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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.
—
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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The Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
When firefighters cleared Beth Israel Synagogue after an arson attack this month, the library floor was slick with water and ash. Prayer books lay swollen and blackened. Smoke clung to the sanctuary walls.
Two Torah scrolls burned. A third Torah did not.
That Torah, displayed for decades in a glass case near the front of the synagogue, survived unscathed. Its presence at Beth Israel was not incidental. It was brought to Mississippi by Gilbert Metz, the state’s only concentration camp survivor — a man who retrieved it from Europe and brought it to the American South. It, too, had survived the Nazis.
“The million dollar question is: How in the hell did he get to Mississippi?” his grandson, Joseph Metz, recalled in an interview on Tuesday.
From Auschwitz to Jackson
Gilbert Metz was born in 1929 in Alsace-Lorraine, France. At 13, the family was forced into hiding. When people fled Nazi Germany, they often gathered silver or jewelry. Gilbert’s mom packed her prayer books and Rashi commentary instead. She had taught her son Hebrew and Talmud, and she refused to leave those books behind.
They snuck back and forth to their summer home in northeastern France, but were eventually captured by the Nazis and sent to an internment camp. From there, a 14-year-old Metz and his family were sent to Auschwitz. His mother and 10-year-old sister were murdered in the gas chambers shortly after their arrival. His father later met the same fate.
Metz survived multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, and was liberated by American troops in April 1945. He was eventually bar mitzvahed after the Holocaust at 16, a delayed rite marking a childhood interrupted and then resumed.
Relatives who had settled in Mississippi sponsored Metz to come to the United States. He finished high school in Natchez, attended Tulane University, and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War — at one point having to reapply for citizenship after being deployed overseas.
He eventually moved to Jackson, where he raised a family and became a traveling salesman before co-founding Metz Industries, a wholesale lingerie business that sold brassieres, hosiery and feather boas to stores across the region — the work of an ordinary American life rebuilt mile by mile. He and his wife, Louise, were married for more than 50 years.
Bringing the Torah to Mississippi
In 1992, Robert Berman, a longtime congregant and former Beth Israel president, heard about an international effort to restore and redistribute scrolls damaged, desecrated or orphaned during the Holocaust. He and his sisters, Joan and Brenda, along with their families donated the funds to acquire one. Shul leaders decided there was only one person who should retrieve it.
Metz and his son, Lawson, traveled to London to bring the Torah back to Jackson. At a restoration warehouse, he was shown piles of scrolls — some burned, some torn, some riddled with bullet holes — many painstakingly pieced together from fragments. They chose a Torah rescued from Prague and took turns carrying it on their laps during the international flight.
Other Torahs rescued from the Holocaust made similar southern journeys, to congregations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Joseph Metz said his grandfather felt honored to be the one chosen from Beth Israel to collect the Torah, and that bringing it to Mississippi was closure for him — a full-circle moment.
A welcoming committee from the shul — including Berman, the rabbi and others — greeted the Metzs and the Torah at Jackson’s airport. “They sang prayers,” recalled Berman, now 94.
Beth Israel held a dedication ceremony at the synagogue and the Torah was installed in a glass case near the front doors, where it remained for decades. The words “Memory sustains humanity” is etched across the top of the case. Next to it hangs a photograph of Metz as an adult wearing the yellow star he was forced to wear under Nazi rule.
The scroll is displayed unfurled to a chapter in Exodus that comes after the Red Sea has closed behind the fleeing Israelites and before the Ten Commandments are given — a narrow span of time when survival has been achieved but meaning has not yet arrived. The scroll has remained that way for years, suspended between catastrophe and covenant.
“The congregation understood exactly whose story that Torah represented,” said Stuart Rockoff, a historian and longtime member of the 165-year-old Beth Israel. “This was a synagogue with one Holocaust survivor.”
Behind its building, Beth Israel also maintains a Holocaust memorial garden, dedicated to Metz and to Gus Waterman Herrman, a U.S. Army officer from Mississippi who fought in Europe during World War II and later became a philanthropist. The garden, which features stained-glass sculptures and is used for Yom HaShoah commemorations, was not damaged in the fire.
Berman’s daughter, Deborah Silver, had her bat mitzvah and wedding at the synagogue. She’s now a jazz singer, nominated for a Grammy this year, and plans to perform charity concerts in New York City and Jackson to benefit the shul. “We will be back,” she said, “and we will recover.”
Surviving another act of antisemitism
Saturday’s fire at Beth Israel is being investigated by federal authorities as a possible hate crime. A local teen, Stephen Spencer Pittman, confessed to igniting the blaze.
The bulk of the damage was concentrated in the library and administrative offices, which are also home to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. It’s the same part of the building targeted in a 1967 Ku Klux Klan bombing.
After the fire, the congregation moved the Torahs to the nearby Northminster Baptist Church, which offered its space. There, five Torah scrolls from the sanctuary were carefully unfurled and laid out across long tables, allowing soot and smoke to dissipate.
On the advice of a sofer, a ritual scribe, the Holocaust Torah was not unrolled.
“It’s extremely delicate,” said Sarah Thomas, Beth Israel’s vice president. She said it appeared to have no visible damage and is now wrapped and stored for safekeeping until the congregation is able to move back into the building.
The Torah’s survival can be explained without invoking a miracle: it was protected by its glass case and by where it stood. Still, for those who know its history, the moment carried weight.
What survives
Gilbert Metz spent decades speaking publicly about his Holocaust experience. His oral testimony is preserved in Holocaust archives, and his story has been taught in schools across Mississippi.
That inheritance was also ritual: For decades at Beth Israel, the shofar on the High Holidays was blown by Metz’s son, Lawson, and later by his grandson, Joseph.
Joseph Metz — now the president of the Jewish federation in Mobile, Alabama — has written a book about his grandfather’s survival, Behind the Silent Doors — a phrase Gilbert used to describe the gas chambers. Joseph regularly appears at Holocaust remembrance events and in classrooms. When he does, he pins his grandfather’s yellow star to his jacket before he speaks — the same object that once marked Gilbert for death now marking the story as one that refuses to disappear.
Metz, who died at 78 in 2007, bore the tattooed number the Nazis assigned him at Auschwitz for the rest of his life: 184203. Joseph and his sister, Caroline, each later chose to replicate the number on a tattoo of their own, as an inheritance. He said his grandfather survived so the story would not end with him, but be carried forward.
The Torah Metz carried across an ocean — and across a lifetime — remains.
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This California synagogue was just vandalized with anti-Zionist graffiti, one year after being destroyed by wildfire
(JTA) — The remains of a synagogue in southern California destroyed in last January’s Eaton wildfire were vandalized over the weekend with anti-Zionist messages.
The rabbi of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center and the Anti-Defamation League decried the vandalism as antisemitic.
“The vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center is antisemitism — full stop,” ADL Los Angeles senior regional director David Englin said in a statement. “This was a deliberate act of hate meant to intimidate a Jewish community already rebuilding after last year’s fire, and it comes at a time when antisemitism is already at unprecedented levels in California and nationwide. Targeting a synagogue is simply unacceptable and represents an attack on our entire community.”
Photographs of the graffiti showed that it was scrawled in black spray paint on an exterior wall fence and read “RIP Renee” followed by “F— Zionizm” [sic].
This is the remaining outside wall of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. The Temple burned down last year in the Eaton fire. Intersectionality in all its glory. pic.twitter.com/4Z3CbfdUVl
— Gregg Mashberg (@gregg_mashberg) January 12, 2026
The first words appeared to be a likely reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old unarmed Minneapolis resident shot whose killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is igniting a nationwide spate of anti-ICE activism.
Anti-Zionist graffiti has been painted on synagogues around the country over the last two years amid a spike in anti-Israel sentiment during the war in Gaza.
The vandalism came days after congregants from the Conservative synagogue gathered at the burnt site of their spiritual home to commemorate one year since the wildfire tore through their synagogue. Dozens of members also lost their homes or were forced to evacuate due to last year’s fire, which was the second-deadliest in the state’s history.
The vandalism also came a day after an arson attack at a Mississippi synagogue that had been bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 in retaliation for the rabbi’s involvement with civil rights activism. The man charged with the crime said he targeted that synagogue due to its “Jewish ties.”
No suspect has yet been named in the Pasadena vandalism, which the Altadena station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department first received a call about on Sunday at 9 a.m.
“Acts of antisemitism and hate have no place in our diverse communities,” Altadena Station Captain Ethan Marquez said in a statement. “Crimes motivated by bias impact far more than a single victim, they harm the sense of safety and unity of our entire community. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department takes all hate-motivated incidents seriously and is committed to thoroughly investigating these acts and holding individuals accountable. The community of Altadena has endured significant hardship over the past year and acts of hateful vandalism will not be tolerated.”
Detectives with the department’s Major Crimes Bureau will be taking over the investigation, the Altadena station said in a statement.
During the fire recovery process, PJTC, a century-old congregation, welcomed a new senior rabbi, Joshua Ratner, a former lawyer who became the synagogue’s permanent religious leader in August.
A representative from the synagogue did not respond to a request for comment. But in an email to congregants, Ratner described the vandalism as “hateful and antisemitic.”
“It was devastating in many ways,” Ratner said about the graffiti to The New York Times. He also told the newspaper that in his prayer for the dead over the weekend’s services, he had included Renee Good’s name.
Local political figures joined in condemning the vandalism.
“I am horrified by the vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, especially coming just days after we marked the one-year anniversary of the Eaton Fire that tragically destroyed its entire campus,” Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat who represents the district in Congress, shared on X. “For over a century, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been a beloved community institution and safe haven for our Jewish neighbors and loved ones. I stand with the congregation and the Jewish community as we await the results of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s investigation. Hate has no place in the San Gabriel Valley.”
The Jan. 5 commemoration was the first time most congregants had been back to their synagogue building since last the fire. For the past year, services have been held in a neighboring church; Hebrew school services have also been held offsite. PJTC is home to about 450 member families, mostly from Pasadena and neighboring Altadena.
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Australian writers’ festival collapses — and apologizes — after boycott over disinvited Palestinian activist
(JTA) — The organizers of an Australian literary festival pulled the plug on this year’s event on Tuesday, after nearly 200 authors said they would boycott over the disinvitation of a Palestinian-Australian author and activist who has justified “armed struggle.”
The board of the Adelaide Writers’ Week announced last week that they had disinvited Randa Abdel-Fattah, saying they felt her presence “would not be culturally sensitive” in the wake of the Bondi massacre, where 15 people were killed by two gunmen at a Hanukkah event.
Following the board’s announcement, roughly 180 of 240 writers slated to appear at the festival announced they were boycotting it over the decision, including British author Zadie Smith and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
On Tuesday, the festival’s board put out another statement, apologizing to Abdel-Fattah, announcing that all but one of its members had resigned and canceling the writers’ week altogether.
“We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented and reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history,” the statement said.
Abdel-Fattah rejected the apology in a statement on X.
“I refuse and reject the Board’s apology. It is disingenuous. It adds insult to injury,” she said. “The Board again reiterates the link to a terror attack I had nothing to do with, nor did any Palestinian. The Bondi shooting does not mean I or anyone else has to stop advocating for an end to the illegal occupation and systemic extermination of my people — that is an obscene and absurd demand.”
While the board did not cite specific statements by Abdel-Fattah in its initial decision, Australian Jewish groups have called for her exclusion from public appearances in the past, citing a March 2024 post on X where she wrote that “armed struggle is a moral and legal right of the colonised and brutalised.”
Jewish Community Council of South Australia public and government liaison Norman Schueler, who called for Abdel-Fattah’s removal in a letter to the festival’s organizers, condemned those that boycotted the festival.
“I think for everyone who has dropped out that it’s rather pathetic because that means they agree with what Dr Fattah is on about… Namely, that Israel should not exist,” Schueler told The Adelaide Advertiser.
The dustup comes as Australia’s parliament prepares to consider harsher speech laws devised in the wake of the Bondi massacre.
Louis Adler, a Jewish Australian and the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, announced her resignation in an op-ed in The Guardian where she said the disinvitation of Abdel-Fattah “weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation.”
“I cannot be party to silencing writers so, with a heavy heart, I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW. Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us,” wrote Adler.
Another Jewish board member, Tony Berg, had announced his resignation in October, appearing to cite Abdel-Fattah’s invitation.
“I cannot serve on a board which employs a Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week who continues to deal with the board inappropriately and who programs writers who have a vendetta against Israel and Zionism,” wrote Berg, according to the Australian outlet InDaily.
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