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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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William Lawrence, El-Sayed-aligned progressive, takes Democratic House nomination in Michigan battleground race
(JTA) — An outspoken pro-Palestinian progressive who campaigned with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed bested two establishment-backed picks in a Democratic House primary for a battleground district in the state on Tuesday.
William Lawrence, a co-founder of the climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement, took the Democratic nomination in the state’s 7th District, with the Associated Press calling the race for him Tuesday night. With 58% of the vote in, Lawrence had around 43% of the tally in the three-way race.
His opponents Bridget Brink, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and former Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam, two centrist candidates who boasted military and foreign policy backgrounds, effectively split the establishment vote and opened a lane for the progressive.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the movement we’ve built in mid-Michigan,” Lawrence wrote on social media after the race was called. “We’re building a movement made up of real Michiganders across political divides, not DC consultants.”
At the time the AP called the race for Lawrence, another House candidate backed by El-Sayed, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, was awaiting results in his challenge to the incumbent in Michigan’s 13th District.
As with several other victorious Democratic House candidates this primary cycle, Lawrence made pro-Palestinian advocacy a central plank of his campaign. He was the only Democrat in his race to accuse Israel of genocide, and at his rally with El-Sayed in Lansing, the candidate had called for America to “stop arming Israel.”
Lawrence, whose campaign also tapped into growing public anger over data centers, will face Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett in November.
Lawrence’s victory marked one area where party leadership will be pressured to support pro-Palestinian progressives if it hopes to retake Congress in November. Democrats have eyed the district, which was held by centrist Jewish Democrat Sen. Elissa Slotkin before Barrett, as a top target for flipping. Slotkin had endorsed Maasdam in the race’s homestretch while staying out of the Senate race.
It won’t be easy to line the party up behind Lawrence. He had been condemned by the Congressional Black Caucus during his campaign over resurfaced podcast comments in which he said Black Democratic leaders “defang the white left” — comments he later explained as having been prompted by his anger over Israel’s war in Gaza. Centrist House Democrats have questioned his ability to win in November.
But his campaign told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement ahead of primary day that they were confident his focus on “ending military support to human rights abusers and bringing that money home to fund good jobs, housing, and healthcare here at home” would play well across party lines.
The post William Lawrence, El-Sayed-aligned progressive, takes Democratic House nomination in Michigan battleground race appeared first on The Forward.
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Michigan Democrats await Senate winner in party’s biggest test yet on Israel
The Democratic primary for the open Senate seat in Michigan appeared too close to call Tuesday night, with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens locked in a tight race that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics.
According to unofficial results, El-Sayed, a physician and the son of Egyptian immigrants, held a narrow lead over opponent Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment favorite — 49.9% vs. 46.3% — with 65% of the vote counted for the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters.
The Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle. Its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million on ads attacking El-Sayed and promoting Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens’ own campaign through its donors’ portal.
If El-Sayed prevails, it would deliver a blow to the establishment and to the U.S.-Israel fundraising group, AIPAC, its biggest setback since it started its direct political spending in 2021 and after years of helping defeat progressive critics of Israel who challenged congressional incumbents. The brand has become increasingly controversial among Democratic voters in the wake of the Gaza war. Congressional candidates, including some Jewish Democrats, have promised not to take contributions from AIPAC.
Supporters of El-Sayed remained optimistic that the candidate’s upset victory would be proof positive that the future of the Democratic Party lies in candidates who support cutting off U.S. aid to Israel and characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive insurgent’s most prominent backer, said on CNN the race reflected a broader shift in Democratic politics. “What we are seeing, no matter what happens tonight in Michigan — and I hope very much that El-Sayed wins — is: you’re seeing the transformation of the Democratic Party, and what the debate within the Democratic Party is about,” he said. Sanders added that the campaign showed that progressive candidates are challenging the party establishment not only on ideology, but also on how campaigns are run.
Winning the primary may be the easier test. Michigan remains one of the nation’s top battleground states, and a close finish would suggest ongoing divisions within the Democratic coalition. El-Sayed will have to carry moderate Democrats who backed Stevens, while taking on former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a race that could help determine control of the Senate. Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
How we got here
The Michigan race became a culmination of several political currents that have been building for years.
It reflected lingering anger among Americans over the Gaza war, Democratic criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frustration among progressives over AIPAC’s support for some Republicans who challenged the 2020 election results, and the growing influence of the Democratic Socialists of America, accelerated by the political rise of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral race last year.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities and the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war in the 2024 presidential primary, made it a natural testing ground for progressive forces.
El-Sayed highlighted the Gaza war and AIPAC’s involvement in Democratic primaries when he launched his campaign in April 2025 — months before AIPAC spent a dollar. He advocated for ending unconditional military aid to Israel and framed his candidacy as a fight against outside influence. Notably, El-Sayed supported the “uncommitted” movement, though he later endorsed Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out.
According to data compiled by Milan Singh, a fellow at The Argument, a liberal opinion-focused media publication, insurgent progressive candidates for Congress mentioned Israel in 48% of their fundraising emails.
With most major primaries already decided, this race became the biggest Democratic showdown yet over Israel.
Jewish divide
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race — with Jews both in fierce opposition to El-Sayed and fiery support.
For many Jews, El-Sayed’s questioning of whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state and his decision to campaign alongside controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric, were cause for alarm. El-Sayed also came under fire for calling the Israeli government “evil” like Hamas.
Rep. Hillary Scholten, a second-term Michigan Democrat, said on CNN Tuesday night that El-Sayed reinforced concerns some voters had about him by campaigning again with Piker in the final days before the primary. “Elections are about choices,” she said. “What is the message that you want to send to your voters?”
At the same time, El-Sayed courted Jewish voters. He attended a Passover seder at Congregation T’chiyah, a progressive Reconstructionist synagogue outside Detroit. Many of its congregants volunteered for El-Sayed’s campaign with a group dubbed “Jews for Abdul.”
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin — who lost his House election against Stevens in 2022 after AIPAC poured millions into defeating him — endorsed El-Sayed.
In the final days of the campaign, Stevens had sharpened her concerns about El-Sayed, accusing him of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans.”
El-Sayed rejected accusations of antisemitism and argued that his critics conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
The post Michigan Democrats await Senate winner in party’s biggest test yet on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco
For all of us who don’t know much about geography, international political crises are always welcome. Since the start of Trump 2.0, we have been discovering places we never knew existed, but now present existential threats. From straits — think Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — to islands — whether Greenland or Heard and McDonald — we now have, along with higher gas and food prices, a better appreciation of our world.
Late last week, yet another obscure part of the globe was suddenly brought, this time without our president’s assistance, to the attention of western media: Ceuta. A city of approximately 83,000 inhabitants, Ceuta is ensconced on a peninsula which, though attached to the Moroccan coastline, is nevertheless under Spanish rule, even while it enjoys a significant amount of autonomy.
As we now know, Ceuta was also the magnet that, starting on July 30, drew about 72,000 young Moroccans who sought, mostly by swimming, to reach its beaches and, from there, perhaps reach Europe. That nearly 100 young men and women drowned in the effort — one that moreover proved naught for those who reached Ceuta as nearly all of them were obliged to return to Morocco — adds a heartrending chapter to the complex history of a city where tragedy has long mixed with comity.
Founded two millennia earlier by the Phoenicians, Ceuta was successively ruled by the Romans, Ottomans, Portuguese and Spaniards. In 1492, when the kingdom expelled its Jewish population, a few thousand crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, where they managed to avoid the bloody reach of the Inquisition. Yet they were not the first Jews to make their home on this tip of North Africa; as early as the 11th century, the Spanish-Jewish poet Abraham Ibn Ezra refers to the Jews of Ceuta in one of his poems. For the next few centuries, the small community lived in relative peace alongside its Christian and Muslim neighbors, a continuation, argues the historian Veronica Viviana Reyes, of the medieval “al-Andalus,” that brilliant and brief moment of cultural convergence between the three “peoples of the Book.”
Come the mid-20th century, the steadily dwindling Jewish community received reinforcements with the arrival of a few hundred Sephardic Jews who left their native Morocco in the wake of its independence from France. Earlier that century, several hundred Indians, mostly Sindhi, who were subjects under the British Raj also arrived in Ceuta, drawn by the city’s busy trading and commercial opportunities. Though the statistics are approximate — Spain does not require citizens to list their religion — about 58% of Ceuta’s population is Christian, 40% is Muslim, and the remaining couple of percentage points comprise its Jewish and Hindi communities. [ As a result, this ancient city attached by a thread of rock and soil to North Africa has accomplished a remarkable feat: the braiding of four distinct faith communities into what the locals call convivencia, or peaceful coexistence.
Yet, as last week’s event revealed, convivencia is a fragile thing. The influx of Moroccan youths on the beaches and streets of Ceuta, though over as quickly as it began, has become the gift that does not stop giving for the extreme-right media and politicians in countries bordering Spain. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ethno-nationalist party the National Rally, demanded that the French government “reinforce its border controls.”
Not to be outdone, her second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, warned that these “invaders will soon be on our streets.” Going a step further, the extreme-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain’s suspension from the Schengen Accord—the guarantee of free movement of citizens across the borders of European Union nations — and resurrected immigration controls for Spanish citizens, although Spain does not share a border with Italy. (This geographical fact did not deter Mette Fredricksen, the prime minister of distant Denmark, from voicing her support for Meloni.)
Inevitably, the old chestnut of a Jewish conspiracy has also been resurrected. Public figures, ranging from antisemitic fantasist Candace Owens, through the former director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, to the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, have posted or reposted wink-wink, nudge-nudge claims that Israel orchestrated the mad rush of Moroccans towards Ceuta. The reason cited for this nefarious feat is Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to embarrass the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who has been one of the harshest European critics of the war in Gaza and a proponent of a more liberal immigration policy than his European peers. The Moroccan government’s irritation over Spain’s support of Algerian claims to the western Sahara makes this baseless claim seem more reasonable.
The political and rhetorical theatrics have little to do with reality. Europe is not being overrun by what Marion Maréchal, a politician to the right of her aunt Marine Le Pen, described as a “veritable invasion” by “hordes of young Moroccans.” Or, for that matter, what her Spanish homologue, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the extreme-right party Vox, insisted was “an act of war” against Spain and, by extension, Europe.
This frenzied response deliberately ignores the fact that not a single Moroccan migrant entered Spain — a strait, after all, runs between Spain and Ceuta — and have nearly all been returned by Spanish soldiers and police to Morocco. Tellingly, residents of Ceuta have also used the word “invasion,” but with greater nuance. As a journalist for Le Monde reported, none of the locals she interviewed described the Moroccans as enemies. Though frightened by the sudden and massive influx, they also understood the migrants were not seeking “to rob them,” but instead to find a better future. Besides, as one Ceutan, Rachel Gomes, observed, she has Muslim in-laws. “This does not make for problems. Four cultures exist here — Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian — that live together remarkably well.” If only a similar convivencia reigned among the members of the European Union.
The post The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco appeared first on The Forward.
