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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.”
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How Jim Bakker sent a rabbi’s son to 52 churches
Jim Bakker convinced me to go to church.
Bakker died Monday at 86. For a stretch in the 1980s he and his wife, Tammy Faye, were on television every day, praying, singing and weeping, her in waterproof mascara, in front of as many as 13 million people. Then came the sex scandal, the hush money and the fraud trial.
And yet, he became my gateway into Christianity.
I’m an Orthodox rabbi’s son who grew up in the Bible Belt, which made me a spiritual window-shopper. My bedroom window looked out across the street at Cokesbury Methodist Church. Every Sunday morning, I watched the families climb out of their minivans in khakis and pastels, smiling like people who had never once wondered whether turning on a light switch counted as work on Shabbat.
We didn’t have cable. Regular TV in our house was already a negotiation, and a channel devoted to Jesus wasn’t even up for discussion.
Then I went off to college, moved out on my own, and one of my first acts of rebellion was ordering basic cable. I flipped on the Cartoon Network, a channel that showed animated classics around the clock, and wondered if this was what the Messianic age felt like.
On Sunday mornings, on channel after channel, I stumbled across pastors preaching to their congregations. What hooked me wasn’t the theology; the sermons seemed more like self-help seminars. It was the production. Where I came from, worship was a closed-door affair, in Hebrew, for members only. Here it was a show, with a band and cameras.
The format Bakker perfected inspired others: the tears, the house band, the host who knew exactly where the camera was. I couldn’t look away.
Heaven, with a gift shop
Bakker was born in Michigan in 1940 into a Pentecostal family, and he met Tammy Faye at Bible college. They married in 1961, after three dates, which, as a rabbi’s son who spent years in the dating trenches, I find both reckless and enviable. They drifted into television through Pat Robertson’s network, where they hosted a children’s show, and in 1976 they started their own ministry: PTL, short for Praise the Lord. At its peak, PTL drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and took in more than $100 million a year. Critics said PTL stood for “Pass the Loot.”
On 2,500 acres in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the Bakkers built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park with a hotel, water slides, skating and Bible study. They sold shares in it and offered lifetime vacations there to donors.
I’ll confess: I was jealous. Christians had a place you went to bring your family closer to God, with a gift shop and cotton candy. We had the Catskills and a very long buffet. I took this about as well as a kid whose neighbors have a swimming pool.
Then it all fell apart. In 1987 came the revelation of Bakker’s encounter with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, and the $265,000 paid to keep it quiet. Fellow preachers lined up to condemn him, Jerry Falwell took over the ministry, and a federal inquiry followed. He was convicted of fraud in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years. He served five. Tammy Faye divorced him while he was in prison.
Bakker left prison in 1994, chastened. In a 1996 book called I Was Wrong, he wrote that Jesus had nothing good to say about money, a lesson he learned, as so many of us do, only after losing the water park. In 2003 he resurfaced in Branson, Missouri, hosting a new show from a café and selling viewers buckets of emergency food for the end of days.
The Jew on the Jumbotron
Soon, I had a plan of my own. I would spend a year going to 52 churches over 52 Sundays. Jewish tradition teaches that it’s verboten to go to church, especially during services. I planned to go as a journalistic endeavor and write a book about the experience.
Yet, I was still riddled with the guilt of my ancestors, so I went to my synagogue’s rabbi and asked his permission. To my surprise, he granted it on two conditions: I had to wear my press badge, so worshippers knew I was there to take notes and not to take part in prayer. The second condition was that I had to wear a yarmulke. People needed to know I was Jewish, the rabbi said. As if being short, bespectacled and named Benyamin Cohen didn’t already give that away.
Jim Bakker had put church on television. I was going to find out what happened when you stepped through the screen.
My wife, Elizabeth, a Christian minister’s daughter who had converted to Judaism, was still dripping wet from the mikvah and not exactly thrilled that her husband was going to spend a year in churches. She pointed out that I was about to become the first Orthodox Jew in history to qualify for a church loyalty card.
I started in the deep end, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the country’s largest megachurches, home to 15,000 people on a typical Sunday. The sanctuary looked like a sports arena. A camera operator found me in the pews. Within seconds my shayna punim was 20-feet tall on Jesus’ Jumbotron for all to see. I had been there for all of five minutes and I was already outed as the Jew.
“Oh God,” I thought. “What if my dad could see me now?”
Watching church was Bakker’s big idea. At New Birth, the cameras roamed the pews and the congregation cheered at itself on the big screens. After years of watching church from my couch, I was the one in the shot.
I’d spent my childhood sure the grass was greener at the proverbial church across the street. It wasn’t. It was just better lit. Once the cameras and the choirs were gone, what I found were people trying, like me, to figure out how to believe, and some of them were doing it better than I was.
Hanging out with Jesus made me a better Jew, a sentence I never expected to write, and one my father never expected to hear.
The other Bakker
There was another Bakker I felt I knew.
I was born the same year as Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He was 12 when his father was indicted. By 18, he’d co-founded Revolution, which eventually opened a branch in Atlanta, my hometown. The New York Times once described churches like it as meeting in “warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs,” which is, to put it plainly, not where my synagogue held services.
In 2006, the Sundance Channel made a six-part series about him called One Punk Under God, and I was hooked. The camera was back on the Bakker family business, only now it followed the son, who seemed to be building the opposite of his parents’ church.
I felt a kinship with Jay that I couldn’t have explained then. We were both preachers’ kids, which meant your father’s job was also your religion, so you couldn’t be mad at one without it messing with the other. He titled his memoir Son of a Preacher Man, which is also what I called a chapter in mine.
His choices were harder than mine. My father never lost his congregation to a federal grand jury. While Jim Bakker went to Branson to sell apocalypse buckets and political prophecy, Jay went toward a gentler, more inclusive faith.
As I learned throughout my journey, a church built for television is only as strong as its ratings. The Jewish service I understand best would make terrible TV. On Yom Kippur we fast for 25 hours and act somberly. In the prayers, we confess in the plural, a whole congregation beating its chests together: we have sinned, not I.
Jim Bakker got me into church, and church sent me back to synagogue. Praise the Lord, as they used to say on his show. And, as we say in mine, amen.
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As voting nears, Israeli democracy is not healthy
When Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the right of Arab parties last week to run in the country’s Oct. 27 election, they didn’t only provide Israel’s 2 million-plus Arab citizens a reason to vote. They also sent yet another signal in the incredible noise of these elections: Israeli democracy is not healthy.
Every time Israel has held elections in the last two decades, this cycle repeats: The Central Elections Committee — a body mostly made up of politicians — bars Arab parties or candidates, the Supreme Court puts them back on the ballot, and the country congratulates itself that its democratic guardrails held up to the pressure. But when Israel’s political representatives think democracy means disqualifying parties representing 20% of its electorate, the guardrails are not holding. When that 20% of the electorate is told its voices are unwanted and its opinions suspect enough to ban, it is nearly impossible to call Israel a healthy democracy.
And there’s a deeper story here, too — one that came to a head in 2023, connected to the decades-long march of the populist far-right in Israel against the Supreme Court. Recall that one of the first things that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government did upon taking power was to announce a “judicial overhaul plan” built on the populist claim that the elected politicians are the only true representatives of the people, and the unelected, elitist, liberal-leftist Supreme Court ought to be subservient to them.
Since then, they have tried to eliminate the Court’s ability to review the quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, left the court’s top positions unfilled and languishing, and managed to pass a bill putting judicial appointments in political hands. In short, the Court is not simply a neutral referee in the fight over whether Arab parties can run. Its independence and authority are themselves at the center of Israel’s political struggle.
When the court restored Arab parties to the ballot, and liberals breathed a sigh of relief, the right went to work. It is telling its base that the Court, by simply upholding the most basic tenet of a democratic system — that parties be allowed to run regardless of their political positions — is in bed with the enemy: Arabs. In other words, it weaponizes the court ruling as proof of what it has been saying all along: that this is not the court of the Israeli people, it is the Arab’s court, the left’s court, and it must be brought to heel.
This is the double bind the Israeli Supreme Court has existed in for years. It is more hostage than guardrail. I have spent my career in Israeli civil society, and now lead an organization that funds a good deal of it, which is a long way of saying I have watched this cycle from close enough to know that the relief is a trap.
The court recognizes the part it plays in this game of political football, and it is caving to pressures and changing its own internal approach. The discussions it held last week were not limited to the Elections Committee’s decision to disqualify all the Arab parties. It went further. The court recommended Sami Abu Shehadeh of the Balad party withdraw his candidacy so that it would not have to disqualify him. Yes, Sami wrote an appalling article on Oct. 8 — one that I find deeply repugnant. But for many years, the court held that disqualification required extensive and consistent evidence of support for terrorism or opposition to democracy. On that basis, it allowed both Jewish and Arab candidates to run, even when they had written or said things that were unpopular, racist, or dangerous. And when it came to Abu Shehadeh, there was no solid evidence of a sustained pattern showing that he supported violence or opposed democratic principles. The court did not want to depart from its own precedent, but it could not withstand the pressure of public sentiment, so it asked Sami not to run. He withdrew.
It is clear to me that if Sami were Jewish, he would never have been disqualified. Jewish politicians have said things just as horrifying as he has, and they are consistently allowed to run. People fighting for Israeli democracy — both here in the U.S. and in Israel — can’t go to the mat for Israel’s democratic institutions without dealing with the essence of what democracy is.
In a democracy, the majority does not extend equality to the minority as a kindness. And for members of the minority, democracy is a bargain: You choose to live with the outcome because you had a real chance to shape it — by voting for politicians who represent your interests. With these bans, Israel asks two million citizens of the country to hold up their end of this bargain — to pay taxes and vote— while informing them every few years that the state’s end of the bargain is actually negotiable. That equality is not assured. That their parties could be barred from running.
Democracy is only more than a word if every citizen has both the right to vote and the right to govern. Israel simply is not a democracy if it fails to offer Palestinian citizens full participation. Period. Israel’s Palestinian citizens are not a test Israeli democracy has to pass, where the Supreme Court is a cheat code. Israel’s Palestinian citizens and their rights are what Israeli democracy ought to be made of.
Yes, it is a relief to know that Israel’s Supreme Court restored the Arab parties to the ballot, but we ought to notice what we are relieved about: that judges had to stop Israel’s elected representatives from cutting out a fifth of the electorate just five weeks before a general election. A democracy that has to be rescued from its own politicians on a regular basis is not a healthy one.
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‘Remember 7.10.23’: In Israel, Hostage Square bears few remnants of a national crisis – but trauma lingers
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – In the days following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, the families of the hostages held in Gaza turned the plaza next to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art into what became known as Hostage Square.
Filled with “Bring Them Home” signs and hostage posters, yellow ribbons and yellow balloons, the square hosted demonstrations and press conferences.
It was here that the families created a replica of a Hamas tunnel and established the Empty Shabbat Table, a haunting art installation to remind visitors – and especially the Israeli government – that their loved ones still languished in Gaza. And it was here, two years later, that the families and thousands of other Israelis gathered to watch the last of the living hostages return to Israel.
Three years after the attack on Simchat Torah, there are few remnants of the hostage families’ encampment: the tunnel replica, a few yellow ribbons and a sign bearing the words “Remember 7.10.23.” During the days leading up to the third anniversary, some paid respects to the few hostage families who set up a sukkah on the square, but the plaza was nearly empty.
By all outward appearances, Israelis have moved on.
Yet beneath the surface, many are still grappling with the trauma of Oct. 7 and the multifront war the attack triggered.
In a Channel 12 TV poll in June, 74% of respondents said they fear that terrorists will carry out another large-scale attack, and 66% said they want the Oct. 7 attack to be investigated by a state commission of inquiry.
Last month, in an Israel Democracy Institute survey, 68% of Jewish Israelis and 32% of Arab Israelis said the Oct. 7 attack is a “central factor” in deciding which party to vote for, behind security and the high cost of living.
In the café at the edge of Hostage Square, Isaac Badra, a 33-year-old realtor, recalled how he and his wife opened their home to their upstairs neighbors because the Badras live on the “safer” ground floor and their Tel Aviv building has no bomb shelter. The trauma persists, he said.
He vividly remembered the air-raid sirens, reserve soldiers rushing to base on Simchat Torah and the frantic phone calls with his wife’s family near the Gaza border as Hamas attacked Sderot, where they live.
“My wife’s mother said she saw terrorists in the street, but I couldn’t grasp what she was saying,” he recalled. When he turned on the TV, he realized the scale of the attack. “I locked all of our doors and our windows and prayed.”
Three years later, Badra said, “When I hear noises outside, I jump. When Arab construction workers shout out to each other, I jump. And now I doubt whether my friends abroad really have our back.”
Roni Shoval, a defense industry worker from northern Israel not far from the Lebanon border, said the trauma of the past three years “is still inside me.” He called the attacks “a modern Holocaust for Israel.”
Even three years later, “I’m not ready to visit Nova,” he said, referring to the memorial at the site of the music festival where Hamas murdered 378 people and abducted dozens more. “Look, I’m getting goosebumps now just talking about it.”
Shoval, 54, is still doing IDF reserve duty, years beyond the maximum age because the IDF needs his expertise. He doesn’t want the same for his children.
“My son will be drafted soon,” he said. “Back in the day, I served in Gaza and Lebanon. I don’t want him sent to Gaza and Lebanon.”
At a nearby table, 24-year-old Yael Meyer sat with classmates from Tel Aviv University. The attack the previous day aboard a flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv, they said, only reinforced the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed.
“I’m always aware that there could be another terror attack. But I always had the sense that the security services would protect us.” Since Oct. 7, that trust in the government is gone, she said.
Her friend Talia Zecler, also 24, said she felt “helpless” after the attack. “I was angry at my country. Entire families were killed or kidnapped,” she added. “It feels like we’re living in an endless war.”
Her heart races when the sound of a passing motorcycle resembles an air-raid siren. But at the same time, she still marvels at the bravery and solidarity of ordinary Israelis in the months after the attack.
“People became more connected after Oct. 7. They volunteered everywhere, including at Hostage Square,” she said. “There was a sense of unity, that we’re in this together, and we saw it on the flydubai flight.
“This is the Israeli spirit.”
Sitting in the café with her parents, S., a 19-year-old IDF soldier, said the trauma she experienced on Oct. 7 at her home in Jerusalem “is minuscule” compared to the experience of those whose families were directly harmed by the attacks on the Gaza border and, later, attacks by Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis.
“Sure, when I hear a plane flying in the sky, I think, will there be another war with Iran? I immediately go there,” said S., whose name could not be published due to military protocol.
But as the country prepares to vote for the next government on Oct. 27, she plans to channel her hopes and dreams in the voting booth.
“The most important things for me right now are to have a national investigation of what happened on Oct. 7 and to repair our relations not only with our immediate neighbors but everywhere. We don’t live in a vacuum,” she said.
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