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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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The post One rabbi’s lifesaving solution to help Odessa’s vulnerable Jews: jerry-rigged car batteries appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Deborah Lipstadt has second thoughts about tying Jackson synagogue arsonist to ‘Globalize the Intifada’
(JTA) — As news broke over the weekend of an arson attack that heavily damaged the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, a few prominent individuals connected the culprit to pro-Palestinian activism.
“This is a major tragedy. But it’s more than that,” Deborah Lipstadt, formerly the State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, wrote on the social network X. “It’s an arson attack and another step in the globalization of the intifada.”
Later, upon learning that the arsonist appeared to have been motivated by a strain of antisemitism associated with the far right, not the pro-Palestinian movement, she walked back her comments — to a degree. But Lipstadt’s initial comments about the arsonist’s motives reflect a larger sense of disorientation among diaspora Jews as they face increased levels of antisemitism from across the spectrum of left-wing, right-wing and Islamist extremism.
Jewish activists and communities have been engaged in fierce debate over which corner poses the greatest threat, and reports of new incidents are often met with immediate speculation over the attacker’s motivations. Lipstadt, an Emory University professor who had served in the State Department under President Biden, has herself criticized the politicization of antisemitism charges. “When you only see it on the other side of the political transom,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2024, “I have to ask: Are you interested in fighting antisemitism, or was your main objective to beat up on your enemies?”
“Globalize the Intifada” is a term commonly used in left-wing, pro-Palestinian protests. Most of the perpetrators of the large-scale antisemitic attacks in the diaspora since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel — including in Washington, D.C.; Boulder, Colorado; Bondi Beach, Australia; and the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home — have made their pro-Palestinian and/or Islamist affiliations public.
But when the identity of the Jackson arsonist was revealed and the suspect appeared in court, his comments and social media presence betrayed no obvious link to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Instead the suspect, 19-year-old Catholic school graduate Stephen Spencer Pittman, used language —including “synagogue of Satan” and “Jesus Christ is Lord” — popular among leading figures of the online far right who peddle antisemitism, including Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. (“Synagogue of Satan” also has deeper roots; it was popularized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.)
An Instagram account appearing to be Pittman’s also contains references to a “Christian diet” and a clip from “Drawn Together,” an adult animated series, referencing an antisemitic “Jew crow.” (One of the show’s creators is Jewish.) Neither Pittman’s public statements in court, nor his Instagram account, referred to pro-Palestinian activism.
In hindsight, was Lipstadt right to preemptively link the fire to “globalize the intifada”?
“It may have been inopportune of me to say that,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her invocation of the phrase.
Lipstadt insisted, “I was not saying this was a leftist attack. Clearly it’s not.” Nor did she “mean to suggest that this was an Islamist attack.”
She offered that the phrase, which uses the Arabic word associated with the violent Palestinian uprisings of the late 1980s and early 2000s, could be interpreted as hatred toward Jews coming from all sides.
“If ‘globalize the intifada’ means ‘attack Jews everywhere,’ then it certainly fits,” she said. “So it depends on how you want to interpret the sentence.”
Lipstadt wasn’t the only prominent figure linking the arsonist to “globalize the intifada” and other pro-Palestinian phrases before his identity was revealed.
“It began with BDS. Some said, it’s just words,” Marc Edelman, a Jewish law professor at the City University of New York, wrote on X over the weekend.
He continued, “CUNY Law speech: ‘globalize the intifada.’ Still, just words? Recent pro-Hamas chants. Words again? And now the violence in Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., Sydney, Jackson, Mississippi and more. As the Left used to say, words matter!”
Even a pro-Palestinian politician condemned the arson while also addressing recent hard-line pro-Palestinian activism in her own city.
“Mississippi’s oldest and largest synagogue, and two of their Torah scrolls, were burned yesterday on Shabbat in a horrific antisemitic attack—days after protestors chanted ‘We support Hamas’, here in NYC,” Shahana Hanif, a New York City council member from Brooklyn who won re-election in a race that pivoted largely on Israel, wrote on X.
She was referencing recent pro-Hamas protesters outside synagogues in New York, who have been denounced by progressives who are critical of Israel including Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Hanif added, “These chants are antisemitic and deeply harmful. You can oppose land sales in the West Bank without supporting violence against Jews. Yesterday’s arson in Mississippi is a stark reminder of the consequences of hate.”
She attracted some criticism from the pro-Palestinian movement for her statement — including from the group that organized the pro-Hamas New York synagogue protests, which took offense at the comparison.
“Linking chants at a Palestine protest that support a resistance movement of occupied people to the klan bombing of a synagogue is absolutely irresponsible and disgusting,” PAL-Awda NY/NJ, a radical group, wrote to Hanif.
In the group’s Telegram channel viewed by JTA, PAL-Awda added, “We see you, politicians who claim to support Palestine but then follow the hasbara playbook to link people resisting colonial oppression with white supremacists bombing synagogues in Mississippi.” “Hasbara” is a Hebrew term used to describe Israeli public relations efforts.
Pro-Israel groups, meanwhile, claimed hypocrisy, with some sharing a screenshot of Hanif previously retweeting a pro-Palestinian activist’s post that included the phrase “Globalize the Intifada.” JTA was unable to verify the post.
Unlike Lipstadt, Edelman, the CUNY law professor, told JTA he stands by his initial assessment of the arson.
“Nothing changes the fact that the actions taken in Washington, D.C. and Sydney, Australia, coalesced with an extreme left anti-Israel position,” he said, referring to the mass shootings at the Capital Jewish Museum and Bondi Beach — the former by a declared pro-Palestinian activist, the latter by declared Islamists. (Edelman noted that he recently undertook a Fulbright scholarship in Australia.)
Edelman added, “It is also not surprising that far-right rhetoric, much as it has for generations in this country, has also led to increased violence against minority groups including Jewish Americans.”
But there’s a key difference between the two sides, in Edelman’s eyes.
“The big distinction here, and I say this as a member of the Democratic Party, is that the left has historically been better than this,” he said. “And now, perhaps, they are not.”
For Lipstadt, the incident has largely taught her that Jews shouldn’t spend time trying to determine which kinds of antisemitic attacks, whether from the left or right, are worse.
“It’s all horrible,” she said. “Much of it is lethal. It’s toxic and it’s dangerous.”
The post Deborah Lipstadt has second thoughts about tying Jackson synagogue arsonist to ‘Globalize the Intifada’ appeared first on The Forward.
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In Jordan’s pick for the Oscars, a contradictory message about ethnonationalism
There’s a disagreement in public discourse about how to understand the First Intifada, the nature of the violence, the scale of destruction, and who is responsible. Even the date it began is a source of controversy — foreign-policy analyst Mitchell Bard points to an Israeli being stabbed to death in Gaza in December 1987; the Institute for Middle East Understanding says it was the killing of four Palestinians by an Israeli truck driver days later — but All That’s Left of You, Jordan’s entry for the Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards, makes the claim that the real beginning was far earlier.
The film, directed by Cherien Dabis, opens in 1988 with a confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians in a refugee camp in the West Bank. Stones are thrown, shots are fired, and a teenager, Noor Hammad, is shot in the head. Suddenly, the film cuts to an old woman’s face looking straight into the camera.
“I’m here to tell you who is my son,” the woman, Hanan (played by Dabis), says. “But for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.”
We flash back to 1948, where the film marks the origins of the discontent that led to the First Intifada, just as a Zionist paramilitary unit descends on Jaffa. Noor’s grandfather, Sharif — then a young father — sends his family someplace safer as he faces the Israeli soldiers and is eventually imprisoned for refusing to cede his land. The second part of the film takes place after a 30-year time jump, and shows Sharif instilling a sense of Palestinian nationalism in his grandson Noor.
Noor’s father Salim instructs him to obey the laws of Israeli occupation, believing this will keep Noor out of harm’s way. But then we return to 1988 and the day Noor is shot.
All That’s Left of You is strongest in its moving portrayal of the intergenerational differences that can exist in a single family when it comes to dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even though the 1948 and 1978 sections occasionally meander, the timeline helps viewers understand the pressures in the region and within the Hammad family that led to a boiling point in 1988.
But the culmination of the film’s trauma-filled journey lands as a poor lesson in nationalism.
Towards the end of the film, we see an older Hanan in 2022 in a cafe in Tel Aviv — Jaffa. Hanan debates an Israeli about whether or not an organ can have a nationality, particularly in the context of an organ transfer. Ari, the Israeli, says no. Hanan asserts that yes — a Palestinian heart is always Palestinian no matter what body it occupies.
It’s a not so subtle metaphor for the belief that the land of Israel remains Palestinian in its soul, no matter who occupies it. But that feels like a case for embracing ethnonationalism to try and combat…ethnonationalism. Historically, no matter what name you call it, that patch of earth has always been home to many different people and an important marker of different cultural identities.
All That’s Left of You depicts Palestinian resilience in the face of great oppression but the message seems to be that this abuse is inherent to certain identities. Throughout the film, the characters make blanket statements about Zionists and Israelis as a monolithic force of evil. When these characters are dealing with being imprisoned, barred from their own homes, and humiliated at gunpoint, these angry generalizations are not surprising, especially if that is all they have known for three generations. But the ending argument, that an organ cannot exist without a nationalistic sentiment, does not offer a hopeful message. Up until this point, the film has demonstrated the destructive and dehumanizing effects of ethnocentric possessiveness, but it struggles to disentangle itself from the ideology it seeks to condemn. Instead, it ends up replicating it.
The post In Jordan’s pick for the Oscars, a contradictory message about ethnonationalism appeared first on The Forward.
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VIDEO: Chatting in Yiddish during an Iraqi Jewish meal
אין 2022 האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס אַרויסגעלאָזט אַ ווידעאָ, וווּ דער ייִדישער אַקטיאָר מײַק בורשטיין און זײַן פֿרײַנדינע פּערלאַ קאַרני שמועסן אויף ייִדיש בעת זיי עסן אין „פֿאַקטאָרס פֿיימאָס דעלי“ אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס.
עטלעכע לייענער האָבן דעמאָלט געזאָגט אַז זיי האָבן הנאה געהאַט פֿונעם ווידעאָ ווײַל, ווי איינער האָט געשריבן: „ס׳האָט מיך דערמאָנט אין די קינדעריאָרן ווען איך פֿלעג זיך אונטערהערן ווי מײַנע קרובֿים רעדן ייִדיש צווישן זיך.“
זינט דעמאָלט זענען אַרויס עטלעכע אַנדערע ווידעאָס, וווּ זיי עסן אין פֿאַרשידענע לאָקאַלן און שמועסן בשעת־מעשׂה אויף מאַמע־לשון.
איצט האָט מען זיי פֿילמירט בעת אַ סעודה פֿון איראַקישע פּאָטראַוועס צוגעגרייט פֿון אַ יונגערמאַן, ניקאָלאַס ניסים, וואָס רעדט אַליין ייִדיש.
דער ווידעאָ, וואָס ווערט באַגלייט מיט ענגלישע אונטערקעפּלעך, איז פּראָדוצירט געוואָרן פֿונעם ייִדישן טעלעוויזיע־קאַנאַל JBS
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