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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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‘Have a problem, call the PM,’ says Netanyahu as he gives out his number in campaign video
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday posted what he described as his personal phone number and invited Israelis to contact him with their questions and problems.
It was an election-season stunt that drew such a flood of responses that the number’s WhatsApp account was blocked within minutes and those calling received a busy signal.
It also drew suspicions that it was a ploy to collect voter data.
In a video posted to social media, Netanyahu is seen with longtime adviser Topaz Luk, who asks the prime minister whether he can publish his phone number. Netanyahu initially reacts with disbelief, saying, “Topaz, have you gone crazy?” before agreeing.
“I want to hear from you. Your suggestions, your questions, your problems. I want to hear, so leave me a message,” Netanyahu said. He added that he could not promise to answer everyone but would respond to as many people as possible.
Hundreds of messages and calls arrived within minutes and the WhatsApp account associated with the number was blocked. Luk later posted on X that the account had been disabled because of the volume of calls and said Netanyahu’s team was working to restore it, directing people to Telegram in the meantime.
Kan political correspondent Michael Shemesh questioned whether the number belonged to Netanyahu at all and suggested on X that the exercise was “probably designed to harvest the phone numbers of potential voters.”
Other users pointed to another clue that the handset seen in the video was unlikely to be Netanyahu’s personal phone. One of the WhatsApp groups visible in Luk’s video was a synagogue updates group whose latest message appeared to back political rival Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who now heads the Beyachad party.
“Something tells me that Bibi isn’t signed up to the ‘Menachem’s House Main Shul Updates’ group,” one X user wrote, “especially not when the latest message there is ‘yalla, it’s time for Bennett.’”
The Likud spokesperson had not responded to a request for comment on the accusations by the time of publication.
It was not the first time Netanyahu handed out what he presented as his personal number during an election campaign. In August 2022, little more than two months before the vote that returned him to power, the then-opposition leader published another number and invited Israelis to video call him.
“Why should only some people have my phone number? Everyone should have it,” Netanyahu said at the time, joking that the move was a “dramatic, world-changing decision.” He told supporters who sent proof they had joined his Telegram channel that they would have a better chance of receiving a video call from him.
The response was similarly intense. Likud said Netanyahu received 9,420 calls within the first 30 minutes, while follow-up videos showed calls and messages flooding the phone.
Netanyahu’s rivals mocked the stunt. Then-Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman released a parody video saying Netanyahu “has not picked up the phone in 12 years,” while Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid dismissed it as a “fictional phone operated by Netanyahu’s aides.”
The episode comes as Netanyahu faces a difficult reelection campaign, with roughly 20% of voters remaining undecided, many of whom are disillusioned Likud voters, according to pollsters and researchers cited by Reuters.
A Channel 13 poll released earlier this month put Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party at 23 seats, ahead of Likud with 21, and Netanyahu’s current coalition projected to win just 49 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Eisenkot also led Netanyahu 47% to 34% when respondents were asked who was better suited to serve as prime minister.
The phone-number appeal is the latest in a series of efforts to put Netanyahu directly in front of voters, including a blitz of highly publicized appearances. Last week, the prime minister visited a restaurant in Hadera, a Likud stronghold, where owner Simo Shtivi said his arrival was “like hoisting the World Cup,” as diners lined up for photos and a chance to speak with him.
Netanyahu also made a surprise appearance with his wife Sara at a concert by Israeli pop star Eden Ben Zaken. A few days earlier, he filmed a campaign video at Jerusalem’s Malha Mall meeting shoppers, including children. The Central Elections Committee later ordered the video removed because election law bars the use of children in campaign propaganda.
Likud also rolled out billboards showing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside the leaders of Iran, Turkey and Hezbollah under the slogan, “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘Have a problem, call the PM,’ says Netanyahu as he gives out his number in campaign video appeared first on The Forward.
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Providence voters to put Israel boycott movement to major test at the ballot box
(JTA) — As pro-Palestinian progressives find some success at the 2026 ballot box, the long-gestating Israel divestment campaign is looking to capitalize in Rhode Island.
Voters in Providence, the state capital, will vote on a referendum this November saying the city should refrain from investing in “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.”
The language of the actual ballot petition does not mention Israel, nor any other country, by name. But the signature campaign was led by Providence for Palestine, a local activist coalition, and both its proponents and opponents have framed the measure as a referendum on Israel and the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
With the referendum’s ballot placement secured, Providence has become the largest American municipality ever to place divestment before the voting public.
“We’re in this moment when the general public at large, and particularly Democratic voters, very much understand what’s going on in Gaza and Palestine as genocide, as apartheid, and want their leaders to take action on it,” Zack Kliger, a lead organizer of the ballot initiative and member of the Rhode Island chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Kliger described the current divestment campaign as having “definitely been led disproportionately by Jewish organizers.”
To determine which countries are “conducting” any of its list of human rights abuses, the referendum would rely on “resolutions” from various bodies, including the United Nations Security Council, International Court of Justice and “any” U.S. court ruling or U.N. body. Some, though not all, of those bodies have reached conclusions that would implicate Israel in the ballot language’s divestment campaign.
Both Israel and the Trump administration have strongly rejected all genocide accusations leveled against the country. “Apartheid” can be considered an independent crime under international law, while “ethnic cleansing” has no formal legal definition.
Divestment from Israel has seen some success on the municipal level since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s military response in Gaza, which has sunk the country’s popularity across the American electorate. Last year a non-binding divestment resolution in Somerville, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb with less than half of Providence’s population, became the first such initiative to win at the ballot box. Over objections from Jewish groups, the city this summer began exploring the question of how to enact the measure into law.
Critics of divestment measures argue that they force local governments to put undue focus on international issues; could prompt division and backlash against local Jewish communities, and jeopardize public pension programs. The Providence campaign’s decision to avoid mentioning Israel in the ballot language sets it apart from similar initiatives, while also neutralizing claims, made against other resolutions, that such measures unfairly single out Israel.
Yet local Jewish groups say the risk to the community remains.
“All this will do [is] stoke more division in our community, and potentially make Jewish people here feel more unsafe,” Stephanie Hague, chief strategy officer of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island, told JTA.
Hague noted that the ballot language, as written, prompts questions about the authority of the international bodies making judgments about what constitutes genocide, ethnic cleansing and other terms in in the initiative. She said that the Alliance would campaign against the ballot measure and, if it passes, explore legal options for putting up roadblocks to it.
A 2024 proposal to the city council urged Providence, whose approximately 15,000 Jews make up around 7% of the population, not to invest in Israel bonds. The measure failed to make it out of committee. Likewise, the board of Brown University, the Ivy League school located in Providence, voted on a divestment resolution as part of the demands of the school’s pro-Palestinian encampment movement in 2024. It failed.
Activists are more confident this time, citing the success in Somerville — where, unlike in Providence, Israel was mentioned by name as the target of the winning ballot measure. Also unlike Somerville, whose measure was non-binding, Providence’s initiative would mandate city action.
Supporters also note that Providence joined a 2006 divestment initiative against Sudan to protest ethnic cleansing in Darfur, a divestment campaign that was spearheaded by American Jewish groups.
“We’re really proud of the legacy of the American Jewish community and standing up on social issues,” Kliger, who grew up in the Conservative movement, attended a Jewish day school in Brooklyn and has family in Israel, told JTA.
Unlike in Pittsburgh, where a similar 2024 initiative was undone before the election following legal challenges to the signatures, the Providence activists were able to collect and verify more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The initiative’s supporters said they had identified around $2.5 million in city funds that would be affected by a divestment order. They cited American companies frequently targeted by pro-Palestinian activists, such as construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar and weapons firm Axon Enterprise.
The city council of Portland, Maine, also passed a divestment proposal in 2024, though that city’s mayor, after initially endorsing the plan, later said he regretted having done so because of the divisiveness it spurred.
Some progressive Jewish professionals in Providence say the initiative is in keeping with their values.
“I know there are others out there who think that this is a situation where one would need to choose between their Jewish principles and other principles. I don’t perceive it that way,” Lex Rofeberg, senior Jewish educator with the alternative Jewish engagement network Judaism Unbound, told JTA about his support for the ballot campaign.
Rofeberg, a Providence resident, said it would be wrong for non-Jews to conclude that “it is a Jewish value to support human rights violations.”
“For those who see a ballot initiative that does not name Israel at all, but simply says we should not invest our dollars in atrocities — for people who see that as somehow threatening to Judaism, why would they think that?” he asked.
Hague, the Jewish Alliance staffer opposing the initiative, sees just such a threat to Jewish interests. She acknowledged that it can be hard to communicate to non-Jews, who would understandably oppose genocide and apartheid, the ways in which her group sees the BDS movement as “a calling card for antisemitism.”
She outlined what she saw as her group’s mission: “We have to do so much education in a short period of time, and helping people understand the Jewish community’s relationship to Israel, and then understanding this initiative’s relationship to the BDS movement and how those things are connected, and the real fear and isolation many Jewish Americans are already feeling, particularly after Oct. 7.”
The political environment, though, may be unfriendly to such efforts. Following broader national trends, the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, set for Sept. 9, is also pivoting to a large degree around Israel.
Incumbent Mayor Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism and held a bar mitzvah while in office, is a vocal Israel supporter who opposes the ballot initiative. His progressive challenger, state Rep. David Morales, has backed the ballot initiative.
So too have some local elected officials with Jewish heritage. “For any community that we are identified with, and for the sake of our soul and our humanity, we have to be able to say, ‘This is not OK,’” Rachel Miller, city council president, told JTA.
Miller, who has a Jewish father and Catholic mother, said she considers herself “culturally” Jewish and objected to the idea that there is a single Jewish voice on the issue. She believes, she said, in “disconnecting the actions of a state against a group of people from my personal Jewish heritage, from my personal Jewish identity.”
Even if passed, it’s possible the ballot initiative could run afoul of a statewide ban on working with government contractors who openly boycott Israel — a so-called “anti-BDS law,” one of many such measures enacted in a range of states.
Those laws themselves have been debated for years. This fall a ballot initiative in Oak Park, Illinois, a liberal Chicago suburb, will ask voters to register a formal objection to that state’s anti-boycott law. The initiative, which is opposed by local Jewish groups, survived a legal challenge on Monday.
Hague acknowledged current Jewish divisions on Israel, and the difficult political climate for pro-Israel Jewish groups. Facing down a ballot initiative like this, she said, takes work.
“I think we know public opinion is not supportive of Israel right now. I think it’s not an issue that people understand implicitly when they just read a ballot question,” she said. “So yes, of course, there’s reason for concern, and I think no matter what happens at the ballot, I still think it’s an important moment.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Providence voters to put Israel boycott movement to major test at the ballot box appeared first on The Forward.
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Dutch broadcaster pulls out of Eurovision over Israel’s participation
(JTA) — The Dutch public broadcaster Avrotros has pulled out of the next Eurovision Song Contest, saying that Israel’s participation undermined the event’s neutrality.
Avrotros announced on Monday that it was withdrawing from the world’s largest music event next year because it “can no longer be considered neutral, with a participating country still involved in a large-scale military conflict.”
Eurovision included 35 countries in 2026, all of them in Europe except for Israel and Australia. Avrotros said the contest’s independence was compromised by divisions surrounding “the severe humanitarian suffering in Gaza and the ongoing restrictions on press freedom.”
Avrotros’ withdrawal does not necessarily mean that the Netherlands won’t be part of the 2027 competition in Burgas, Bulgaria. Public-service broadcasters serve as the technical sponsors of competing artists, and Avrotros said it returned responsibility for Dutch participation in Eurovision to the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, or NPO, the coordinating body for public broadcasters in the Netherlands. NPO could hand it off to a different broadcaster.
The Netherlands was absent from Eurovision in 2026, when Avrotros pulled out for the first time over Israel’s participation and NPO ruled out identifying another broadcaster.
Eurovision has become a focal point in European backlash against Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Netherlands was joined last year by boycotts from Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Slovenia, a bloc representing Israel’s strongest critics in Europe. The competition was viewed by 131 million people, down 35 million from the previous year.
The 2026 event in Vienna also saw thousands of protesters, while over 1,000 artists signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Eurovision. Boycotters have accused the European Broadcasting Union, which owns the contest, of a double standard for allowing Israel to remain while banning Russia after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Swiss singer Nemo, who won in 2024, returned their trophy last year in protest against Israel’s inclusion.
Earlier this month, Eurovision organizers announced new rules that bar countries involved in armed conflict from hosting the competition. But the changes did not sufficiently prove that Eurovision would remain “independent and neutral,” according to Avrotros.
“It is undeniable that international conflicts are increasingly affecting the Contest, undermining its neutral character,” Avrotros Director-General Taco Zimmerman said in a statement. “The Eurovision Song Contest has therefore become a platform for division.”
Martin Green, the director of the Eurovision Song Contest, said in a statement that organizers “regret” Avrotros’ decision but will continue to coordinate with NPO about opportunities for another broadcaster to take its place.
“We very much hope that audiences and artists in the Netherlands can continue to be represented in the Eurovision Song Contest,” said Green.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Dutch broadcaster pulls out of Eurovision over Israel’s participation appeared first on The Forward.
