitti noted, treating warnings about Iranian assassination plots as credible.
In a September 2024 post on X, he wrote that “Iran has been after Trump since January of 2020 after he ordered the targeted killing of the terrorist Qasem Soleimani. This isn’t a new threat.”
The timing of Kent’s abrupt reversal was too politically convenient, according to Filitti.
“Either Kent was wrong then, or he is lying now,” he said.
“His [Kent’s] resignation letter doesn’t represent a whistleblower’s courage; it represents a fired official’s revisionism, dressed up in the language of patriotism and laced with the oldest smear in the canon,” Filitti said.
He added that the former counterterrorism chief should be questioned under oath about what he knew of Iran’s threat posture while advising the president, and why he later walked back his views.
Nevertheless, even if Kent is appealing to the Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Candace Owens lane of the far-right, recent polls show that bloc is not representative of most MAGA voters. An NBC survey conducted about a week into the war found roughly 90 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans supported the strikes, compared with far lower backing among Republicans outside that camp.
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Nigeria: 25 Killed, Over 200 Injured in Triple Bombing Terror Attacks
A Nigerian police truck stands at the deserted Maiduguri Monday Market the morning after multiple explosions struck the northeastern city of Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria, March 17, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Kingimi
Three simultaneous explosions hit Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s northeast state Borno, on Monday night, killing dozens of people as terrorism continues to wreak havoc across Sub-Saharan Africa.
The death count was initially reported as 23, but Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima stated on Tuesday that it had since risen to 25.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the bombings, which also left more than 200 people hospitalized after suicide bombers targeted the gate of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, the Post Office flyover area, and Maiduguri Monday Market.
Following the attacks, medical services rushed victims to hospitals before police and military moved in to secure the scenes and begin investigations.
Bagoni Alkali, an eyewitness of the explosions who helped bring victims to the hospital, told the Associated Press that over 200 people were injured and receiving care in the accident and emergency department.
“Investigations are ongoing to further ascertain the circumstances surrounding the incidents and to bring perpetrators to justice,” according to Borno police.
Caleb Jonah survived the attack on the hospital with injuries to his legs and hands.
“I was coming to the hospital to check [in on] a patient when I saw two men struggling with the security men at the gate,” he said. “Before I could process what was going on I heard the deafening blast and I passed out.”
Mohammed Hassan — who works in a volunteer force backing counter-terrorism military operations — described the attack as one of the deadliest in Maiduguri in years and noted that hospitals were “in dire need of blood.”
In a Monday statement, Borno’s Governor Babagana Umara Zulum said that “my thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims and those injured as a result of the blast. The act is utterly condemnable, barbaric, and inhumane.”
Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu called the attacks “desperate acts of the evil-minded terrorist groups” and said that “our gallant military and civilian task forces will curtail and put them down.”
Nigerian politician Rotimi Amaechi, who previously served as governor of Rivers and ex-minister of transportation, condemned Tinubu in a Tuesday statement.
“This government is killing Nigerians. I repeat, President Tinubu’s government is killing Nigerians, literally destroying lives. He has failed in the most sacred duty of protecting the lives of the citizens of this country,” Amaechi said.
“The Monday bombings in Maiduguri are not just a tragedy; it is a damning indictment of a leadership that has grown complacent, incompetent, and indifferent to the sufferings and deaths of Nigerians at the hands of ravaging bandits,” he added.
Noting that Tinubu had issued his statement during a trip to the United Kingdom, Amaechi said that “while families mourn and communities live in fear, those in power issue hollow statements and make empty promises. In fact, now, they don’t bother to make promises anymore. They just move on as if nothing happened. Tinubu would rather be dining and partying in London while Nigeria burns. They just don’t care!”
Nigeria’s military said on Monday that its forces had also engaged suspected Islamist terrorists outside Maiduguri. The leading jihadist organizations which the state has battled for years have included Boko Haram and its splinter group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Another of the region’s most lethal Islamist organizations is Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al Qaeda-linked group which the Africa Center for Strategic Studies has named as responsible for 83 percent of deaths regionally.
On Wednesday, Nigeria’s military fought Islamic extremists again, killing 80 who attacked a base. Troops had reportedly anticipated the attack and called on Nigeria’s air force to deliver precision strikes.
Over the last decade, Islamist terrorism has surged in the Sahel region of central Africa, where 17 out of every 20 attacks classified as serious have taken place. The Sahel — also called the Sahelian acacia savanna — runs south of the Sahara Desert across the African continent.
Burkina Faso has seen the most attacks, accounting for 20 percent of the world’s terrorist killings since 2020. Neighboring Mali and Niger have also seen increases in terrorism, with analysts regarding the countries’ recent military coups as a key factor in destabilizing state security. New leaders have rejected Western military assistance and chosen Russian mercenaries instead. This rise in chaos has bled over into Nigeria, which now accounts for 6 percent of global terrorism deaths.
In November, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point published new research identifying Africa as the primary theater now in the continued fight against Islamist extremists. Analysts found that 86 percent of all terrorism-related deaths occurred in just 10 countries, with seven of them in Africa and five in the Sahel region.
A report released last month from India’s Observer Research Foundation (ORF), one of the top-ranked think tanks in the world, detailed how forests had become a key strategic territory for the terrorists seeking to impose Shariah in the Sahel, notably JNIM and the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), formerly known as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS).
“In recent years, forests across the Sahel and its southern periphery have evolved into core infrastructure for terrorist operations, enabling recruitment, financing, logistics, and even parallel governance,” wrote ORF’s Samir Bhattacharya and Shrestha Medhi. “As a matter of fact, this spatial transformation is a key reason behind the rapid expansion of terrorist violence across the Sahel.”
Bhattacharya and Medhi explained that “terrorist groups in the Sahel have learned that while holding cities is costly and difficult to sustain, controlling forests is relatively easier. Forests provide concealment from aerial surveillance and, due to limited road access, constrain mechanized military responses. They also create jurisdictional ambiguity, with overlapping authority between ranger forces and regular troops.”
The ORF report described three key advantages which this forest strategy provides for Sahel Islamists: inadequate armed patrol more focused on conservation than counterterrorism, dense vegetation which enables ambushes among the limited infrastructure, and already-existing black-market economies they can plunder to fund further attacks. The Sahel’s forest regions also obscure smuggling, gold mining, cattle grazing, and wildlife poaching.
According to Bhattacharya and Medhi, JNIM “has increasingly prioritized rural hinterlands, border zones, and conservation areas over urban centers.”
The group has embedded itself within the W-Arly-Pendjari Complex (WAP Complex), which UNESCO has designated as a World Heritage site and describes as “the largest and most important continuum of terrestrial, semi-aquatic and aquatic ecosystems in the West African savannah belt. The property is a refuge for wildlife species that have disappeared elsewhere in West Africa or are highly threatened.” The preserve contains the largest populations of elephants in West Africa as well as other large mammals including cheetahs, leopards, and the region’s only viable lion population.
The ORF report described how the WAP complex — which includes territory in Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger — has become “central” to the strategy of operating within forest regions. “By embedding itself within the park system, JNIM has secured a cross-border sanctuary that allows its militants to evade security forces by moving seamlessly between jurisdictions.”
Within the forests, JNIM operates as a governing authority and attempts to present itself as a superior alternative. “Where governments ban mining or grazing in the name of security or conservation, militants portray themselves as facilitators of livelihoods by loosening such restrictions,” Bhattacharya and Medhi wrote.
The terrorist conflicts represent an intra-religious war within Islam, as Muslim political leaders in Nigeria invoked their faith to call for justice.
“May Allah also bring this madness to an end. No religion sanctions the killing of the innocent,” Shettima wrote on Facebook. “Whatever is motivating them, may Allah either guide them onto the right path, or may Allah vanquish them from the surface of the earth.”
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Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats
A police report obtained by the Forward sheds light on the removal of a Chabad rabbi from the campus of Oberlin College last week, after the school administration became aware of a police report that alleged he engaged in sexually explicit conversations online concerning minors.
Rabbi Scott (Shlomo) Elkan, former co-director of Oberlin Chabad, allegedly sent sexually explicit texts, photos and videos through the messaging app Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12 and 13, according to the report.
In December 2025 messages to an adult on the platform, Elkan allegedly sent photos of himself giving a child a bath, alluded to touching the child’s genitals, and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap, the report stated.
Investigators said he also shared media of the child’s underwear that he appeared to have ejaculated on.
According to the report, the Oberlin Police Department closed the case after a 20-day investigation, with no charges filed.
In a phone interview with the Forward, Elkan said he regretted his participation in the chat, but that his messages were not based on real events. He did not address the photos.
“To be clear, what had happened was an online chat with an anonymous adult on purely fictional, you know, fantastical things that’s not rooted in any kind of reality whatsoever,” Elkan said. “And I entered that, and I should not have, and I take responsibility for that.”
Elkan added that he has been engaged in “professional care and spiritual counseling to deal with all of the stresses and all of the factors that led me to engaging in an unhealthy behavior.”
According to the report, in an interview with police, Elkan confirmed the Kik account belonged to him and said the chats were “escapism” from the stress of his everyday life. He denied ever viewing or possessing child pornography.
Elkan told the Forward that “oftentimes people think of rabbis as godlike and infallible,” and he “made a mistake in one of the weakest few moments of my life.”
“There was no crime. Nothing illegal. Poor judgment, yes,” Elkan said. “And there’s not a victim. The victims here are the Jewish community and my family.”
The fallout on campus
Oberlin president Carmen Twillie Ambar wrote an email last week alerting students and staff of the news that Elkan, who had worked at Oberlin Chabad since 2010, had been banned from campus — without sharing specifics.
“In the police report, Elkan admits to egregious actions in his personal life — including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children and objectionable behavior,” Ambar wrote. “This behavior violates Oberlin’s values, shocks the conscience, and makes it clear that we cannot allow him continued access to our campus and community.”
Elkan criticized how Oberlin handled the situation, saying the email that the college sent to the community about his departure was vague and allowed speculation to spread. He also said the email was made public during the meeting in which campus officials informed him that he had been banned.
“That’s where my hurt, and I think so much of the hurt of the community lies. Because every time we stuck our neck out for the college, and every time we work for the best interest of them and the community, what feels like the very first opportunity they had to show us that same support, they chose a very different route,” Elkan said. “So I take responsibility for my actions, and I hold the college incredibly responsible for how this has played out.”
Andrea Simakis, a spokesperson for Oberlin, said in a statement that representatives of the college met with Elkan via Zoom just prior to releasing the campus message “to let him know we were going to send it, why we were sending it, and that we were banning him from campus.”
Simakis added that the language in the campuswide email “reflects the information in the police report, which we obtained through a public records request.”
Along with serving as a Chabad rabbi, Elkan also certified Oberlin’s kosher kitchen and sometimes led Passover services and other religious celebrations on campus, according to Ambar’s email.
Chabad rabbis are not typically employed by universities, instead operating independently through the Chabad umbrella, with Chabad functioning as recognized campus religious organizations.
Elkan resigned from his position with Chabad last Friday, a Chabad spokesperson told the Forward. Chabad did not provide further comment.
In the email to the community, Ambar said Oberlin had not previously received reports concerning Elkan’s behavior and was now asking a third party to investigate whether members of the campus community had been affected.
Ambar added that the news would be especially difficult for “those who sought spiritual leadership and guidance from Elkan,” but “the seriousness of this matter requires clear and swift action.” Rabbi Allison Vann, who had led High Holy Day services on campus with Cleveland Hillel, will work with students for the remainder of the semester.
The post Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats appeared first on The Forward.