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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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How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin
Berlin Before and After: A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times
By Wendy Lesser
Harper, 352 pages, $32
For years, Wendy Lesser was a proud, Germany-avoiding Jew with what she calls “an ingrained distaste for the nation that gave rise to the Third Reich.” Then, in 2003, Lesser, founder and editor of The Threepenny Review and a prolific critic and author, was the recipient of a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Those few months in residence started her love affair with that history-embattled city, where she now returns regularly and feels surprisingly at home.
“One of the things I discovered, when I eventually got to Berlin,” she writes in her latest book, Berlin Before and After, “was how deeply Jewish that city’s culture still is. Or…how thoroughly the German and Jewish cultures at one time entered into each other, so that the versions we now have of them…are still colored by that mutual infusion.”
Berlin Before and After is Lesser’s highly idiosyncratic, selective take on the city — as much travelogue as cultural history. Its subtitle, A Cautionary Mirror for Our Times, evoking the civil rights abuses of the Trump era, reveals something of its raison-d’être. But Lesser doesn’t belabor the comparison, by now a cliché of American political discourse. She is at least as interested in the diverse artistic pleasures of contemporary Berlin as in the historical shadows that shape its landscape and personality.
The conceit of the book is simple: Lesser begins with an admiring look at Berlin in the year 1929, which she defines as “the last year in which it was possible to turn a blind eye” to impending disaster. “Runaway inflation, widespread economic despair, and violent social unrest were just around the corner,” she writes, “but they were invisible to most people.”
Lesser skips over the rise of the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the devastation of World War II and resumes her narrative in the contemporary city, with its wealth of museums, memorials and other cultural attractions. An aficionado of Berlin’s public transit, she ends, somewhat bizarrely, by taking readers on an extended bus ride across the city.
Some of the greatest achievements of the Weimar period, she argues, date to 1929. Lesser proceeds chronologically but also associatively, touching on architectural treatises, novels (including Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel), and the photography, paintings, silent film, dance and theater of the era. Though her focus isn’t political, she lauds the achievements of chancellor and, later, foreign minister Gustav Stresemann. She also remarks on the celebrity of Albert Einstein, one of the many German Jewish scientists and intellectuals who eventually found refuge in the United States.
In the section “Berlin Now,” Lesser is concerned with the impacts of two separate, but related traumas: the Nazi era and the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Wall dividing the city into east and west. Berlin’s intense memorial landscape has by now been the subject of countless articles and books, but that doesn’t impede Lesser from digging in. “Berlin is the companion who never shuts up, and what it wants to tell you about is itself,” she writes. The city “lives on a daily basis with its history in a way that is true of no other place I know.”
Lesser is right on the big picture. But her patience for dissection of both the history and its memorialization is limited. She rushes through the Topography of Terror museum (admittedly, a heavy lift), built on the site of Gestapo and SS headquarters and the Reich Security Main Office. She has little to say about the German Resistance Memorial Center, another site-specific museum, located in the military headquarters where the failed July 20, 1944, assassination plot against Adolf Hitler was planned. And she contemptuously dismisses what she calls “the self-glorifying architecture” of Daniel Libeskind’s generally acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin in a single paragraph, without any reference to the many important shows it has mounted over the years or to its revamped (in 2020) core exhibition.
Nor does Lesser explicitly consider the notion of the “counter-memorial” — those self-effacing monuments that serve as a critique of more conventional, celebratory memorials. She nevertheless describes several of them. Among the earliest is Bibliothek, the underground “empty library” memorial on Bebelplatz, commemorating the 1933 book burnings that took place there. She visits Peter Eisenman’s vast, unmissable (and controversial) Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but makes no mention of its excellent underground museum. She examines the now ubiquitous Stolpersteine (Stumble-Stones), recording the last known residences, deportation dates and fates of Berlin’s Jewish residents, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Places of Remembrance, whose playful signs attached to lampposts catalog the plethora of anti-Jewish ordinances enacted by the Third Reich.
She also covers memorials to Germany’s division, including remnants of the Wall, the Stasi Museum, the Spandau Zitadelle (with its collection of “toxic monuments”) and the gruesome Hohenschönhausen Prison, whose brutal past clearly captures her imagination.
Berlin’s greatest draw for Lesser is arguably its culture, though it, too, is inseparable from history. She delves into the art of Gerhard Richter, the music of the Russian-born conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the television series Babylon Berlin, and the literature and film of East Germany.
The resulting narrative is an intellectual potpourri, probably most engaging to those who know Berlin (but not too well) or who might be contemplating a visit. Lesser follows her own wide-ranging curiosity and assumes that we’ll tag along. “Viscerally and consciously, with a kind of self-awareness that is rare in a collective entity,” she writes, radiating enthusiasm, “Berlin has continued to reveal itself to me in ways I never cease to find moving.”
The post How a Jewish, German-averse writer came to love Berlin appeared first on The Forward.
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What Black voters can teach Michigan Jews about Abdul El-Sayed
Jewish Democrats in Michigan face a tough choice. They can vote for Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate whose views clash with their own, or withhold their support for the Democratic candidate for senator in a razor-close election that may determine which party controls the Senate.
In a race where a single percentage point separates the two candidates, and in which Jews make up 1.4% of the electorate, every Jewish vote counts. That’s why it’s instructive to look at the history of another minority voting bloc — Black Americans.
Black Americans have faced a version of the El-Sayed dilemma for a century: Should they support a candidate who is imperfect or even hostile on issues they care about intensely, or hold their noses, be pragmatic and vote for the larger prize of institutional power?
Black Americans “don’t have the luxury of picking a candidate who is purely for their interests,” Sam Fulwood III, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who specializes in race and public policy, told me in a phone interview. “I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in history where there’s been a pure choice.”
I get why so many Michigan Jewish voters see El-Sayed as the ultimate “impure” choice. He said he’d cut off both offensive and even defensive military aid to Israel. He called the Israeli government evil, comparing it to Hamas. He has campaigned with Hasan Piker, the influencer who called Israel “the Jewish ISIS” and said that American Jews bring violence on themselves by supporting Israel.
Amid a storm of criticism and calls to distance himself from Piker, El-Sayed reiterated his support for Jews. “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
At the same time, El-Sayed’s progressive stances on health care, education and economic justice and even his sharp criticism of the Israeli government have resonated with some Jewish voters.
Others have been satisfied by his pledges to fight antisemitism and his call for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, in his words, guarantees equal rights “for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”
“So many young Jewish people are active in Abdul’s campaign, and it’s their Judaism that leads them to that position,” said former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, a self-described Zionist.
Many Michigan Jewish Democrats remain unconvinced. Just before the High Holidays, dozens of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders signed onto a list of “non-negotiable” principles about Jewish safety and Israel that any candidate hoping to earn their support must espouse. The petition, called Non-Negotiable Michigan, didn’t name El-Sayed directly, but it’s clear he was its target.
Ultimatums cut both ways. In setting terms for El-Sayed Jewish leaders have created one for themselves. Elections, despite what we learned in high school, aren’t popularity contests. A vote isn’t an approval. It’s a choice.
The Democratic Jews on the fence over El-Sayed may ultimately be faced, come November, with the prospect of an imperfect candidate representing a wing of the party they fear, versus two more years of a Republican majority that will continue to rubber-stamp the Trump administration’s damage to the economy, democracy, the environment, the social safety net, health care and immigrant rights.
If the choice is novel for many Jewish Democrats, it’s old news for Black Americans.
The dilemma goes back at least as far as the 1936 election, when Black voters shifted to the Democratic Party to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, even though FDR, fearful of losing Southern support, repeatedly refused to support federal anti-lynching legislation.
Or consider Lyndon Johnson. In 1957, Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, stripped the enforcement teeth out of that year’s Civil Rights Act to get it passed, bypassing the objections of civil rights leaders. Seven years later, after Johnson became president and signed the Civil Rights Act, Black voters delivered him about 94% of their vote — despite a legislative record on civil rights that had been mixed at best.
Even more recently, Black voters have had to sacrifice the perfect for the good, supporting Hillary Clinton despite the impact of Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that contributed to mass incarceration.
In all these cases, Black voters didn’t overlook or excuse these records. Instead, they made a strategic calculation to focus on the bigger goals, realizing politicians are often imperfect vehicles to get us there.
“Black Democrats have overlooked differences in the Democratic Party and even overlooked prejudice because they knew the Democratic Party was much better than the alternative,” Ada Horwich, a longtime Democratic Jewish activist in Los Angeles told me. “We need to learn from their political behavior.”
Perhaps the best example, Fulwood reminded me, was John F. Kennedy, who saw the civil rights movement as a domestic distraction. But in 1960, after Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed, Kennedy privately — so as not to offend Southern Democrats — called Coretta Scott King to offer support, while his brother Robert worked behind the scenes to secure King’s release. That persuaded King’s father, King Sr., to throw his considerable electoral influence behind the Democrat.
“He took a lot of Black voters with him,” said Fulwood, “even though Kennedy was not great.”
Fast-forward to 1963, and JFK came around to support the movement.
“It’s a difficult thing,” King Jr. said at the time, “to teach a president.”
One lesson is that politicians are teachable. Stances that seem “non-negotiable” now can change.
That mixture of cold calculation and hope is exactly what this election is asking Jewish Michiganders to negotiate. Or, as Fulwood said of so many electoral choices Black Americans have faced, “One candidate is very bad, and one is less bad.”
The post What Black voters can teach Michigan Jews about Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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South Florida Democrat Moskowitz airs campaign ad targeting antisemitism with concentration camp footage
(JTA) — South Florida U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz pulled on his family’s story as Jews in the Holocaust in a campaign ad targeting antisemitism, as he strives to retain his seat in the November general election.
“In every generation, they rise against us,” the Jewish incumbent says in the ad over a background of somber music and black-and-white photos from a concentration camp. “My great-grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz.”
“In our generation, right here, the Parkland shooter had swastikas carved into his gun,” he continues, standing in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, referring to the 2018 fatal shooting that killed 14 students and three educators.
Moskowitz, a top Democratic supporter of Israel in Congress, who fended off progressive challenger Oliver Larkin in a heated August primary, emphasizes in the ad that he has worked to fight antisemitism through bipartisan laws. Some of this legislative action has involved increasing security at synagogues and Jewish nonprofits and expanding education to reduce hate crimes.
“Never again is now,” Moskowitz concludes.
Moskowitz won the August primary with 63.5% of Democratic voter support, to Larkin’s 36.5%. But Larkin was vocal throughout the race about his opposition to arms sales to Israel, going so far as to label the country as a “religious supremacist” nation.
As Moskowitz prepares to face former Boca Raton Mayor Scott Singer, a Republican who is also Jewish, the Democrat may be facing a tight race in a region that had previously been solidly blue.
The 25th Congressional District, which includes parts of Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Miami Beach, is about 25% Jewish, according to local estimates.
Yet recent redistricting efforts have transformed the region into territory that President Donald Trump would have likely won in the 2024 elections. In fact, the Cook Political Report declared a shift from “solid D” to “toss up.”
“There’s no doubt that the race for the new 25th District will be highly competitive in a favorable environment for Democrats,” the report stated.
Moskowitz’s team emphasized the “deeply personal” nature of the congressman’s battle against antisemitism, in a statement issued alongside the ad’s release. He is confronting this challenge, his team explained, by “connecting his family’s experience during the Holocaust to the hatred that continues to threaten our communities today.”
While Moskowitz’s great-grandparents died in Auschwitz, his grandparents were able to escape Europe right before the war. His grandmother left on the Kindertransport, an organized effort that rescued Jewish children from Nazi-controlled territories beginning in 1938.
By Tuesday evening, the Google Ads Transparency Center, which includes data on YouTube ads, did not yet reflect how much money the campaign had spent on its ads there. Meta’s Ad Library also did not yet have data as to how much had been spent on the Facebook version of the ad posted there.
Stephen Sussman, a professor of public administration at Barry University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that although “Holocaust imagery should never become routine campaign material,” he doesn’t believe that this ad has crossed a line.
“The Holocaust was, of course, a real event that continues to shape Jewish life and memory,” Sussman said, recognizing that Moskowitz’s great-grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz and that many Jews today feel threatened by antisemitism.
“He is not comparing his opponent to Hitler or using the Holocaust to make an unrelated political attack,” Sussman added.
The professor also noted the ad’s direct connections to the congressman’s record, such as his leadership in passing bipartisan legislation on antisemitism awareness and in boosting funding for synagogue security.
Sussman acknowledged that when Holocaust imagery becomes part of a campaign, there “is a legitimate concern” that other people might deploy that imagery less responsibly. But he stressed that given Moskowitz’s history and work record, as well as the current political climate, this particular ad is “powerful but defensible.”
Ken Goldstein, a politics professor at the University of San Francisco, offered a similar perspective, explaining that of the thousands of ads he has watched in his lifetime, he found this one to be powerful but not particularly controversial.
“He was certainly using pictures of the Holocaust, jarring images, but they were his family’s story,” said Goldstein, who is an expert on the impacts of political advertising.
“I don’t think he’s using it to personally attack anybody else except the Parkland shooter,” he added, noting that the ad isn’t being used to attack an opponent. “This one does not strike me as particularly harsh, unfair, or out of bounds at all.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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