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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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When Assassination Attempts Stop Shocking Us
US President Donald Trump takes questions from media at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The villagers of Chelm once faced a serious problem.
A wooden bridge at the edge of town had a loose plank in the middle. People kept stepping on it, falling through, and breaking their legs. The town elders gathered for an emergency meeting. Some said, “We should put up warning signs!” Others said, “We should add lights along the bridge!”
Then one leader stood up and said, “I have the answer! Let’s build a hospital at the bottom of the bridge!”
This, I fear, is where America stands today.
Just a few days ago, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., a gunman rushed past a security checkpoint and opened fire. The President, the First Lady, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. The suspect, a 31-year-old teacher with an engineering degree, had written a manifesto targeting administration officials, and investigators later found anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric on his social media accounts.
Regardless of where one stands politically, this news should shake our very core. A civilized society cannot become comfortable with such evil acts of violence. And yet, by morning, the conversation had already shifted: More security. Stricter gun laws. Better screening.
All of it sounded like building another hospital at the bottom of the bridge — because while some of these ideas are worthy and necessary, they do not answer the deeper question that should be at the forefront of our minds: How did we arrive at a moment when evil has become so banal that it no longer shocks us?
Many blame all sorts of reasons — from political extremism to mental illness, from social media to economic anxiety — and while each of these may contain parts of the truth, none addresses the root of the problem. Because the broken plank is not only political. It is a crisis of the nation’s soul.
Shortly after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 at the same Washington Hilton in Washington D.C., the Lubavitcher Rebbe addressed the nation with remarkable clarity. The Rebbe rejected the explanation that crime grows from deprivation and poverty, as some suggested. The Rebbe noted that Reagan’s attacker lacked nothing materially. The real issue, the Rebbe said, was that he lacked education. Not education of the mind alone, but education of the conscience.
A child must grow up knowing that there is “an Eye that sees and an Ear that hears,” that human life is sacred, that actions matter even when no one is watching, and that freedom is not permission to do whatever one wishes, but responsibility to do what is right.
Without that foundation, a society may produce people of dazzling intellectual brilliance, but with almost no goodness to guide it.
Alas, history has already shown us where that road leads. The Nazi era proved that reason alone can rationalize anything, even evil. Germany of the 20th century produced philosophers, scientists, poets, and composers. And yet, it also produced Auschwitz.
In Schindler’s List, there is a haunting scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto in which a little girl, hiding near a piano, is shot by an SS guard. As her tiny body lies in blood, another guard sits down and begins to play the piano. One guard asks the other, “Is that Bach?” His friend replies, “No. Mozart.” And they continue to discuss the music as if nothing had happened. That was Nazi Germany: murder alongside Mozart.
Elie Wiesel once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe how he could still believe in God after Auschwitz. The Rebbe responded with a question of his own: “In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?”
Because without God and the absolute truth of His Bible, morality becomes negotiable. Without grounding ourselves in Divine commandments such as “Do not murder,” even cultured and educated people can descend into evil.
We must act responsibly in the face of real threats, increase security, and pass legislation where needed. But if we truly want to prevent the next attack, we must repair the bridge itself. And that repair begins with teaching our children not only how to think, but how to live. Not only how to succeed, but how to serve. Not only how to respect life, but how to recognize “the Lord your God” Who gives us life and Who commands us to protect it in ourselves and in others.
A few years ago, here in Arizona, I had the privilege of working with Governor Doug Ducey and others to help bring a statewide Moment of Silence to the beginning of the school day. Just one quiet minute in which students can pause and remember that life has purpose, that actions have meaning, and that there is something greater than themselves.
This responsibility belongs to all of us. Adults and children alike must know that kindness is not optional, that words matter, and that every human being — even those who are different from us — is created in the image of God. And the simple moral truths that built our civilization must once again guide the way we live: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Love your fellow as yourself.” “Do not stand idly by while your fellow’s blood is being shed.”
Let us repair the bridge. Let us return to God and His guidance, and strengthen the soul of our country. For when a nation strengthens its soul, it not only survives. It rises.
Rabbi Pinchas Allouche is the founding Rabbi of Congregation Beth Tefillah and the founding dean and spiritual leader of the Nishmat Adin High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he resides with his wife, Esther, and 10 children.
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The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn’t Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Within hours of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), a comment on The Young Turks’ social media pages offered one theory of the case.
The shooting, the commenter explained, was the work of “the family that owns and brags it founded that country and stole our fed and our way of tying our currency to its value in gold.”
Another, on the same channel, called it “another convincing Mossad-CIA joint charade.”
A sitting president had nearly been shot at a press dinner in Washington. The shooter, a 31-year-old California tutor named Cole Tomas Allen, was already in custody. None of this had any plausible connection to Israel, Jews, or the Federal Reserve. The audience supplied that connection anyway.
At NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, my colleagues and I collected and annotated 2,000 YouTube comments from 10 major US news outlets in the first 24 hours after the attack — left, center, and right — and compared them to our earlier work on the Charlie Kirk killing in September 2025 and on the saturation of antisemitic conspiracy during last summer’s US-Israeli campaign against Iran.
What we found is a structural shift in how online publics process political violence in real time. It is not, on its surface, what a Jewish reader might expect. It is more troubling than that.
At first glance, what I am about to describe might look like a decline in antisemitism. It is not.
In the Kirk corpus, roughly three in 10 comments performed conventional blame attribution: it was the Left’s fault, the Right’s fault, the media’s fault, Kirk’s own rhetoric. At the WHCD, that figure collapses to one in 20. Conspiracy theories — false flag claims, staged-event narratives, claims that Trump himself or the security state orchestrated the shooting — jump from a marginal six percent to roughly one in four. Within a single news cycle, the question being answered shifted from *who is responsible?* to *did this even happen?*
And it shifted across the entire spectrum.
At CBS, the most-engaged comment in the entire corpus — 1,887 likes — read: “That’s a helluva way to get out of the dinner berating.” The second most-engaged, 1,875 likes: “And the band played on.” A Titanic metaphor, Trump as the doomed captain.
One-word assertions reached the engagement-leading tier without any humor cover at all: “STAGED” at CBS, 659 likes. “Faker than 3 dollar bill BS” at CNN, 1,233 likes.
The same logic ran in the opposite direction at Fox News, where the staging frame was inverted into “MAGA-HOAX” — left-leaning commenters arriving on the Fox thread accused MAGA itself of having staged the attack. Different villain, identical architecture: a manufactured event, a hidden orchestrator, a perpetrator framed as a patsy, security-camera footage read as evidence of staging.
The motives stacked on top of one another — mutually exclusive, but co-existing without friction. Trump staged it to escape being roasted at the dinner. Trump staged it to manufacture sympathy for his $400 million ballroom expansion. Trump staged it to distract from issues like the Iran war, or from his collapsing poll numbers.
This is what a comment section now looks like in the hours after a political-violence event in the United States. Not partisan blame. Not grief. Not even shock. Instead, we see conspiracy as the default register of interpretation, stable across editorial positions.
What does this have to do with Jews?
Six weeks ago, during the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the same architecture was running through the same comment sections — and the orchestrator slot was filled by Israel, by Mossad, by AIPAC, by “the family that founded that country,” by Trump-as-Israeli-asset. The mechanics were identical. What rotated was the villain.
This is what Jewish readers need to see clearly. The conspiratorial machinery that saturates American comment sections after political violence is not ideologically fixed. It is a template. It takes whatever villain the moment makes available — Israel during Iran coverage, Trump and the CIA at the WHCD, regardless of context, because that audience already carries the frame.
Antisemitism, in other words, has become structurally optional but instantly available. The infrastructure no longer needs a Jewish orchestrator to function. It still has a slot ready for one.
That is why a comparatively low antisemitism rates at most outlets this week is not a reprieve. It is a measurement of which villain the architecture happened to reach for. The infrastructure built up during the Iran coverage has not gone away. It has gone latent. The next event that supplies a Jewish or Israeli connection will reactivate it instantly, because the architecture itself was never dismantled.
One qualifier. Our corpus closed on April 26, before reports surfaced of writings recovered from Allen’s hotel room. What those documents revealed about his motive, they cannot affect the finding here. We are not diagnosing the shooter. We are diagnosing the commentariat.
Two things follow.
For those tracking online antisemitism: monitoring systems calibrated only to antisemitic markers will systematically miss what is actually happening. The threat to Jews is not located only in explicitly antisemitic comments. It is located in the universalization of the conspiratorial template that produces them whenever the conditions are right.
For those thinking about platform governance: we already know how to see this in close to real time. The bottleneck is not technical. It is institutional. Moving from documentation to early warning and intervention is a political choice, not a research problem.
The empty chair after the evacuation was Trump’s. The chair where antisemitism used to sit in this kind of discourse is, at most outlets this week, also empty. Neither absence is permanent.
Dr. Matthias J. Becker is AddressHate Research Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism, the largest study of online antisemitism conducted in Europe, and now directs its successor project, Decoding Hate, at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
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‘Aliyah Buddies’: How Moving to Israel Helped Me Find My People, My Community, and My New Life
Illustrative: New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
When I made Aliyah to Israel last September, I knew another war with Iran was possible. So, on February 28th, when we all woke up to sirens, I wasn’t shocked. But I was surprised at how quickly ballistic missile attacks became almost a normal, routine part of reality.
Even so, as attacks continued with multiple impacts near where I live in Tel Aviv, I was still so glad that I had moved to Israel. Despite everything going on, I still wish I had done it 10 years ago. Now that I am here, I can’t even remember the fears that held me back for so long.
Part of the reason I feel this way comes from the support and community I have built here in Tel Aviv, largely with olim, and specifically those who were on my Aliyah flight.
Nearly seven months later, a group of us from the flight, organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, in partnership with the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and Jewish National Fund-USA, are in touch almost daily in an online chat group.
The group was born out of what I call “the Israel effect,” the phenomenon of people gravitating toward each other, looking for ways to help or get to know new people.
This happens in bomb shelters, at the grocery store, in the street — and it happened on our flight. Pretty immediately, I started talking to another olah who was sitting next to me on the plane. When we landed, we ended up in the airport waiting to complete the process of immigration with several other olim our age. We discussed everything from where we were from to where we were going to live and work, to our reasons for moving across the world and our army processes. Because we were starting a similar chapter of life, the connection was natural.
Eleven of us opened a group chat that day called “Aliyah Buddies.” At first, our questions revolved around finding ulpans and learning how to settle bureaucratic matters like converting our drivers licenses. Even though I had plenty of Israeli relatives on my father’s side of the family who were excited to accompany me to the Interior Ministry or the bank, this group was still a lifeline.
It was a place for us to put all of our worries, our doubts, and our struggles, and to be supported by the other people in the group who were experiencing the same problems. We moved from practical matters to inviting people out to events, planning reunions, asking for help choosing LinkedIn pictures, and giving general life updates. No matter what time of day or what the topic was, there was always somebody willing to help, encourage, or commiserate.
“I love this chat,” one member wrote in the Fall after a fellow group member posted photos of a single friend looking for a relationship. Just recently, a friend in the group chat got engaged and invited us all to her engagement party.
Under missile fire, this feeling is amplified. Shortly after the war’s first sirens, someone posted “Everyone good?” with a heart emoji. That led to everyone checking in from places across the country, then discussing the Home Front Command’s system of early warnings, alerts, and all-clears. In the weeks since, there have been constant check-ins along with photos from shelters, sharing fears and stress as well as more humorous stories about missile alerts interrupting showers.
In a post October 7th world, these connections are more meaningful to me, especially after I, like so many others, went through several friendship losses in the wake of the attacks. Friends who I had known for years unfollowed me or blocked me without so much as a single word. It doesn’t compare to what the State or people of Israel went through, but I definitely lost my spark for months, and felt guilty that I was living a safe, comfortable life in the Diaspora while so many were fighting and losing their lives here in Israel. Now, being here and building new communities like we’ve done in our group chat means everything to me.
Aliyah has shown me, more than anything, how deeply we as Jewish people care for one another — even if we don’t fully know them yet. What I didn’t fully understand before I moved to Israel was the strength of the community here. The sense of camaraderie among immigrants, the way people show up for each other — it makes the challenges of building a life here seem doable.
Anyone considering aliyah should understand that coming to Israel doesn’t solve all of your problems. But I’m finally in the right place, the place that feeds my soul, and where everything comes together. It is exhausting, frustrating and has challenged me in countless ways, but it is more amazing and fulfilling than I could have hoped — and at the end of the day, that’s what counts.
Arielle Gur made Aliyah to Tel Aviv in September 2025 out of love for her family, the country, and the people of Israel.