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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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‘Nobody Wants This’ is getting less and less Jewish
In its third season, Nobody Wants This gives up on Judaism.
The Netflix show, starring Adam Brody as the ultimate nice Jewish boy, Rabbi Noah Roklov, and Kristen Bell as Joanne, his shiksa — the show’s preferred term — girlfriend, has been accused, repeatedly, of doing Jews wrong. Its creator, Erin Foster, a fellow blonde who converted for her husband, has just as regularly defended her show as good for the Jews, a positive representation in a time of antisemitism, and has basically implied that anyone who didn’t like it just couldn’t take a joke.
But the complaints have been about more than jokes. Some of the issues were one-offs, like cheesy puns about a bad Jewish basketball team, the Matzo Ballers, that leaned into a stereotype of Jewish men being unathletic. Others pointed to bigger concerns, like when Noah’s mom, who is ostensibly observant, ate pork out of the trash when she thought no one was looking — was the show painting Jews as dishonest liars?
Or there was the time the show mixed up Tu B’Shvat — a holiday celebrating the birthday of trees — and Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning the destruction of the Temple. This sparked debates about whether the writers’ room had done enough to ensure basic cultural competency; the show’s Judaism seemed to rely on shallow signifiers, like a room full of menorahs, to shore up its identity. Foster may have claimed that she made the show to spread “positive Jewish stories,” but the writing has never engaged particularly deeply with Judaism.
Really, though, the biggest complaint across the first two seasons of Nobody Wants This was the Jewish women. Jewish men have often been presented as nebbishy or neurotic in the media, something Foster set out to change, but Jewish women have long gotten the short end of the stick, stereotype-wise, and the show not only doesn’t rehab that image, it worsens it. The Jewish mothers are critical and overbearing and too obsessed with their kids. The Jewish wives are simultaneously overbearing nags and prissy princesses. The non-Jewish women are somehow always cooler, more beautiful, crazy in a fun and quirky way instead of a shrewish one. Non-Jewish women might thirst after Jewish men and vice versa, but no one lusts after a Jewish woman.
Given that the entire concept of Nobody Wants This is a hot rabbi dating a shiksa, it should not surprise any readers that the issue of Jewish women is not solved in the third season. Yes, yes, the characters are all better developed; Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law (Jackie Tohn), who was once mean, is sort of endearingly cranky and wry, and they’ve started putting her in much better outfits. Noah’s mom, Bina (Tovah Feldshuh), is as overbearing as ever — in fact she actually acts even crazier than ever before — but she is much nicer to Joanne. But the Jewish women are still not good enough for the Jewish men. And this season, Joanne is converting, so she can even beat Jewish women at their own game.
Putting all that aside, however, the new season of Nobody Wants This is kind of delightful. And that was, in part, thanks to making this season far less Jewish, or at least less overtly focused on it.
That’s not to say it has no Jewish elements; Noah is still a rabbi, Joanne is, as mentioned earlier, converting in a class led by Sarah Silverman, who nails the role — unsurprisingly, given that her real-life sister Susan is a rabbi. But the conversion class is as focused on work drama than what everyone is learning about Judaism. Noah and Joanne have moved in together and have a housewarming party where they hang a mezuzah on their door frame, but the episode is more about Joanne’s ex who lives next-door. The couple tries out a tech-free Shabbat, but they spend it smoking weed, not walking to synagogue or otherwise doing anything particularly Jewish.
That turns out to be the season’s strength. It isn’t trying to demonstrate specifically Jewish family dynamics, nor does it shoehorn Jewish traditions into each episode. Instead, one plot line focuses on Noah’s attempt to navigate between his mom’s vision for his life, Joanne’s and his own — a universal topic, since parents across cultures feel deeply personally engaged in their kids’ major life events. Another storyline takes on dating, reinventing and moving on after a breakup, as Esther and Sascha, Noah’s brother, try to figure out coparenting, new hairstyles and what they really want out of life. (Though it feels odd, and like a bit of a plot hole, that Esther doesn’t seem to care about dating Jewish, even though she was very hostile to Noah dating a non-Jew in season one.)
Though Nobody Wants This has occasionally managed nice little sermonizing moments on the deeper meaning of various holidays or ideas, it has stumbled when it has tried to make Jewish Representation the show’s identity. Besides, Jews are diverse, both in religious observance level and cultural background. The show was doomed from the start if it was meant to be some sort of ur-text to represent American Jewish life in the 2020s; Jews aren’t a monolith, and design for everyone is bad design. A Syrian Jew was never going to feel seen, nor was a Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi.
In its third season, the show’s Judaism is about exactly what it is: a Reform L.A. rabbi and a woman who is (finally) converting for him. There’s an episode about Joanne’s last Christmas and her attachment to the holiday; Noah tries to make her final celebration of it the most festive one ever, and it’s a deeply sweet episode despite its total dearth of Jewish content. That’s a story worth telling, and something many converts likely feel, and a rabbi celebrating Christmas is also not the average Jewish experience.
There are, still, to be fair, plenty of issues. Noah cops to drinking coffee on Yom Kippur, which I think a lot of people will be upset about — a rabbi unable to properly observe the most holy day of the year? What’s wrong with these people? But now that the show doesn’t feel as though it’s trying to represent American Jews to the rest of the world, that seems less harmful.
Besides, the best Jewish TV has always been TV about Jews who are doing other things — Seinfeld or Broad City are no less Jewish for focusing on the general misadventures of young people living in New York. Jews live life outside of Judaism. In this season, Nobody Wants This hits its stride by giving up on clunky explanations of Judaism for the wider world; we barely see Noah at the bima. Instead of Jewish holidays, we see Christmas. Nobody Wants This was always, truly, a sweet rom-com about a guy who happens to be Jewish, and his girlfriend who happens to be converting. Nobody wanted a spokesperson in the form of a Netflix show anyway.
The post ‘Nobody Wants This’ is getting less and less Jewish appeared first on The Forward.
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Herzog calls for crackdown on violent West Bank settlers as olive harvest tensions mount
(JTA) — BUDAPEST, Hungary — Israeli President Isaac Herzog is backing senior Israel Defense Forces commanders in taking decisive action against violent settler attacks in the West Bank, he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
His comments came a day before Israeli forces detained New York Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander along with 90 rabbis and activists accompanying Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest.
At a press briefing in Budapest, JTA asked Herzog what action had been taken to curb settler violence following his previous calls for a stronger government response. Herzog pointed to a meeting he held earlier this month with the IDF’s West Bank division commander and other senior officers.
“I looked them in the eye and I gave them full backing to do whatever it takes to stop this terrible phenomenon,” he said.
The goal was to end the settler violence “at its roots,” Herzog said, adding that “major efforts” were underway.
Israeli police arrested 10 suspects following a series of settler attacks over the weekend, including a violent assault on Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine. Nine of those suspects were released from custody, Haaretz reported on Wednesday.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir ordered the deployment of an additional Border Police company to the West Bank to combat extremist violence. The unit is expected to begin operations in late November.
Herzog had personally called Levine on Saturday to apologize for the attack, which left her with four broken vertebrae and other injuries. “I was morally tormented during Shabbat when I thought about it, and I express deep sorrow and apologize for what you went through,” he told her.
The attacks have drawn condemnation from the U.S. and European governments. On Sunday, the European Union called for Israel to take “full accountability” in preventing further violence against Palestinians, journalists and diplomats.
During his visit Tuesday, Herzog met with Hungarian President András Baka and Prime Minister Péter Magyar, whose government ended its predecessor’s opposition to EU sanctions against extremist Israeli settlers.
Herzog’s visit was the first by a senior Israeli leader since Magyar defeated longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in April. At a joint appearance, Baka described relations with Israel as “cordial and stable,” while Herzog called Hungary a “friend and an ally.”
Asked later at the press briefing whether he had received a cooler reception than under Orbán, Herzog dismissed the suggestion, describing his meetings with both leaders as “fantastic.”
Pressed on Baka’s reference to the Palestinians, Herzog said the issue had been discussed “very politely” but had not dominated the talks, adding that it was “a perfectly legitimate subject to discuss.”
Herzog called the new prime minister “a brilliant person, a very impressive leader.”
The Hungarian leaders had “opened their hearts” to him, Herzog said, citing the attendance of several senior ministers at a lunch hosted by Magyar among other gestures that he said went beyond diplomatic protocol.
The visit also had personal significance for Herzog, whose father, former Israeli President Chaim Herzog, made the first state visit to Hungary by a sitting Israeli president in 1991, shortly after the restoration of diplomatic relations between the countries.
Herzog also addressed the closing gathering of Voice of the People, his initiative bringing together 150 Jews from Israel and the diaspora. He warned that combating antisemitism would be a “long-range battle” and stressed the need to engage millions of unaffiliated Jews.
“Ask the average Israeli – he has no clue about the diversity of Jewish life,” Herzog said, adding that many Jews in the Diaspora were similarly unfamiliar with Jewish life in Israel.
The post Herzog calls for crackdown on violent West Bank settlers as olive harvest tensions mount appeared first on The Forward.
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El-Sayed campaign hires Jewish liaison
(JTA) —
DETROIT – Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat has hired a Jewish liaison in the final weeks of the election season, part of a new push to swing undecided Jewish voters as the contentious race enters its homestretch.
Lenore Goldman is a veteran political consultant with Michigan ties whose work has included One Fair Wage, a national movement to raise the minimum wage that has prompted years of back-and-forth in the Michigan state legislature and courts.
She also consulted on Voters Not Politicians, a 2018 Michigan campaign that successfully passed a ballot measure to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission in the state. She has also consulted for Jewish groups, including the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco.
Multiple figures close to the campaign confirmed her hire to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday. The El-Sayed campaign did not immediately make Goldman available for comment, but she has already been a presence at some local events staged by Jewish supporters.
News of her hire comes nearly two months after the Democratic candidate’s campaign first told JTA they were interviewing for a Jewish liaison position.
Goldman enters the campaign at a precarious moment for El-Sayed, who has struggled to win over skeptical Jewish voters in his tight race with his Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers.
Recent polls show a tight race, with El-Sayed holding a narrow advantage. A Marist poll released Wednesday put him ahead of Rogers, 50% to 48% among likely voters, within the survey’s margin of error.
Jews have bristled at the former county health director’s strong criticism of Israel, including when he stated earlier this week that the country is “not an ally.” They have also objected to his campaign’s prior association with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, whose remarks about Jews have drawn accusations of antisemitism. El-Sayed has since distanced himself from Piker.
Some Jews have criticized El-Sayed’s initial remarks to this spring’s Temple Israel attack, which he has since apologized for. Rogers called his opponent “anti-Jew” in a JTA interview this week.
A new letter from El-Sayed to Jewish Michiganders is also being circulated as part of an effort to warm relations.
“I care deeply about the threat of antisemitism to our communities, and I am committed to protecting all Michigan Jews against hatred and injustice,” El-Sayed writes in the letter, which was shared on social media.
A spokesperson for the Michigan Democratic Party, which is named as a sponsor in the letter, did not respond to JTA requests for comment by press time. The El-Sayed campaign also did not respond to a request for comment about the letter.
Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed meets with concerned Jewish voters during the state Jewish Democratic caucus’s “Summer Simcha” event, Birmingham, Mich., Aug. 30, 2026. (Andrew Lapin/JTA)
In the campaign’s final days, Jewish surrogates for El-Sayed are hitting the pavement hard. A new Jewish canvassing initiative led by the progressive voter-mobilization group Seed the Vote hopes to engage voters in an effort to boost support for El-Sayed. Seed The Vote is working with the Jewish advocacy groups Bend the Arc Action and IfNotNow.
Most of the Jewish canvassers have come from out of state. One Jewish Michigander who is canvassing, Ronit Wagman, said the activists have sometimes experienced hostility from Jewish households.
“People just don’t want to put themselves on a limb and open themselves up to name-calling,” Wagman, who lives in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park and has canvassed in the nearby, largely liberal town of Huntington Woods, told JTA. “So I’m not too surprised that local Jews don’t really want to door-knock.”
In her own family, Wagman said she has been an El-Sayed supporter for a while but that her parents “took some convincing” to vote for him.
The argument that worked on them, she said, was pulling back from the candidate’s remarks about Israel and the Temple Israel attack. Instead, she asked them to consider the prospect of how Jews would fare long-term under what she described as continued Republican attacks on “constitutional democracy and civil rights.”
“Ultimately, we talked about how Jews have been able to enjoy so much safety and security in America because of the protections offered to all people by our constitution,” she said. “And when you start to erode that, nobody is safe.”
Conversations like the Wagmans’ could prove the tipping point for a Jewish population that largely considers itself liberal but has often been troubled by El-Sayed. Jewish organizers for him have also staged a series of small-room meet-and-greets with progressive politicians who are either Jewish, or who have close ties to the Jewish community. These figures have made their own pitches for the senate candidate.
One of those surrogates, Jewish Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss, spoke at a Detroit private Jewish residence on Monday to about 50 people. Goldman was also present at the event.
Biss was targeted by far-left activists during his own primary this spring, some of whom accused the candidate of being AIPAC-aligned himself. In fact, he is backed by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street and he fended off millions in spending that the pro-Israel group dropped in favor of an opponent.
Yet Biss told JTA he had no qualms about supporting El-Sayed, some of whose followers have targeted Jewish Democrats in the state in similar fashion.
“I don’t think it is ever healthy to associate any leader with the ugliest thing that anyone who supports them does,” Biss told JTA. “I absolutely never saw anything like that from Abdul himself.”
He continued, “It is possible to fight for Jewish safety in America with a variety of different positions on foreign policy. I think if we don’t accept that, we make ourselves vulnerable unnecessarily.”
To the group, he also argued that some Jewish concerns regarding El-Sayed were misplaced, particularly concerns about his language around AIPAC, which spent heavily against El-Sayed in his primary.
The lobbyists also spent heavily against Biss in his own primary, and, according to Biss, are fair game for criticism because they employed pernicious tactics in hiding their ad spending and paying for ads that often obscure their pro-Israel motivations.
“To be a little bit cheeky, I would say you can’t perform an antisemitic trope and then accuse me of antisemitism when I describe the thing you just did,” Biss told the Jewish crowd.
AIPAC announced Wednesday that it would cease endorsing and soliciting donations for its preferred candidates, though its associated super PAC, United Democracy Project, would continue operations.
El-Sayed will campaign in Detroit this weekend with former President Barack Obama. He and Rogers face off in their final scheduled debate tonight.
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