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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A Jerusalem cafe became a symbol of secular defiance — until Israelis learned it was run by Jews for Jesus
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Jerusalem’s premier soccer team made an unusual announcement last week: It would give a new cafe free advertising on players’ uniforms for the coming season.
Cafe Basimta was facing harassment from haredi Orthodox protesters who wanted it to close on Shabbat, and Hapoel Jerusalem said it wanted to send the message that Jerusalem is “an open and diverse city, where there is room for everyone.”
But on Tuesday, Hapoel Jerusalem reversed course and retracted the offer, after learning via an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Cafe Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus.
“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”
For the secular Israelis who have flocked to Cafe Basimta in response to the protests, too, the revelation of the cafe’s ties to a Christian missionary organization is complicating what had seemed like a simple skirmish in the city’s culture war over businesses open on the Jewish day of rest.
“I don’t know if it changes my desire to drink their coffee, but it definitely complicates things,” Gabriel, an American studying in Jerusalem for the year, told JTA on Saturday from the cafe’s long line after learning about the Jews for Jesus connection, as protesters yelled. “It’s one layer deeper than I thought.”
Others say the cafe’s Christian character is irrelevant to their defense of Cafe Basimta.
“I understand they hate Jews for Jesus, and I understand what they hate them for,” said Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Adir Schwartz, who is a prominent defender of the city’s secular sector, in an interview. “My father was a rabbi abroad, and I get that they feel they are protecting Jewish continuity.But this is about belonging in our shared city.”
Yoel Ben David, the cafe’s operator as well as Jews for Jesus’ top official in Jerusalem, says the twin culture wars have been good for business.
“Even though financially, it’s great, me and the staff, we don’t love it,” he told JTA from his cafe on Saturday. “We’d all love it to just chill out.”
At first, the tensions over Cafe Basimta seemed straightforward: In a city where 46% of Jews are haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, and only 13% identify as secular, the inverse of Israel as a whole, here was a rare cafe willing to flout religious authorities and open on Shabbat. A handful of such cafes dot the city, but others have given up on Shabbat hours in the past over pressure from religious authorities.
Cafe Basimta, which means “cafe in the alley,” opened at the end of May in the Nahlaot neighborhood of central Jerusalem. The name refers to the neighborhood’s 19th century stone dwellings toppling into one another along tiny streets. Decades ago a center of the city’s bohemian culture, Nahlaot is now increasingly haredi and there are few if any establishments open on Shabbat.
On July 4, the first Saturday it drew protesters, dozens of haredi demonstrators, many of them reportedly minors, descended on the cafe in four separate waves, surrounding it, banging on its windows and overturning tables, according to cafe staff and footage circulated online.
At the time, the cafe’s ties to Jews for Jesus were not public. That changed in early July, when Or LeAchim, a haredi anti-missionary organization that helps Jews leave missionary groups and cults, exposed the connections and began organizing protests against Cafe Basimta.
The group has placed pashkevils, or public billboards, denouncing the cafe in the neighborhood. “The missionary-messianic influence operates all the more forcefully by winning over hearts through food and drink,” the placards say in Hebrew. “And as if that were not enough, they added sin upon crime and began operating the place on the holy Sabbath, with disgraceful Sabbath desecration in the heart of the holy city.”
The revelations surprised and deterred some who had been inclined to support the cafe. But they did not change the tenor of the demonstrations, which remain focused on Basimta’s Shabbat operations.
“People went to demonstrate because it was open on Shabbos. They did not know that it was a missionary place. The demonstration was not useful for us,” said Binyamin Klugger, who works with Or LeAchim as well as other anti-missionary groups, and who was concerned the aggression of the Haredi protesters would undercut his message about the cafe’s evangelizing mission. “People that continue to demonstrate are really not knowing that it is a missionary place,” he said,
During Saturday’s demonstration, cries of “Shabbos!” echoed off the stone alleyways as the line of Israelis waiting for cold coffees stretched into the courtyard.
Israeli police stepped in to cordon off the protesters, preventing them from approaching the cafe. Some secular Israelis yelled back, with a handful at one point breaking into “Shalom Aleichem,” the hymn traditionally sung at the Shabbat table.
Residents stared down at the altercations from their balconies, the screams shattering an otherwise quiet Shabbat morning. Yael Levy, who moved to Israel from California and lives in the building directly beside Cafe Basimta, was handing out cookies to build goodwill.
“It’s very sad, especially during the Three Weeks,” she said, referring to the mourning period between the 17th of Tammuz and Tisha B’Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of both Temples, a destruction rabbinic tradition attributes to baseless hatred among Jews. “This is just bad energy during a time that calls for positive energy.”
Outside, a long line of coffee fiends waited their turn to choose from an extensive drinks menu, as Ben David greeted customers and monitored the demonstration.
There were no visible signs of the cafe’s affiliation with Jews for Jesus. But Ben David confirmed that the organization owns the building and the cafe, which joins a growing network of similar outposts across the country. He said he is aiming to strike a balance between missionary work and just offering a pleasant place to work or meet.
“Everyone accuses us of that,” Ben David said about proselytizing. “The Jesus goal is not completely out, but it’s not front and center.”
Jews for Jesus is a flagship organization of the diffuse movement of Messianic Judaism, which believes in the divinity of Jesus while claiming to practice Judaism — an overlap that no denomination across the Jewish world accepts as compatible. While hard numbers about how many Israelis hold Messianic beliefs are scarce, both Messianic leaders and their critics believe the number is growing. Last year, one of the two Israeli embassy workers killed in an attack outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., came from an Israeli Messianic family.
In 2024, Jews for Jesus appointed a member with an Israeli background as its CEO for the first time, and the Israeli branch of the global organization took in roughly $6 million in revenue that year, supporting a local staff of 60. On its website, it solicits donations for its Israel work, including, in one December 2025 appeal, $225,000 to launch a coffee shop and ministry center in Haifa, which it called a “welcoming space where Israelis can encounter the hope of Yeshua,” the Hebrew name for Jesus.
Ben David has worked with Jews for Jesus for more than two decades. He was born in Israel and came to believe in the divinity of Jesus as a young adult, together with his wife, around the time of his stint in the army, where he served as an Orthodox rabbi. He has a master’s degree from a Messianic seminary and once helmed training for missionary staff in Israel, according to Jews for Jesus’ website, which says he “now leads our work in Jerusalem, bringing the gospel back to the city where he first believed.”
Missionary activity is not illegal in Israel, with the exception of proselytizing to minors without their parents’ consent and offering religious conversions in exchange for a material gift. But many Israelis believe that it is, in a reflection of the deep cultural norms in Jewish communities.
Or LeAchim says it is planning a future protest that will focus more squarely on Cafe Basimta’s missionary ambitions.
“We are planning to hold a massive protest there soon — involving thousands of people — on a weekday,” said Rabbi Binyamin Vulcan, the group’s head of counter-missionary activities. “In the meantime, we are trying to get the place shut down through the municipality.”
Ben David said Jews for Jesus, anticipating such a response, bought Basimta’s building instead of renting it from a landlord who could be susceptible to a pressure campaign. At the same time, he insisted he didn’t understand the uproar.
“If Jesus is the Jewish Messiah,” Ben David said, “what could be more Jewish than believing in Jesus?” As for the missionary label, he insists the cafe is about more than just theology: “We don’t put crosses in our espresso,” he said.
Klugger said he is mystified about why the same secular Jerusalemites who are uncomfortable with the growing haredi character of the city are willing to buy coffee from someone who wants them to stop being Jewish altogether.
“If you don’t want haredim influencing your children,” he said, “you also can’t want missionaries influencing your children.”
Some Shabbat customers, meanwhile, say they have heard the warnings and aren’t swayed — for them, who owns the cafe is beside the point.
“I’m not going to convert because of the coffee, unless it’s really good coffee, then maybe,” said Lior Stern, who drove from the Tel Aviv area to support the cafe after hearing about the protests. “It could be Buddhist, it could be Muslim, it could be Jewish, it could be Christian. That’s not the point. The point is freedom.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A Jerusalem cafe became a symbol of secular defiance — until Israelis learned it was run by Jews for Jesus appeared first on The Forward.
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Prize-winning journalist Amir Tibon is moving back to the kibbutz where he and his family survived Oct. 7
(JTA) — “To be a liberal Zionist, it’s quite a lonely place,” said Amir Tibon, the Israeli journalist whose memoir “The Gates of Gaza” is one of the defining books of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
“Lonely” is relative, of course. Tibon’s story of how he, his wife Miri and their young daughters hunkered in a safe room as Hamas gunmen overran their kibbutz in southern Israel, and how his parents — Maj. Gen. (ret.) Noam Tivon and Dr. Gali Mir-Tibon — rushed into the war zone on a mission to save them, has made him one of the best-known survivors of the carnage.
In an interview, he described the outpouring of support his family received from fellow Israelis and American Jews, and the letters he gets weekly from people inspired by his book.
But Tibon, the opinion editor for the left-wing Israeli daily Haaretz, was speaking about a political reality. In the 33 months since Oct. 7, Israeli society has moved to the right, while the global left has turned Israel, its government, its people and its supporters into pariahs. That makes Tibon an inconvenient figure in both camps: too left for the Zionists, too Zionist for the left, and an eyewitness to events — acts of butchery on one side, security lapses on the other — that both would rather forget.
Meanwhile, even as he feels like a beleaguered minority, he remains committed to a vision of coexistence. “The one thing that is not changing: In this land, you have about 50% Palestinians or Arabs — some of them civilian citizens of Israel — and 50% Jews,” he said. “What do we do? How do we live together in this land? I think that question is not going anywhere.”
On July 28, at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Tibon will receive the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for his memoir, subtitled “A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” The $100,000 award, established 20 years ago by the family of the late American real estate developer, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor, is presented annually to an emerging author “who demonstrates the potential to make ongoing contributions to Jewish literature.”
In “The Gates of Gaza,” published in the fall of 2024, Tibon weaves his family’s rescue story with a wider history of Kibbutz Nahal Oz and the Gaza border communities and an account of the intelligence and policy failures that left them undefended. The book has also won the National Jewish Book Award, the Wingate Prize and the Bernstein Prize, and has been translated into Hebrew, German, French, Romanian, Italian and Hungarian, with a Spanish edition on the way.
The Rohr prize, Tibon said, arrives at a moment when he feels a duty to keep Oct. 7 in view. “It means that we are not forgetting Oct. 7,” he said of the prize. “We are not allowing anyone to minimize, deny, justify or otherwise just ignore that day and its place in history. There are very powerful forces that are trying to shift the conversation away from that day for various reasons. And by choosing this book, I think the judging panel is doing the opposite: It’s once again putting a spotlight on that day, and on everything that has changed because of it.
Since the attack, Tibon and his family have lived as evacuees in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek in northern Israel. In August, nearly three years after the invasion, they and other evacuees plan to move back home to Nahal Oz and join those who have already come back. Fifteen civilians from the kibbutz were killed on Oct. 7, and eight were taken to Gaza as hostages. More than 50 Israeli soldiers and security personnel were killed in the battle for the kibbutz and at the adjacent army base.
The return, he said, is “still a difficult, complicated situation on many levels — security, resources and just kind of the mental part of it.”
Counting his family, roughly two-thirds of the community who lived there before the attacks will soon be living there.
“I’m not sure everybody who is returning is definitely going to stay,” he said. “I think this is a test we still have to see — how is life going to look for families, what’s going to be the security situation, how much the education and health care and transportation and other government services are going to be high quality. These are all open questions. But we’ll see about all of these things.”
His daughters, Galia, 6, and Carmel, four and a half, have absorbed more in the last three years than any child should. “The kids here grow up too fast,” he said. “They understand a lot of what has happened — Oct. 7, the war with Gaza, the experience of having to leave your home, and then the subsequent Hezbollah and Iran wars. Unfortunately they understand pretty much everything.”
Between the book and a 2025 documentary based on his story, “The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue,” Tibon has become one of the most recognizable faces of Oct. 7 — a status he wears uneasily.
“I don’t see myself as a spokesperson for anyone,” he said, pointing to others whose books have resonated widely, including the former hostage Eli Sharabi and Rachel Goldberg-Polin, Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was abducted by Hamas from the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7. Hersh was slain by his captors after surviving for nearly 11 months in captivity.
Even within his own tiny community, Tibon said, “every story is different.” Nahal Oz has 450 residents. “Each family has its own story from that day.”
But the reception for the book means he has had an impact on how people remember and discuss Oct. 7.”Tens of thousands of people around the world have read this book,” he said, and he still hears from readers weekly. “Most of them are very supportive and uplifting, but there’s also criticism, and I’m happy for that as well.”
Some of that criticism comes from the left, from those who feel his story of Israeli suffering crowds out attention that should be focused on the tens of thousands of Gazans killed in the war and the million-plus who have been displaced. Tibon doesn’t flinch from the argument that the war has been catastrophic for Palestinians — he has said so in print, repeatedly. And he remains a harsh critic of the Netanyahu government, which he feels has extended the war in part to keep its hold on power.
But he insists that Hamas’ culpability for all that followed cannot be erased: “This war never would have started without Oct. 7. That’s just a fact,” he said. “And that day, it was a catastrophe for Israelis, and it was just as much a calamity for the Palestinians.”
Tibon said he is less worried about the activist left’s hostility toward Israel than he is about the mainstream turn in U.S. public opinion. “Today 60% of Americans have a negative view of the country,” he said, “and nobody is going to convince me that 60% of Americans is antisemitic and supports BDS.”
The Netanyahu government, he said, has been “a godsend, a gift from the heavens, for the far left in America,” which prefers to point to Netanyahu and his far-right ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, rather than Israelis like Tibon’s family and the other residents of Nahal Oz who still yearn for peace.
But he warns fellow supporters of Israel against making the opposite mistake, and defending the Israeli government from justified criticism. “If you’re saying Netanyahu is immune from criticism and cannot be separated from Israel, you just made Zohran Mamdani’s day,” he said, referring to the anti-Israel New York City mayor.
Tibon is blunt about what he sees as an Israeli government strategy of trying to move on from Oct. 7. “The government would very much like to erase Oct. 7 from public memory,” he said, “or at least to frame it in terms that are very favorable for them, and make it smaller than the war writ large.”
Given the security failures on that day, Tibon remains flabbergasted that Netanyahu’s government has survived the almost three years since.
He argues Israel abandoned its founding doctrine of short, decisive wars for long, inconclusive ones in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that served the coalition’s survival more than the country’s security: “They did not defeat Hamas. They did not defeat Hezbollah. They did not defeat Iran. But they managed to survive a full term,” he said.
Not everyone who lived through what Tibon’s family did has landed where he has politically. But while acknowledging the sharp political shift to the right in Israel since Oct. 7, he says it’s not just the left that remains “disgusted” with the government. Friends across the spectrum who served hundreds of days in reserve duty are appalled, for example, by legislation sheltering approximately 72,000 haredi Orthodox yeshiva students from the draft.
That contradiction, he said, is why figures like Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot — politicians critical of Netanyahu but hardly doves — are “ascendant right now.”
Asked if he’s changed his own mind about anything since Oct. 7, Tibon didn’t hesitate: “I’ve become more pessimistic.” Then, he catches himself. “If we succumb to total pessimism, then what’s the point of being here at all?”
If there is hope, he said, it has come from community, family and routine. He calls Mishmar HaEmek “a wonderful kibbutz” that “opened their hearts and their home.” Miri resumed her work with autistic children, now in Afula, a city in northern Israel. He went back to Haaretz and wrote the book. “It gives you a sense of purpose and meaning and something to get up for in the morning,” he said. He has also found purpose over the past three years in visiting the families of soldiers who died defending Nahal Oz or fell later in Gaza or Lebanon — “many dozens” by now. “I keep in touch with many of them,” he said. “There is no release from this.”
He is also grateful to the American Jewish organizations and synagogues, many from the Washington, D.C.-area where he and Miri once lived, for an outpouring of support that began on Oct. 8 and hasn’t let up.
“I also find a lot of reasons for hope within my own family — to see my daughters, how they’re growing and overcoming this trauma and becoming independent and strong every day — and to see my community, the people of Nahal Oz, who are doing a little bit every day to make things better and to overcome what happened.
“And I want to be optimistic that just as we are able to rebuild Nahal Oz now, and rebuild our life over there, we will also rebuild the country and put it on the right track.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Prize-winning journalist Amir Tibon is moving back to the kibbutz where he and his family survived Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows
Israeli election campaigns have often been ugly. They have featured exaggeration, fearmongering and outright deception. But even by those standards, the first major campaign advertisement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, posted on Netanyahu’s X account on Tuesday, managed to shock much of the country.
The AI-generated video depicts former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, who has become the standard-bearer for the opposition, walking through a sunlit field toward a young Jewish man before passing him by to embrace Mansour Abbas of Ra’am, the United Arab List, instead.
The young man looks strikingly like Eisenkot’s son, Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in late 2023 — although Likud insists he isn’t meant to. Strictly speaking, there is enough difference to sustain the protestations. The young man has longer, wavier hair than Gal Eisenkot did — just enough, perhaps, to preserve plausible deniability. Yet almost everyone I know believed they were watching a father joyfully approaching his slain son, seemingly restored to life, only to ignore him in favor of an Arab political leader at a time when Arab political participation in Israel is particularly contentious.
The only possible explanation: Likud wants their campaign to be as mean as possible. Or perhaps that they believe that anything that creates a buzz — and therefore distracts from the governing coalition’s disastrous and controversial policies, including a wildly unpopular recent legislative blitz — is a good thing.
And buzz there is. The perception that a father’s personal loss had been weaponized for electoral gain struck many as a line that simply should not be crossed. “This is Netanyahu, and this is his machine of incitement”, wrote Einav Zangauker, whose son was held hostage in Gaza by Hamas, on social media. “This isn’t politics,” Zangauker added, but rather “an attack on a bereaved father and an assault on his dignity. It is the lowest of the low.”
“I turn to elected representatives, activists, and all candidates from all parties, and demand that you do not cross red lines. Do not turn rivals into enemies,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said. “I call on the people of Israel, in a clear voice: Remember that elections are not a civil war.”
But even if one puts aside the controversy surrounding the young man altogether, the advertisement remains deeply troubling. It is, at its core, an exercise in incitement against Ra’am — and, by extension, against the very idea that Arab citizens may legitimately participate in governing Israel.
Abbas himself accused Netanyahu of “trying to incite between different parts of society”; about a fifth of Israelis are Arab, and the ad was obviously trying to delegitimize collaboration with the parties who generally represent them.
From Likud’s perspective, that too is logical — so long as they ignore the goal of Israel remaining a democratic country in which component ethnic groups live in harmony. It’s logical because Arab parties have always been part of the opposition to Likud and the chances are high that Eisenkot might need them, even passively, to successfully craft a coalition after the Oct. 27 election.
This isn’t just dangerous. It ignores the essential role that Arab parties have played in building toward a strong Israeli future.
Ra’am, under Abbas, has been the most integrationist Arab party Israel has ever seen. Abbas broke with decades of Arab political orthodoxy by arguing that Arab citizens should seek influence through practical cooperation with whichever Zionist government Israelis elected. He has repeatedly recognized Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people while demanding full equality for its Arab citizens.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, these choices have represented one of the boldest experiments in Jewish-Arab partnership since the state’s founding.
That experiment briefly succeeded. Ra’am joined Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid’s coalition in 2021 and demonstrated that Arab participation in government could become something ordinary rather than revolutionary.
More awkward still for Likud, Netanyahu himself spent some weeks after the 2021 election attempting to persuade Abbas to support — or even participate in — his own coalition. Those negotiations failed for one principal reason: Far-right firebrand Bezalel Smotrich — now Netanyahu’s finance minister — refused to countenance a government dependent on an Arab party. Without Ra’am, Netanyahu lacked a majority.
It is therefore surreal to portray Eisenkot’s willingness to work with Ra’am as somehow beyond the democratic pale, when not so long ago, Netanyahu himself tried to do precisely the same thing.
Nor should anyone pretend that Arab parties suddenly became relevant because of Eisenkot. Since the emergence of today’s political blocs, Arab parties have almost invariably belonged to the anti-Likud camp. Any center-left coalition aspiring to govern has depended, directly or indirectly, on their parliamentary support. That is not a distortion of Israeli democracy. It is one of its enduring structural realities.
Which brings us to the larger significance of this episode.
Many Israelis have long predicted that this Likud campaign would barely concern policy at all. They expected, instead, an effort to delegitimize any prospective change government by portraying it as illegitimate because it relied on Arab parties. They expected renewed attempts to cast Arab political participation as inherently suspect. They expected emotional manipulation to substitute for argument and personal attacks to eclipse serious debate. Some feared renewed efforts to discourage Arab turnout and disqualify Arab parties from the ballot.
That appears to be exactly what they’re getting.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Likud produced this advertisement, but that doing so was effectively its first act of the campaign, which kicked off after the Knesset recently went into recess.
Before voters had heard competing visions for Israel’s economy, security or diplomacy, the country’s governing party chose to launch its campaign by inflaming fears about Arab political participation while employing imagery that countless Israelis immediately interpreted as mocking one father’s unbearable personal loss.
By the next day, competing ads using a similar aesthetic were put out by opponents of Netanyahu. One depicted Netanyahu on a similar field running past a soldier to hug a Haredi politician holding a sign that says — as many Haredi anti-draft protesters chant — “we’d rather die than serve.”
One reason AI is so attractive to political strategists is because it blurs responsibility. Images can be carefully engineered to evoke a conclusion while remaining just different enough to deny that such a conclusion was ever the intention. The technology offers something every spin doctor craves: emotional impact coupled with plausible deniability.
“I do not think we can allow this to continue,” lamented David Lau, a former chief rabbi of Israel, who has served in the military. “We must stop all these disputes, all this talk, and all these behaviors. This path does not lead to building anything. It does not lead to peace. It is a bad path, and I am even more concerned about the next generation.”
It is entirely possible that this advertisement will prove to have established the moral tone of the campaign. Israel deserves better.
The post With anti-Arab campaign ad, Netanyahu stoops to new moral and political lows appeared first on The Forward.
