Uncategorized
The first Passover haggadah in Ukrainian marks a community’s break with Russia
(JTA) — For Michal Stamova, the challenge of translating Passover’s core text into Ukrainian started with the title.
The haggadah — the book containing the Passover story — starts with an “h” sound in both Hebrew, its original language, and English. In Russian, the primary language of organized Jewish life in Ukraine until recently, there is no such sound, so the book has long been known there as an “agada.”
Ukrainian does have an “h” sound. But the character representing that sound conveys a different sound in Russian: a “G.” So for many Ukrainian Jews, the cover of Stamova’s translation will read as “Gagada.”
The journey of that single sound reflects the complexity of the task Stamova took on to aid Ukrainian Jews celebrating Passover a year into their country’s war with Russia. A musicologist from western Ukraine who fled to Israel shortly after Russia’s invasion, Stamova was recruited to create a Ukrainian-language haggadah, a powerful sign of the community’s rupture with its Russophone past.
Stamova knew she wanted to base her translation not off the preexisting Russian translation, but from the original Hebrew and Aramaic. That proved challenging because much of the text of the haggadah is lifted from other sources in Jewish canon, but Jewish translations of those texts to Ukrainian are only underway now for the first time.
“At first, it was very difficult to start, because we don’t have the sources in Ukrainian,” Stamova said. “We don’t have Torah in Ukrainian. We don’t have Tanakh in Ukrainian. It was very difficult to know what words to find.”
Stamova’s text, titled “For Our Freedom,” was released online earlier this month in advance of the Passover holiday that starts April 5. It is one of a growing number of efforts to translate Jewish texts into Ukrainian. Translators affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement have produced a book of psalms and are working on a daily prayer book, with their sights set on a full translation of the Torah. An effort is also underway now to translate a chapter of a newer text associated with Yom Hashoah, the Jewish Holocaust memorial day, in advance of its commemoration this year on April 18.
The absence of those texts until now, despite Ukraine’s significant Jewish population, reflects the particular linguistic history of Ukrainian Jews. Under the Russian empire, Jews living in what is now Ukraine in the 19th century tended to adopt Russian rather than Ukrainian, usually in addition to Yiddish, because Ukrainian was perceived as the language of the peasantry and conferred few benefits. That tilt became more pronounced after World War II and the Holocaust, when Yiddish declined as a Jewish vernacular and Russian became the main language of the Soviet Union. The history helps explain why, even as the number of Ukrainians speaking Russian at home fell sharply over the last decade, Jews remained largely Russian-speaking. (Russian and Ukrainian are related linguistically, though their speakers cannot understand each other.)
A sample page of text from the haggadah. (Courtesy of Project Kesher)
Over the past 30 years, the vast majority of printed material used by Ukrainian Jewish communities, including haggadahs for Passover, were created in Russian by groups such as Chabad, which is the main Jewish presence in both countries. But after Russia’s invasion, those materials became a liability at a time when being perceived as having ties to the enemy could be dangerous.
Indeed, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year prompted many Russian-speaking Ukrainians to switch languages as a marker of national solidarity — and sparked a push to translate Ukraine’s Jewish life into the Ukrainian language.
“Ukrainian Jews always spoke Russian. That really was the norm. With the advent of the escalation of the war, that has shifted, and Ukrainian Jews who are in the country are shifting as fast as they can over to Ukrainian,” said Karyn Gershon, the executive director of Project Kesher, the global Jewish feminist nonprofit that commissioned the new haggadah.
Gershon said the haggadah offers an opportunity to elevate a Ukrainian Jewish identity in other ways, such as by including tidbits about famous Jewish writers from the area that comprises modern Ukraine who in the past might have been characterized only as “Russian.”
“In most of the Jewish world, the things that make a haggadah unique are the special readings,” Gershon said. The new Ukrainian haggadah includes alongside the traditional text, she said, “prayers for the defenders of Ukraine, prayers for peace in Ukraine, but also [passages] reclaiming writers who were always categorized as Russian, but because they came from places like Kyiv, Odessa and Berdichev, are more accurately Ukrainian.”
For example, the haggadah includes passages from the 1925 book “Passover Nights,” by Hava Shapiro, a Kyiv-born Jew and journalist who authored one of the first Hebrew-language diaries known to have been written by a woman.
The additions offer an element of pride for some of the Ukrainian Jews who plan to use the new haggadah.
“It is bringing you to the roots of those Jews who were living here before the Holocaust,” said Lena Pysina, who lives in Cherkasy, southeast of Kyiv. “It’s about rebuilding the Jewish communities in Ukraine as ‘Ukrainian Jews.’”
Pysina said the switch to Ukrainian and the embrace of Ukrainian Jewish history in some ways echoed the themes of the Passover story, which describes the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt.
“It’s like an exodus for us. It is not comfortable, because we get used to what we get used to. But we have to be proactive, we have to find our identity,” she said. “It took us 70 years of Soviet times to … celebrate the Jewish holidays and Jewish traditions. And it took us 30 years to understand that we have to build Ukrainian Jewish communities, too.”
Those communities are very much in flux a year into the war, with millions of Ukrainians internally displaced or having relocated overseas. Stamova undertook the haggadah project from Israel, where she is one of an estimated 15,000 Ukrainians who arrived since February 2022.
Stamova grew up in western Ukraine, where the use of the Ukrainian language is more common than in the east. Like most other Ukrainian Jews, she still grew up speaking Russian at home, but her school, university and most of her life outside the home was conducted in Ukrainian. That made her a natural fit for the translation project, along with her background in Jewish liturgy, which she had studied at a Conservative yeshiva in Jerusalem.
Over the past 30 years, the vast majority of printed material used by Ukrainian Jewish communities, including haggadahs for Passover, were created in Russian. (Courtesy of Project Kesher)
The challenges went beyond phonetics. One frequent question was whether to use Russianisms that are widely known in Ukrainian and would be more easily understandable to a Jewish audience, or to use uniquely Ukrainian words.
The most difficult section of the text, she said, was Hallel, the penultimate step of the Passover seder. Hallel is a lengthy song of divine praise heavy with poetry and allegorical language — making for challenging translation work in any language.
Stamova said she sought to stick to the traditional understanding of the text while also making some adjustments for the contemporary seder attendee. For example, the section of the haggadah about the “four sons” with varying relationships to Judaism is rendered gender-neutral and changed to the “four children” in Stamova’s translation — an adjustment that has been made in other languages, too.
Most of all, Stamova said, she hopes the haggadah offers some solace to Ukrainian Jews whose entire lives have been turned upside down.
“The Jewish tradition of Pesach is that we every year have to remember that we escaped from Egypt, from slavery. It’s very therapeutic,” Stamova said, using the Hebrew word for Passover. “How is it like therapy? Yes, we every year remember this difficult story, but then we have a plan for the future, we say next year in Jerusalem. So we have to have a plan. We have to see the future.”
—
The post The first Passover haggadah in Ukrainian marks a community’s break with Russia appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Vance meets with Temple Israel rabbi on Michigan visit
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance recently met with representatives of Temple Israel in Michigan to offer “his support in the wake of the attack on our community,” clergy from the synagogue told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Vance’s Monday meeting with representatives of the suburban Detroit synagogue that had been attacked by a terrorist in March came as the vice president has upped his outreach to Jewish voters ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. He also invited a rabbi and security guard to a rally Monday in the Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights, where he called them out from the podium and said he was “honored” to have them attend.
The Reform synagogue’s clergy later offered more details about his outreach, telling JTA that he had met with one rabbi, as well as with a security officer who had stopped the assailant from harming anyone at the preschool that was in session.
The meeting was held at Vance’s request, Rabbi Jen Lader told JTA, and the vice president did not visit the synagogue itself.
“This was an important opportunity to ask for the Vice President’s support in the fight against antisemitism, and for additional security funding through the Jewish American Security Act,” Lader wrote in an email to JTA, referring to a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. House this summer to increase federal funds for both Jewish organizations and synagogue security.
Lader continued, “We’ve made the same requests to elected officials on both sides of the political aisle.”
Later that day the vice president traveled to Las Vegas, where he met in a closed-door session with members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who have been riled by his close relationship with podcaster Tucker Carlson and other points of contention.
Vance sought to draw a contrast with Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, who spent the weekend offering apologies for his earlier comments about the temple attack, when he appeared to describe the attack as a response to Israel’s incursion in Lebanon.
Some Michigan Jewish leaders are publicly mobilizing against El-Sayed, a harsh critic of Israel: As of press time, more than 400 Jews in the state, including some who hold prominent community positions, have signed a petition pledging to vote for the GOP candidate, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, in the Senate race.
A representative for Vance did not respond to a request for comment on the vice president’s Temple Israel meeting or for his views on the Jewish American Security Act.
At the RJC meeting, where he also received a standing ovation but did not address his Carlson ties, attendees told JTA that Vance highlighted his outreach to Temple Israel.
The nation’s largest Reform synagogue, Temple Israel was attacked in March by a man who had recently lost family in an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah position in Lebanon. In two statements following the attack, El-Sayed initially condemned it outright. He then changed his wording to include what he now says was “context” about Israel’s war in Lebanon, including the phrase, “Hurt people hurt people.”
Speaking with the state Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday, El-Sayed apologized for those remarks, saying, “I made a mistake.” He also attended the caucus’s “Summer Simcha” fundraiser the next day, where he repeated his apology and asked for forgiveness. He told JTA the “context” he’d sought to include in his initial remarks was related to “violence in all its forms, in all circumstances.”
Temple Israel clergy have declined to comment to JTA on El-Sayed’s two apologies for his past comments. Lader had penned an op-ed in The Free Press criticizing his response.
Vance’s Michigan visit also included a rally in Sterling Heights, where he discussed the synagogue attack and called it “a terrible, antisemitic terrorist attack.”
“It could have been so much worse, ladies and gentlemen,” Vance told the crowd, who had given the Temple Israel personnel a standing ovation. “That guy showed up at that synagogue, at that school with a desire to kill a lot of children, and he killed precisely zero children because of the brave security guards who did their job and did it very well.”
Vance also called El-Sayed, a progressive and a Muslim, “very, very evil” from the podium.
“Abdul El-Sayed made an apology for the very people who would perpetrate violence against hundreds of innocent American school children,” Vance told the crowd. “You’ve got to ask yourself, if he’s willing to empathize, not with the children who almost had their lives destroyed at the most innocent and what should be the safest place in the world, their school, what is he going to do when he goes to Washington, D.C. when the cameras aren’t on?”
Vance added, “What I see is a man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion, but have nothing for people who don’t. A person who will apologize for a murderer so long as he looks the right way, but will not understand the plight of an innocent child if that person has the wrong faith.”
The Jewish voters petition, titled “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” was spearheaded prior to El-Sayed’s apologies but has picked up more signatures in their aftermath.
The petition’s language states that “many” of the signatories “have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles,” but that all of them “declare our intent to vote for Mike Rogers for US Senate in 2026.”
“If El-Sayed were to win the general election in this important swing state, we fear the far-left and anti-Jewish elements in the Democratic Party would become dominant, including in the imminent 2028 presidential race,” the petition says. “We cannot allow him to become the Democratic standard-bearer or Michigan’s senator.”
The petition specifies that their vote for Rogers “does not require that we agree with him on every issue or that we support President Trump.”
Benji Rosenzweig, a real-estate agent and music podcaster based in West Bloomfield, was one of the letter’s signers.
“I’ve watched Abdul El-Sayed, for the last number of months, surround himself with people who cheer for the destruction of our families and the annihilation of our community,” Rosenzweig told JTA. He signed the petition before El-Sayed’s apologies but wasn’t swayed by them: “What he said was, ‘I’m sorry that you were hurt.’ That’s not an apology.”
Rosenzweig describes himself as a “centrist” who holds “liberal values,” and who would have voted for El-Sayed’s primary opponent, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, in the general November election if she had won the nomination. He recently met Rogers at an event, he said, and told him that “I will be holding him accountable to the liberal values that I still value.”
As of press time, the petition’s signatories include Brian Hermelin, current president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit; Mark Davidoff, CEO of the Michigan Israel Business Accelerator; Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld, CEO of the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills; Amy Newman, CEO of Jewish Family Service of Metro Detroit; and David Victor, past president of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The petition included their names but not their titles, suggesting they were signing as individuals and not as representatives of their organizations. The list also includes the names of several people who had previously told JTA they would commit to fundraising for Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic primary.
Local rabbi Asher Lopatin, currently on leave from his role as community relations director for the Ann Arbor Jewish federation, has stumped for Rogers but told JTA he does not have a formal role with the campaign. In the Forward this week, Lopatin again urged the state’s Jewish Democrats to back Rogers over El-Sayed.
“To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win,” the rabbi wrote on Monday.
The El-Sayed campaign did not return a request for comment from JTA about the petition.
For the approximately 100,000 Jews in Michigan, the question of whether to vote for El-Sayed has proven hugely divisive. At the same Sunday event that hosted the candidate, state Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is Jewish and has publicly sparred with El-Sayed over his rhetoric, implored the crowd to “place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival” — suggesting that Jewish voters should put their own feelings of personal safety aside in order to elect a Democrat.
Nessel’s comment, coming one day after she sat out a state Democratic convention over what she said was fear of antisemitic harassment, has sparked some backlash outside of Michigan. Ron Halber, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington, called the attorney general “an absolute embarrassment.”
Mark Goldfeder, who runs the litigation group National Jewish Advocacy Center, wrote on the social network X, “Jewish voters can care deeply about democracy, climate, health care and the welfare of their neighbors while still treating Jewish safety as entirely nonnegotiable.”
Rosenzweig said he had once been an admirer of Nessel but that he was “really sad” over what he interpreted as her suggestion that voting for Abdul “may put Jewish people in danger, but do it anyways.”
“If Abdul wins she gets to say, ‘Well, Jews are endangered,’” he said. “It’s just such a crazy place to put people in.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Vance meets with Temple Israel rabbi on Michigan visit appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Spain’s prime minister blames Israel, Russia for disinformation around Ceuta border crisis
(JTA) — MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Monday that Israel and Russia spread disinformation about Spain’s migration policy after a rush of migrants arrived in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in North Africa.
Over 72,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta between July 30 and July 31, with at least 100 people dying in the attempt, according to local authorities. Sánchez, along with Morocco’s Interior Ministry, have blamed the surge on human trafficking networks that exploited misinterpretations of a change in Spain’s border policy.
In Sánchez’s first interview since the border crisis, he also said that Israel and Russia organized internet campaigns to undermine Spain’s government during the chaotic aftermath. Online theories proliferated widely after the Ceuta crossings, including some that said Israel orchestrated the crisis.
“After July 30th and 31st, there was an expansion of these hoaxes and this disinformation by social networks associated with both Russia and Israel, and with an international far-right movement that always uses migration, not only to attack Spain, but also to attack Europe and divide it,” Sánchez said in an interview with the Spanish radio network Cadena SER.
Sánchez said research from the European Union’s European External Action Service showed that Israel and Russia were behind disinformation campaigns, without giving further details on the evidence. The EEAS did not immediately respond to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
He added that it was “evident” that Israel and Russia were motivated by Spain’s political positions “regarding the genocide in Gaza and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Sánchez is among Europe’s most vocal critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Iran.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Monday that Sánchez was “lying shamelessly,” adding that the statements “will not distract from Sánchez’s disgraceful failure to manage his country’s affairs.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also told the Russian state broadcaster RBC that Russia had no involvement in the migrant crisis or disinformation campaigns.
Spanish-Israeli diplomatic ties, first established in 1986, have deteriorated since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, with Madrid since recognizing Palestine as a state and banning ships carrying arms to Israel from docking in its ports. By 2026, both countries had recalled their ambassadors.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Spain’s prime minister blames Israel, Russia for disinformation around Ceuta border crisis appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
What would a far-right win in Germany’s east mean for Jews?
(JTA) — Germany’s far right is heading to a historic win in the eastern federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, with plans of overhauling society to foster national pride and reject the country’s “guilt complex” over the Holocaust.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is predicted to win an election on Sept. 6. It seeks an absolute majority, which would allow it to govern alone and make AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund the state premier. A victory would deliver the first far-right government of a German state since World War II.
The AfD is polling at over 40% days before the election, about 20 points ahead of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has led the region since 2002. Its victory would overcome a barrier of mainstream parties that have refused to work with the AfD and blocked it from federal and state governments since its founding in 2013.
The AfD has proposed a sweeping nationalist agenda that includes expanding deportations and moving refugees into group shelters, dropping support for public broadcasters, defunding “anti-German art” and teaching children less about the Nazi past.
Lars Rensmann, a political science professor at the University of Passau in Bavaria, wrote a report on antisemitism in the AfD for the American Jewish Committee. He said that the party does not rely on overtly antisemitic rhetoric; instead, AfD leaders reference coded antisemitic stereotypes of “globalist, cosmopolitan elites and shadowy financial powers.”
These powers, alongside migrants, are painted as part of a hostile external force that could destroy Germany’s national identity.
“On the official level, [the AfD] only occasionally mobilizes open antisemitism,” said Rennsmann. “Yet it does, on various levels, use antisemitic tropes, antisemitic ideas, antisemitism as part of a larger worldview.”
The AfD has officially distanced itself from neo-Nazi groups and rejects allegations of extremism. Nonetheless, party leaders have repeatedly used Nazi slogans that are banned in Germany, such as “Alles für Deutschland,” or “Everything for Germany.” Björn Höcke, the AfD chairman in Saxony-Anhalt’s bordering state of Thuringia, has advocated for “a large-scale remigration project” to expel immigrants and prevent “our impending Volkstod,” or “death of the people,” using a term that played a major role in Nazi propaganda.
The Saxony-Anhalt branch of the AfD has also focused its platform on moving past Germany’s “guilt complex” over the Holocaust. The party’s manifesto says that the country’s culture of commemorating Nazi crimes has “led to a situation where national pride is generally considered disreputable, the defense of one’s own interests is perceived as indecent, and politicians avoid any positive reference to our rich history before 1933.”
Höcke has also called Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a “monument of shame.”
The AfD’s normalization of Nazi language and downplaying of Nazi history have pushed it outside the family of other right-wing populist parties in Europe, according to Rensmann. Established far-right movements such as France’s National Rally and Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia have refused to ally with the AfD in the European Parliament, deeming it too extreme.
The party’s branch in Saxony-Anhalt is also classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency as a confirmed right-wing extremist group, a designation the AfD strongly rejects. The government cited anti-constitutional positions in the party that it said violated the principles of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law. The national AfD is being monitored for “suspected” extremism.
If the party comes to power in Saxony-Anhalt, its nationalist views of history could have immediate effects on the state’s education system. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the AfD politician who has spearheaded a new state curriculum, told Deutschlandradio that he plans to emphasize pre-20th century German history with a formula that he called “More Bismarck, less Hitler,” referring to the 19th-century chancellor who realized the country as a unified nation-state.
Rensmann, the professor, noted that education is primarily controlled by state governments in Germany.
“They have ample opportunity to set curricular guidelines, and they will do that — I’m very sure they will implement this as soon as possible,” he said. “They will also draw potential civil servants to the state with an extremist neo-Nazi background, who were rejected as teachers in other states, and then they will have a good chance to join and become lifetime civil servants.”
The AfD has also promised a “patriotic cultural policy.” In that vein, the party has proposed that artists and cultural organizations sign a declaration pledging their “commitment to German national culture” and promising not to “disparage Germany and its culture” if they seek state funding, which many heavily rely on.
The party’s manifesto pushes for “German thinking” over “modern thinking,” specifically attacking the “identitylessness” of the Bauhaus art school, the Saxony-Anhalt institution at the forefront of an iconic avant-garde movement. The school was forced to close by the Nazis, who called it “un-German.”
Remko Leemhuis, the director of the AJC Berlin Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations, said this cultural policy could threaten funding for museums dedicated to the Holocaust. Saxony-Anhalt is home to several Holocaust memorial sites, including the Lichtenburg concentration camp, the Langenstein-Zwieberge subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp and Roter Ochse, which was used by the Nazis as a prison and execution site. The memorials receive both federal and state funding.
“The AfD will immediately — or as soon as they can — cut the funding or reduce it to a level where a lot of these memorial sites are no longer able to operate in a way that they used to be,” said Leemhuis.
The party has not explicitly said that it will sever funding from Holocaust memorials. But it has proposed abolishing the State Agency for Civic Education, which finances a large portion of school trips to these sites.
Leemhuis added that the AfD could transform the priorities of Saxony-Anhalt’s domestic security agency.
“This means the AfD has political power to direct security services where to look, where not to look,” he said. “Given the track record of this party, and especially this party group in that state, it will be very clear that there won’t be much of a focus on right-wing extremists.”
The AfD has defended itself against antisemitism accusations by saying that it supports Israel, specifically invoking Israel as a model of “the fight against Muslim immigration,” said Rensmann. At the same time, members of the party have accused Israel of deporting African immigrants to Germany and suggested that Israel has financially exploited Germany to pay for the Holocaust.
The Saxony-Anhalt branch of the AfD did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
An AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt could portend wider-scale momentum, as CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz struggles with plunging popularity amid a sluggish economy. The AfD won 20.8% of the vote in last year’s national election, the best post-World War II showing by a far-right movement, becoming Germany’s largest opposition party.
Rensmann said that if the AfD sets the agenda it promised in Saxony-Anhalt, it will also immediately send a national message.
“If there is an AfD government, this will be a kind of model for others in the rest of Germany who are antisemitic or rejecting Holocaust memory,” said Rensmann. “They will see this as a model to aspire to.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post What would a far-right win in Germany’s east mean for Jews? appeared first on The Forward.
