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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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Bombing Can Weaken Iranian Regime, but Only Popular Uprising Can Overthrow It, Dissidents Say
Members of the police stand guard on a street, with a large billboard featuring Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the background, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani
A senior official from a Paris-based Iranian opposition group said on Thursday that the US-Israeli war on Iran would not topple the clerical leadership, arguing that only a popular uprising backed by internal resistance could do so.
Almost two weeks of bombing have killed around 2,000 people in Iran including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and damaged much of its military and security apparatus.
Iran has responded in kind, throwing global energy markets and transport into chaos and spreading the conflict across the Middle East, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has tightened its grip on power and threatened to crush any unrest.
“The 12-day war in June, and the current war, now in its 12th day, proved that bombings cannot overthrow the regime,” Mohammad Mohaddesin, head of foreign policy at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told a news conference.
“Even if you have 50,000 armed soldiers on the ground, you need the support of Iranian people. You need a popular uprising. The combination of this 50,000 or 20,000 or any other number with a popular uprising, then you have this power to overthrow the regime.”
Mohaddesin said he did not consider a deployment of US ground troops realistic.
The NCRI, also known by its Farsi name Mujahideen-e-Khalq, was listed as a terrorist organization by the United States until 2012.
It is banned in Iran, and it is unclear how much support it has there. However, along with its bitter rival, the monarchists backing Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the toppled shah, it is one of the few opposition groups able to rally supporters.
Mohaddesin acknowledged that his group alone could not bring down the system. But he said mass protests, like those that raged in January until they were bloodily quashed, would resume once bombing stopped, and could eventually shift the balance.
“I cannot say how many months or a year, but … this is the track of overthrowing the regime,” he said.
Israeli officials have said that one of their objectives is to weaken the security apparatus so that Iran‘s people can take control of their own destiny.
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Trump Says It Is Not Appropriate for Iran to Be in Soccer World Cup
Soccer Football – World Cup – Asian Qualifiers – Group A – Iran v North Korea – Azadi Stadium, Tehran, Iran – June 10, 2025, Iran players line up before the match. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump said on Thursday the Iranian men’s national soccer team was welcome to participate in the 2026 World Cup but that he believed it was not appropriate that they be there “for their own life and safety.”
“The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Iran‘s sports minister said on Wednesday that it was not possible for his nation’s athletes to participate after the US launched airstrikes alongside Israel against Tehran. The attacks triggered a region-wide conflict that has shown no signs of abating.
The 48-team World Cup will be held in the US, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, with Iran scheduled for matches in Los Angeles and Seattle.
An official withdrawal by Iran from the showpiece event, which has not yet happened, would be a first in the modern era and would leave soccer‘s global governing body FIFA with the urgent task of finding a replacement team.
Iran was the only nation missing from a FIFA planning summit for World Cup participants held last week in Atlanta.
FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Late last year it awarded Trump — who has campaigned aggressively for the Nobel Peace Prize — its own inaugural peace prize.
Earlier this week, Australia granted humanitarian visas to five Iranian women soccer players after they sought asylum, fearing persecution on their return home for their refusal to sing the national anthem at an Asia Cup match.
Trump had urged Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to grant asylum to members of the Iranian women’s team, saying the US would if Australia did not.
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The New ‘Tokyo Roses’: How Social Media Influencers Amplify Authoritarian Propaganda
People stand near a destroyed vehicle as smoke rises after a reported strike on Shahran fuel tanks, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 8, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
At 04:38 on the morning of March 11, 2026, the alert blasted onto my phone: “Red Alert – Tel Aviv.”
Like millions of Israelis during the current war with Iran, my family and I moved quickly into our mamad — the reinforced safe room built into Israeli homes constructed after 1993 — grateful for the air-defense systems intercepting incoming missiles overhead.
Fifteen minutes later, the sirens stopped. I climbed back into bed.
That has become the rhythm of daily life here. Restaurants reopened. Businesses operate. Children move between Zoom classes and the occasional dash to a shelter when sirens sound.
But if you relied solely on social media — particularly X or TikTok — you might believe Tel Aviv had already been reduced to rubble.
Videos circulate claiming the city is burning and the electric grid destroyed. Posts declare Israel is collapsing under missile fire. Influencers insist the truth is being “censored.”
The problem is that this supposed “evidence” turns out to be fabricated, misrepresented, or recycled footage — often not even from Israel.
In other words: propaganda.
The tactic itself is not new.
During World War II, Allied soldiers in the Pacific heard English-language propaganda broadcasts from personalities collectively known as “Tokyo Rose.” Their purpose was to undermine morale, spread disinformation, and convince American troops their cause was hopeless.
The technology has changed, but the tactic hasn’t.
Today, the propaganda battlefield is on social media, and the new “Tokyo Roses” are often Western influencers with enormous audiences.
Consider the viral claims that Iran’s missile attacks have “devastated” Israel.
Several widely shared posts attempted to support this narrative with dramatic footage supposedly showing Iranian strikes on Israeli cities.
Basic fact-checking revealed something else: AI-generated fabrications or recycled clips from earlier events.
Repackaging old footage to fabricate a new narrative is one of the oldest tricks in propaganda. What has changed is the speed. In the social media age, recycled footage and fabricated videos spread globally in minutes, while corrections rarely travel as far as the original lie.
A similar pattern appeared recently when Putin- and Houthi-supporting influencer Jackson Hinkle circulated a video claiming to show massive crowds in Iran mourning the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. Fact-checkers later identified the footage as coming from the 2020 funeral of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. By the time the clarification appeared, the misleading version had already spread widely across social media.
Other influencers have gone further by promoting narratives that closely mirror those pushed by authoritarian regimes.
Social media personality Myron Gaines recently argued that Iran “poses no real threat to the United States” and that the war should end because it is “Israel’s problem, not ours.”
But Iran’s regime has spent decades building precisely the opposite reality. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has treated the United States as a principal enemy. Iranian leaders regularly chant “Death to America,” and Iran and its proxies have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American service members, including attacks in Beirut, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran has built a network of proxy militias across the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
These groups have launched thousands of rockets, drones, and missiles against America and its allies while Iran continues expanding its ballistic-missile arsenal and advancing toward nuclear-weapons capability.
This buildup also fits into the broader ambitions of the China-Russia-Iran axis, which seeks to weaken American global influence.
To describe such a regime as posing “no real threat” requires ignoring one of the most documented security challenges in modern geopolitics.
Unless one believes that the world — and especially the United States — would be freer or safer with China, Russia, and Iran ascendant, the stakes should be obvious.
In other cases, the rhetoric moves from distortion into outright antisemitic conspiracy.
Social media personality Dan Bilzerian has posted messages accusing Western leaders and the Muslim governments cooperating with Israel of “selling out” their people. His posts frequently invoke conspiratorial claims about hidden Jewish forces nefariously controlling Western governments.
These narratives mirror themes long promoted by state-controlled media in Iran and Russia.
Whether intentional or not, the effect is the same: Western audiences are fed narratives that erode trust in democratic institutions while portraying authoritarian regimes as misunderstood and even noble victims.
In some cases, the messaging goes further still.
Recent posts from Candace Owens, widely shared across social media, have encouraged Americans not to serve in the US military and urged those currently serving to quit, while framing the conflict through very dark and conspiratorial accusations about hidden motives to serve supposedly prurient and venal Jewish interests.
Messages designed to discourage military service during wartime have long been tools of psychological warfare. In the 1940s such efforts were broadcast over enemy radio. Today they appear in US based social media feeds.
None of this occurs in a vacuum.
For years the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has treated information warfare as a central element of its strategy. Iranian state media and proxy networks attempt to shape global narratives by portraying the Islamic Republic as a victim while depicting Israel and the United States as degenerate and corrupt aggressors.
These campaigns rely on familiar tactics: recycled footage, conspiracy narratives, and emotionally charged messaging designed to spread rapidly online. What makes the modern environment different is that these narratives no longer need to originate inside Iran to reach Western audiences. Influencers with large followings amplify them instantly.
The propaganda circulating online often revives and relies on something far older than modern geopolitics: classic antisemitic tropes.
Many viral posts go far beyond criticism of US or Israeli policy. They invoke conspiracies about Jewish control of governments, repeat blood-libel accusations, and frame global events as the result of a shrouded Jewish plot.
Versions of these accusations have circulated for centuries. What is striking today is how seamlessly these myths have merged with contemporary geopolitical propaganda.
Authoritarian regimes hostile to Israel have long understood that antisemitic narratives can serve as powerful mobilizing tools. Portraying Israel as the center of a global conspiracy transforms a regional conflict into an ideological crusade.
When influencers with large Western audiences repeat these themes, they normalize ideas that have historically fueled violence against Jews.
The modern “Tokyo Rose” no longer sits behind a microphone in an enemy capital. He or she posts on social media.
The voices spreading propaganda today are influencers with millions of Western followers — many living safely and prosperously inside the democratic societies whose resolve they undermine. Some claim they are offering contrarian commentary. Others are motivated by attention or the financial rewards of viral outrage.
But the effect is the same: narratives promoted by authoritarian regimes are amplified to vast audiences, often stripped of context, facts, or accountability.
Meanwhile here in Tel Aviv, life continues between missile alerts. Millions of Israelis move between normal routines and red-alert interruptions as air defenses intercept incoming missiles. But it bears little resemblance to the apocalyptic fantasies circulating online.
That contrast — between lived reality and digital narrative — reveals something important about modern information warfare.
Propaganda no longer requires governments to broadcast lies. It only requires enough people willing to repeat them — and in the age of social media, there are always volunteers.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.