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One rabbi’s lifesaving solution to help Odessa’s vulnerable Jews: jerry-rigged car batteries
This winter, the city of Odessa, Ukraine, feels like the heart of darkness.
The city is constant bombardment by the Russian military, freezing nighttime temperatures commonly fall below zero, and electricity is only available for six hours per day: three in the morning and three at night.
Amid these desperate circumstances, Avraham Wolff, the chief rabbi of Odessa and southern Ukraine, is trying to bring some light — and heat.
He’s doing so with jerry-rigged car batteries to provide warmth and electricity to about 400 Holocaust survivors in the city — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.
“The ones at greatest risk of starving to death or freezing to death are the Holocaust survivors who were not able to flee this place,” Wolff said in a phone interview from Odessa. “Holocaust survivors are staring death in the face for the second time, and we can’t avert our eyes.”
Wolff is trying to raise $500,000 in funds to purchase heating units powered by car batteries. Placed inside a home, the two car batteries connect to special transistors, which generate sufficient electricity to heat an apartment. Each unit costs $1,400, and Wolff’s organization, Mishpacha Chabad Odessa, is trying to organize 357 units: one for each apartment where a Holocaust survivor lives. Accounting for spouses, the units will provide enough electricity for about 500 people.
This literally can stave off death, Wolff says — not only by providing lifesaving heat, but also the electricity essential to the elderly and frail.
“If they go to the bathroom in the dark and they fall and break their hip, that’s the beginning of the end,” he said. When there is no power, Wolff said, “it’s darkness. But not just darkness. Also cold and hunger.”
About 20,000 Jews remain in wartime Odessa. That’s less than half the Jewish population of 50,000 that was there just a year ago, before Russian invaded Ukraine. Since then, most have fled to safer places either in western Ukraine, elsewhere in Europe or Israel. Odessa’s Jewish schools once taught 1,000 children. Now, only 200 students remain.
Jerry-rigged heating units use a pair of car batteries connecting to transistors to generate the power needed to heat an apartment. (Courtesy of Mishpacha Odessa)
The Holocaust survivors in their 80s and 90s who remain in the city are either too old or infirm to endure a dangerous journey or unwilling to leave the place where their spouse is buried.
“Someone over 90 cannot start life over as a refugee,” Wolff said.
Air raid sirens go off four or five times a day. Most of the incoming Russian rockets are shot down by defense systems, but there are hits on infrastructure, including power plants. Even the six hours per day of light and heat are not reliable, according to Wolff.
“Two days ago, they hit two power plants, so the city had no electricity for 24 hours,” he said on Monday. “We’re constantly under this pressure. We’ve been living in a war zone for a long time.”
Aside from caring for the Holocaust survivors, Mishpacha Chabad Odessa organizes monthly food deliveries of basic supplies to the homebound Jewish elderly, including such essentials as rice, cooking oil, potatoes, meat and hygiene items, and run Jewish schools and preschools still operating in Odessa.
“We want to help these people not just spiritually, but physically,” the rabbi said. “Elderly Holocaust survivors are currently the highest-risk group, but we help everyone.”
Odessa once was home to the world’s second-largest Jewish community. In the 19th century, the city became a major center of Jewish life and culture, with a large and diverse Jewish population. Many Jewish immigrants came to Odessa during this period, fleeing persecution and poverty in other parts of Europe and the Russian Empire.
Before the Holocaust, one-third of Odessa’s population was Jewish. Then the Nazis came, and Jews were subjected to forced relocation, property confiscation and mass extermination. Approximately 25,000 Jews were killed in the city and its surroundings.
A year ago, before the current war, 1.1 million people lived in Odessa. Hundreds of thousands have fled.
Wolff, 52, has lived in Odessa since 1992, when he came to the country from Israel as an emissary of Chabad, the Jewish outreach movement. When war broke out last February, he left Ukraine temporarily to settle a group of orphans in Germany. Then he returned.
After the Russian invasion, many Ukrainian Jewish communities crumbled. People fled, and Jewish institutions and landmarks like synagogues, community centers and cemeteries were destroyed by Russian bombs.
“There is so much destruction,” Wolff said. “We’re going to do all we can to rebuild, with God’s help.”
With the Russian military targeting infrastructure like power plants, residents of Odessa, Ukraine, use candles for the scant electricity and heat they provide. (Courtesy of Mishpacha Odessa)
Despite the immense dangers and challenges, Wolff says he is optimistic about the future.
“I’m sure that after Ukraine wins, and life and peace returns, there will be a rapid return of those who left, and I think others will come because there will be an economic and building boom,” Wolff said. “I believe there’s a bright future.”
Part of Wolff’s job as a Jewish leader and Chabadnik is not only to provide physical aid, but positive morale and spiritual inspiration.
“When I was a child, I heard a story from an old Jew who had been imprisoned in Siberia,” Wolff recalled. “One day, he got up and he felt he couldn’t say Modeh Ani” — the Jewish morning prayer of gratitude — “because the Russian authorities had taken everything from him: his house, wife, yeshiva, grandkids, tefillin, kippah, tzitzit. He was all alone in a Siberian prison with nothing. But then he realized that the one thing Stalin couldn’t take from him was the ability to say Modeh Ani.”
Even in these grim times, Wolff said, there is a spirit that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is prosecuting this war, cannot take away from Ukraine’s Jews.
“There’s a war, there are challenges, nothing is easy. It’s dark, it’s cold,” Wolff said. “But the ability to smile Putin didn’t take from us and can’t take away. This is what I try to show the community. In the end we’ll win, so let’s smile now, too.”
Those interested in supporting this effort can make a contribution here to fund the battery-powered heating units being deployed to help Odessa’s Holocaust survivors survive this winter.
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University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
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This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
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At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
