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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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British Gov’t Replaces Hatzalah Ambulances Destroyed in Arson Attack as Millions in Donations Pour In
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
The British government has loaned four ambulances to the Jewish volunteer emergency service Hatzalah to replace its four vehicles that were destroyed in an arson attack in the north London area of Golders Green early Monday morning.
The Department of Health and Social Care said on Tuesday it supplied Hatzalah with four substitute ambulances from the London Ambulance Service following the incident, which is being investigated as an antisemitic hate crime. The department will also cover the cost of permanent replacements for the vehicles destroyed in the attack because “the Jewish community should not bear the cost of this hatred,” Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said in a released statement. He further called the attack a “shocking, cowardly, and despicable act of evil,” and said he has “no doubt” that the fire was carried out to “strike fear” in the Jewish community in Golders Green and across the UK.
“The aim of these attackers is clear – they want Jewish people in this country to live smaller lives, to live less Jewish lives, to be less visible as Jewish people, and to fear going about Jewish life – whether that’s attending school or providing the services and support that makes the Jewish community one of the most resilient, strong, and proud communities in the country,” he added. “Hatzola’s volunteers represent the very best of public service, providing rapid, life-saving care to anyone in need, and it is appalling that such a service has been targeted in this way.”
Streeting continued, “The Jewish community will not stand alone – the government and this entire country stand with them … The answer cannot simply be higher walls, thicker doors, more CCTV. We also have to deal with this hatred at its source. We have to confront and beat the evil ideas that are permeating in our society.”
Hatzalah provides free medical transportation and emergency response to all, not just the Jewish community. As of Thursday morning, £1.8 million ($2.4 million) has been donated to the Jewish charity through a Charity Extra fundraising page, while a separate GoFundMe campaign has raised a little over £134,000 (close to $179,000) to help Hatzalah replace destroyed vehicles and life-saving medical equipment.
The four Hatzalah ambulances were parked in a lot belonging to the Machzikei Hadath synagogue when they were set on fire. Two British nationals, ages 47 and 45, were arrested on Wednesday in connection to the attack but have since been released on bail, according to the Metropolitan Police.
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UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine Shares Reel Calling for Terrorism Against Israel, Allies
University of California, Berkeley students on March 11, 2025. Photo: Reuters via Reuters Connect
The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at the University of California, Berkeley promoted Islamist terrorism on Tuesday, sharing a social media reel in which deceased Palestinian Islamic Jihad senior fighter Farouk Salameh argued for “the armed option” against the “Zionist enemy.”
Terrorism “is the only way,” Salameh said in video shared by the Berkeley SJP group, adding, “What was taken by force should be returned by force. This land was taken by force, and it will be taken back by force. This is a Zionist enemy. It builds settlements and expands. There is no place for negotiations.”
The Jewish advocacy group SAFE Campus first publicized SJP’s sharing the reel.
Salameh was the commander of the Jenin branch of the al-Quds Brigade, the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an internationally designated terrorist group backed by Iran and allied with Hamas. In May 2022, he was involved in the killing of Sgt. Maj. Noam Raz, a veteran of Israel’s elite Yamam counterterrorism police unit, in Jenin in the northern West Bank. The terrorist operative was also suspected of orchestrating other killings of Israeli soldiers, working with the “Lion’s Den” terrorist group, based in the West Bank city of Nablus.
Salameh was planning more attacks when he was shot dead by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Jenin in November 2022. Palestinian health officials said he arrived at a nearby medical facility with gunshot wounds to the chest, head, and abdomen.
UC Berkeley SJP’s commemoration of Salameh continues a pattern of extreme anti-Zionist at the campus. Just this month, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the group has incorporated the inverted red triangle symbol, Hamas’s indicator of Israeli military targets, into its logo.
In February 2024, the group led a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students in shutting down an event featuring an Israeli soldier, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police. Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach Hall while an event featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat — who visited the university to discuss his military service during Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — took place inside. The mob then deluged the building, shattering windows and destroying other property.
During the incident, one member of the mob spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.
In 2021, 23 Berkeley Law groups adopted a bylaw banning Zionists speakers. Supported by campus groups such as Women of Berkeley Law and the Queer Caucus, it called for observing the tenets of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel while requiring the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice to ban Zionists from submitting articles and speaking at its events.
As for SJP, its campus chapters, spread across the US, have a history of amplifying the voices of Islamic jihadists.
In 2024, an SJP spinoff group, which calls itself “Columbia University Apartheid Divest” (CUAD) despite not being formally recognized by Columbia University, distributed literature calling on students to join Hamas.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” it said. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of it were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place in December 2023. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
In the same week, Wesleyan University’s SJP chapter also endorsed Hamas and its Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel as its first act of the 2024-2025 academic year.
“On that day, fighters broke through the occupation walls, initiating a new chapter in the struggle against the US-Israeli war machine, and demanding the release of thousands of Palestinians unfairly imprisoned across their historic homeland,” the group said in a manifesto outlining its views.
Earlier this month, SJP groups and its affiliates proclaimed solidarity with the Islamic Republic of Iran following the US-Israeli killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of other high-level regime officials in military operations..
“Death to America,” CUAD said. “We yearn for the end of the US settler colonial project.”
CUAD was not the only group which denounced what the US has named “Operation Epic Fury.” New York University’s SJP chapter announced an anti-US demonstration to “demand an end to this criminal war that benefits no one other than US corporate interests” while the University of Chicago’s SJP chapter cheered Iran’s retaliatory strikes against US assets in Bahrain.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Reese’s Pieces are now kosher pareve. Carnivores rejoice.
Antisemitism is on the rise. There’s a war raging in the Middle East. Passover is bearing down on us and gas prices are higher than ever.
And yet one morsel of good news came to Jewish faithful this month: Reese’s Pieces are now certified kosher pareve.
OU Kosher, the largest kosher certifier in the U.S., announced March 12 that the candy-coated peanut butter candies are no longer considered dairy despite packaging that labels them as such.
The implications for kosher consumers are as momentous as they are simple: Reese’s Pieces can be eaten immediately after meat — or for the deeply adventurous stomach, alongside it — without the hourslong period Orthodox Jews wait before eating dairy again.
The status change unfolded over the last year, when Reese’s parent corporation, the Hershey Company, informed OU Kosher that it was changing the candy’s ingredients.
“Reese’s decided on their own that there are a lot of consumers that don’t like the fact that it’s dairy,” explained Rabbi Moshe Elefant, OU Kosher’s chief operating officer. “Once they decided that they’re removing the dairy from Reese’s, it became a great possibility for them to be OU-Pareve.”
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and other Reese’s brands remain dairy, and Elefant said the Reese’s Pieces packaging, which currently shows OU-D, will be updated later in 2026. For those concerned about any old bags lying around, the OU said to check the ingredient list or allergen statement — if it doesn’t include milk, you’re good.
The change occurs amid wider changes in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the company that makes Reese’s is headquartered. Some Reese’s products, like the Reese’s Mini Hearts and Peanut Butter Eggs, are no longer being made with milk chocolate due to the rising cost of cocoa, inciting controversy and drawing criticism from the Reese’s family. (Those candies remain certified dairy because they contain other milk ingredients, the OU said.)
Reese’s Pieces, on the other hand, never had chocolate in them to begin with.
Meanwhile, the OU Kosher hotline had fielded countless phone calls in recent weeks from home chefs about the change — some to verify the update, and some just to say thanks. The last time there was this much excitement over a status change, Elefant said, was when Oreos became kosher. (The cookies contained animal fat until the late 1990s.)
The Forward reached out to the Hershey Company for comment.
Elefant said there had been some debate within OU Kosher — which is a branch of the Orthodox Union, a leading umbrella organization for Orthodox Judaism — about whether to announce the candy’s pareve kosher status before the candy’s packaging itself could be updated. The organization’s advisory essentially instructs consumers to temporarily ignore the “D” on the packaging.
His team considered whether it would undermine the OU’s authority or confuse people to practice disregarding the certification printed on the product. But on some level, the decision was made for them.
“This is one of the situations where we had to think about the welfare of the Jewish people,” Elefant said. “And the welfare of the Jewish people was that they need Reese’s to be pareve.”
Kosher consumers typically wait between three and six hours after eating meat to have dairy; now one could get a hamburger on the way to the movies and then house fistfuls of the classic peanut-butter candy in the theater. Watching E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, perhaps. (I’m not saying this is healthy. Just that it’s kosher.)
But the impact will likely be received most gratefully on Shabbat, when meat-based meals force dessert makers to get creative. And while the bite-sized brown, orange and yellow rounds have always been kosher, Reese’s Pieces becoming pareve means Jews who observe cholov yisroel restrictions — only consuming milk that was milked by a Jewish person — can enjoy them now, too.
Time will tell whether the update truly transforms kosher baking — or turns Reese’s Pieces into a de facto pareve chocolate chip — but a new, easy-to-find garnish for any confection was sweet on the ears of OU Kosher’s Instagram followers.
“YESSSSS! This is a win for the non-dairy queens like me!!!” wrote one.
Said another, using a Jewish name for God: “This is how I know Hashem loves me.”
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