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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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My hopes for the rabbi who envisions my defeat — and for a better Jewish future
Dear Rabbi Cosgrove,
Thank you for your letter this week. Although you envision my electoral defeat two years from now, I recognize that it comes from a place of genuine concern, for me and for our shared future.
While your letter imagines my political fate, I think it’s really the future of the Jewish community that’s at stake. I know you care about the safety and thriving of Jews in New York City and beyond — so do I. We just have different ideas about how best to achieve it.
Two thousand years ago, Hillel prescribed us a challenge, in two questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, what am I?”
You believe that I am falling short on the first of Hillel’s questions. In our tradition of tokhecha, of accountability, I’ll sit with your criticism and take it seriously. I fight fiercely to keep our people safe, here in New York City, across the United States, and in Israel. I urged Mayor Zohran Mamdani to keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner; to discourage the use of phrases like “globalize the intifada”; and to increase funding to combat antisemitism and other forms of hate. I’m pleased he’s done those things, and I’ll keep pushing for more.
I believe in the vision of a Jewish and democratic Israel, as imagined in its Declaration of Independence. I just don’t believe there can be democracy with occupation, or that Israel’s present actions in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are consistent with that vision. On Election Night, I spoke about Israelis who provide protective presence in the West Bank, putting their lives on the line to help protect Palestinian neighbors from settler terrorism, as heroes whose courage I hope to emulate. And I pleaded with people not to use “Zionist” as a slur.
But even if I were an anti-Zionist, I would still be deeply within Jewish tradition and values.
My son is named after Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a Bundist (Jewish democratic socialist) who was not a Zionist. Albert Einstein and Judah Magnes, a leading American rabbi who moved to Israel in 1922, both worried presciently about the dangers of sovereignty in a “Jewish state” and preferred to imagine a bi-national one. Many Jews are rediscovering those traditions, and concluding that they fit better with the Jewish values they learned in Hebrew school.
Your efforts to define them, and me, outside the Jewish community, are dangerously short-sighted. Jews are not made safer by proscribing a particular vision of Israel as the price of full belonging, or by insisting on unconditional support for Israel while it commits human rights violations against Palestinians.
Like the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Israeli-American historian and eminent Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov, and the Lemkin Institute — the legacy of the Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor who developed the term — I believe with great sadness that Israel’s destruction of Gaza meets the definition of genocide. But whether one uses the term or not, surely we can agree that the scale of Palestinian death and suffering should trouble every Jew. Our obligation is not to ignore it, or explain it away, but to reckon with it — and to change it.
You recently urged candidates for office seeking the Jewish community’s support to march in the Israel Day Parade. But if representing Jewish New Yorkers requires marching alongside Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, perhaps we should ask whether we’ve confused loyalty with moral leadership.
I believe that we need more attention to Hillel’s second question. Our tradition asks us never to become indifferent to the suffering of children. I cannot reconcile Israel’s killing of thousands of Palestinian children with the Judaism that shaped me — most deeply, with the idea that every one of them was created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, just like my kids.
The future you imagine presumes that the greatest danger facing Jewish life is that Jews will leave Zionism. But it seems to me the real danger is that young Jews will conclude there is no room for them inside Jewish institutions unless they silence their conscience. A community cannot thrive if the choices it offers the next generation are hypocrisy or excommunication.
At the end of your letter, you welcome me “back,” presumably to a position of always defending Israel against its critics, insisting that Zionism is an essential part of every Jewish identity and refusing to be in political coalition with people who disagree.
I’d like to invite you forward, to a belief in shared safety, where we don’t compromise on anyone’s humanity.
Or, at least, I’d like to invite us together to attempt a more productive conversation, to continue a debate that Jews have been having for at least 2,600 years. You recently called for Jews “to avoid the reductive and destructive tactic of labeling people with whom we disagree either as self-hating Jews or colonialist aggressors.” Let’s model that together.
Our differing points of view represent a longstanding debate amongst our people about the best way to achieve safety and flourishing, for ourselves and our neighbors. There’s room to keep that debate going — through conversation and dialogue, not through exclusion and shaming.
The door is open, rabbi. Welcome forward.
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After 4 years and a stubborn leak, a landmark mikveh is finally whole again
Unveiled in the suburbs of Boston more than two decades ago, the Jewish ritual bathhouse known as Mayyim Hayyim offers an intimate space for people of all genders to mark life’s transitions. The facility’s pair of pools beckoned thousands from miles around, effectively reinventing the ancient Jewish practice of mikveh immersion for the modern era.
Then one of the tubs sprung a leak that took more than an ordinary plumber to fix. Now, more than four years later, the mikveh itself has had a rebirth, with the reopening of the immersion pool on the building’s left side, restoring a source of strength in suburban Boston that has become a pillar of American Jewish life.
“It felt like we were cut off from a really important part of our space and our connectedness,” said Sarah Quiat, a mikveh guide at Mayyim Hayyim who has been guiding immersions for seven years. “Being able to give the immersee the option of the left pool in and of itself feels like a core part of how Mayyim Hayyim approaches mikveh. To be able to offer and facilitate the immersion that a person is looking for comes down even to the details of which pool is calling to you.”
Tucked into a butter-yellow, 19th-Century New-England-style home in Newton, Mass., Mayyim Hayyim, Hebrew for “living waters,” grew out of a vision developed by author Anita Diamant and collaborators affectionately known as the “Mikveh Mamas.”
The founders grounded Mayyim Hayyim in a desire to enrich ancient ritual with contemporary life and make it accessible to Jews of all identities and types of observance.
Since ancient times, traditional Judaism has called for married women to immerse themselves in a mikveh after their menstrual period or childbirth before resuming sexual relations with their husbands. In the 1970s, as the Jewish feminist movement began picking up speed, thought leaders including Diamant looked beyond the patriarchal origins of mikveh and sought to reimagine and reclaim it.
“We, as a Jewish community, had to do better,” Diamant said in an interview. “We needed a mikveh where everyone who entered felt welcomed and valued.”
Today, Mayyim Hayyim offers a wide range of non-traditional immersion ceremonies — including for gender transition milestones, survivors of domestic violence or abuse, or individuals recovering from long-term illness — in addition to more conventional ceremonies for occasions like b’nei mitzvahs, the High Holy Days, and conversions.
The pool’s restoration was made possible by a joint gift last year from Mikhveh Mama, Paula Brody, and her husband, Merrill Hassenfeld.
For their 20th wedding anniversary in 2004, the couple immersed in the waters on the house’s left-hand side.
But in February 2022, that pool sprung a leak, and the water level began declining at a rate of more than one inch per day. A leak of such magnitude rendered the pool not Kosher by halachic standards, forcing the organization to close the pool until further notice.
Contractors began work to diagnose the source of the leak. Then came another setback — the particularly frigid Boston winter of 2023. Burst pipes caused a major flood in the building. Now other repairs to the building had to be prioritized.
Brody and Hassenfeld had not been aware that the mikveh where they marked their 20 years of marriage was out of commission. Together, they donated the money to finance the restoration ahead of their 42nd anniversary on June 24.
Since then, members of an adult B’Mitzvah class from a local temple have sought the waters of the mikveh and, during Pride Month in June, Mayyim Hayyim and Keshet, an advocacy group for LGBTQ+ Jews, hosted an evening of affirming immersions for the queer community.
“It was always envisioned with the two pools,” Brody recalled. “When I realized that it had been dysfunctional, we really wanted to help.”
“It enables Mayyim Hayyim to be whole again,” she added.
Mia Peloquin traveled from Connecticut to immerse themself at Mayyim Hayyim last year to mark their conversion. In August, they will return with their friend who converted a year earlier. The pair will celebrate their conversion anniversaries together.
“I was actually surprised that the left pool was open,” Peloquin said. “We thought we would have to go in one after another, which would extend our trip in Massachusetts a bit longer, but finding out that the left pool was open was very exciting for us because we get to immerse at the same time.”
During the closure, the organization has been guiding immersions solely using the pool on the right side of the building. Even with one operational pool, more than 900 people visit Mayyim Hayyim for roughly 1,600 immersions annually, many hailing from the surrounding Boston area, while others plan international travel to experience the one-of-a-kind space.
In addition to increasing the organization’s capacity for immersions, having both pools back to full functionality allows for expanded partnerships with Jewish institutions.
Beginning in 2023, then-Brandeis student and Hillel Tfilah Coordinator Zac Gondelman saw the power of ritual immersion and identified a critical education gap on the subject among his peers.
“Reform Jews came into Brandeis feeling like there was a world of Jewish ritual and practice that they had never heard of or accessed or lived in,” he said. “And so, I thought there was no better way to bridge those things than to bring a whole bunch of college kids to the mikveh.”
Despite Mayyim Hayyim’s decreased capacity at the time, Gondelman helped organize an annual trip for Brandeis students each year ahead of the High Holidays. With the second pool now open, more students can participate.
Harvard Hillel recently organized a trip to the mikveh for graduating seniors to mark the completion of college.
Engaging with the community through the mikveh has long been central to Diamant’s founding vision for the space. In doing so, Mayyim Hayyim has helped the ritual expand and grow, and even interact with other ancient practices. In 2024, the North Shore Hevra, a Boston-based community of Jews seeking to revive Jewish death and burial rituals called tahara, began working with Mayyim Hayyim to offer mikveh immersions for its tahara leaders.
Linda Goodspeed, cofounder of North Shore Hevra, said a shared passion for breathing contemporary life into ancient practice helped forge a relationship between the two organizations. Now, tahara volunteers can receive a newly created immersion blessing before the High Holidays, one adapted ancient practice to prepare for another.
“They were really our mentors,” Goodspeed added.
That mentorship extends far beyond Boston. Through the Rising Tide Open Waters Mikveh Network, 39 facilities in the U.S. and an additional nine internationally draw on Mayyim Hayyim’s extensive training resources to prepare their guides to serve the local community and foster mikvehs around the world.
Rabbi Miriam Berger, founder of Wellspring, another pluralistic mikveh in the network located in London, England, considers Mayyim Hayyim to be “the mothership.”
“Judaism gifted us mikveh,” she said. “Mayyim Hayyim gifted it back to us.”
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‘There’s nothing I can say to her’: Boulder attack survivors have words on antisemitism for Congressional nominee Melat Kiros
For Natalya Reznik and Ed Victor, Tuesday’s primary victory of Melat Kiros, now a Democratic congressional nominee for much of Denver, cut deep and took them back to the horrific first day in June 2025 when they attended an 18-minute protest walk to call for the release of hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on Oct. 7.
That day, Reznik, 54, and her husband carried posters of hostages Lior Rudaeff and Yair Yaakov whose bodies were later returned. As always, the mostly Jewish group of 28 walked quietly, letting their signs do the talking.
“Since 10/7 I was devastated. I expected people everywhere, not just in America, to take to the streets to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages,” said Reznik who came to the U.S. 30 years ago from St. Petersburg, Russia “I was so naive — I really thought this was so horrific that it just couldn’t go unnoticed. But what I saw was the opposite — people took to the streets to protest Israel.”
Reznik didn’t hear a man shouting “Free Palestine” — others did — before she noticed her feet getting hot. She looked down to find much of her lower body on fire, likely from a Molotov cocktail. She rolled over on the grass to put them out. Another woman, Karen Diamond, was engulfed in flames.
Dressed up as a gardener so as not to be noticed in the park outside the Boulder County Courthouse, the attacker, Mohamed Soliman, 46, later told prosecutors he had researched “Zionist” events in the area.
But when a news anchor ahead of the primary asked Kiros whether the attack had been antisemitic, the former lawyer turned doctoral candidate drew a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. She tried to make the case that no one could presume Soliman’s motive.
“I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator,” Kiros told a local Colorado station last month. “All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people that were at that protest believed, too. In fact most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
That logic found little purchase with Ed Victor, a resident of Louisville, Colorado, who had also been at the Boulder courthouse that day.
“You don’t have to look at his heart,” Victor said. “You can look at his actions.”
Soliman pleaded guilty to more than 100 felony charges in state court but not guilty to hate crime charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The success of Kiros, 29, a Democratic Socialist of America in her first run for public office, echoed the victories of DSA-backed candidates Darializa Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, who similarly drew a line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Like those candidates, Kiros has advocated for one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.
Reznik does not live in the deep-blue district Kiros will be favored to win in November, which represents the largest Jewish community in Colorado. But she said Kiros’ victory was the result of a callousness toward Jewish people that now defines the attitude of the general public.
“It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” said Reznik, a Russian Jewish immigrant. “This is not the country I came to 30 years ago. I no longer feel that people in Congress even hold the same values that I do.”
Reznik’s burns from the attack that day covered 40% of her legs and left arm. She spent one week in intensive care and another in the hospital recovering from surgery. It was in the ICU that she first encountered people online trying to downplay the attack as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic – a discourse that seemed to legitimize violence against Jews and continued to unfold in the hours and days after the firebombing.
“They’re encouraging people who are antisemites, who are simply scum, to feel as political activists,” Reznik said. “They speak the language of the murderers.”
Kiros’ equivocating comments ahead of Tuesday’s primary divided Denver Jews, with one rabbi who described herself as a “liberal Jew” writing in the Denver Post that Kiros’ candidacy “scared her.” Another Jewish writer defended Kiros, arguing that the candidate’s criticism is directed at the Israeli government and military, not the Jewish people.
In an interview on CNN the day after her primary win, Kiros tried to allay fears, adding that the “conflation of the actions of the state of Israel and the Jewish people … is putting them at greater risk.”
“My commitment is to protecting the sanctity of human life and dignity and that includes combating the hate and the rising antisemitism that we are seeing,” she said.
But for the survivors of that day’s attack who heard Kiros’ equivocation ahead of the primary, it was hard not to feel fear – and fury. Reznik saw Kiros’ refusal to call the attack antisemitic as the height of hypocrisy.
“There’s nothing I can say to her,” she said, “because I know she’s one of the people who’s not listening.”
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