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These NY Jewish teens are aiding young refugees from Ukraine and Afghanistan
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — On a Sunday afternoon in February, a group of teens met for the first time at the JCC Mid-Westchester in Scarsdale, New York to make friendship bracelets and connections. Teens and tweens huddled together over a plastic folding table, some laughing and others deeply focused on beading plastic and elastic friendship bracelets.
These girls — six from New York’s Westchester County and eight Ukrainian refugees — gathered as part of the Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration. Partly organized by teen leaders, sophomores Jackie Kershner and Kate Douglass, the group gathered to create a safe space for the refugees and ease their struggles in acclimating to a new environment.
“It’s important to try and let these kids have as normal a life as possible and to let us have an influence on their life,” said Kershner, who has Russian and Ukrainian backgrounds and has recently started learning Russian. Outside of co-leading this group she tutors an Ukrainian girl from Ternopil, Ukraine through ENGin, a program that matches native English speakers with Ukrainian students who want to learn English.
Over the past year 271,000 Ukrainian refugees have fled to the United States with about 14,000 relocating in New York. The refugee organization HIAS reports that close to 200 refugees have resettled in Westchester County. More than half of them arrived in six months beginning in September 2021. With $21 million being invested by the federal government to support Ukrainian refugees in New York, a portion of this is being used by Jewish nonprofits that are incorporating Jewish American teens into their efforts to ease the transition for refugees.
Kershner’s co-leader, Douglass, empathizes with the recently displaced teens and tweens. “When I think of moving to a new school that can be so anxiety producing, so for what they are going through I can imagine that they just need an extra friend,” she said.
The experience is welcomed by Ukrainian teens. Valentyna Zabialo, who fled the country recently, is grateful for the opportunity.
“Finally I can speak with somebody else about our similar stories about school and friends, how I’ve fled to America, how I have moved countries, ” agreed Renata Uhlinsky, who fled from Odessa last July.
Ukrainian teens and American teen volunteers at the JCC Mid-Westchester. (Lydia Ettinger)
Holly Fink, the CEO of Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration, sees the firsthand benefits from implementing bonding programs that teens and tweens like Uhlinsky engage in. “I know from my work from Ukrainians that everyone who fled from the war has experienced an immense amount of trauma, so I have created programs like this one to help them bond with others,” she said. “They are meeting teens who I see as the future of immigration work.”
It’s important for teens to be part of the process, said Caroline Wolinsky, the volunteer coordinator at HIAS. The refugee assistance organization began as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 1902. “Teens bring not just energy but a knowledge of how the world works now, how to bring people together, and how to think creatively about problems,” said Wolinksy.
In the past year she has engaged with about 50 active teen volunteers in places ranging from El Paso, Texas to Washington D.C. They mostly engage in more traditional hands-on work such as assembling “dignity kits” to provide refugees with essential hygiene products, but bring their own skills to refugee work.
“A lot of modern organizing and change-making happens online and on social media and so I think using the tools which now have become a really intuitive part of how young people have grown up,” said Wolinsky. “It’s so hugely important to be able to use word processing documents and Google drive and things like that that may not come as naturally to older people, but do come very naturally to teens and really make a huge difference.”
Lyla Souccar, 16, feels a connection to refugee work through her family’s history: Her grandfather fled Egypt in the 1940s because of Jewish persecution and relocated to Brazil. From his stories, she took an interest in aiding those in similar situations.
“Jews are refugees in so many places because we are constantly getting hate, and in the Holocaust there were so many refugees after that [who] needed to move to so many different places,” said Soucar.
Souccar volunteers with Hearts and Homes, a New York nonprofit service organization that helps Afghan refugees resettle in partnership with HIAS. In 2021, 2.4 million Afghan refugees were registered worldwide — 41% women and 40% children. New York State has 7,500 Afghan refugees.
Through Hearts and Homes, Souccar created a club with her friend Keren Jacobowitz at The Leffell School, a Jewish day school in Westchester. The club fundraises, runs toiletry drives and spreads awareness about the plight of Afghan refugees. Later this school year, she has planned for an adult Afghan refugee to speak to the school. Beyond the classroom, she started working with two families through the organization as an intern this past summer, and has continued the work by helping the kids in those families with English and math homework.
“They were a little scared to get close to people, I remember the kids used to hide a little bit the first few weeks of me coming in, but now when I come in they run to the door,” Souccar said. “I definitely feel more connected to them, I’ve shared meals with them, I’ve watched TV with them, I just feel a lot more part of their life.”
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Georgetown Newspaper Editorial Board Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide,’ Calls for Divestment
Georgetown University students on March 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo: Andrew Thomas via Reuters Connect
A Georgetown University-affiliated student newspaper last week issued an editorial which argued that the school has been “complicit in Israel’s genocide,” describing the world’s lone Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that should be isolated.
“There is no doubt in the mind of The Georgetown Voice‘s Editorial Board that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza,” proclaimed The Georgetown Voice, an alternative, far-left publication founded in 1969. “There is no critical mass or breaking point at which elites — including the administrative elite at Georgetown — will suddenly reform their conscience.”
The editorial board condemned what it falsely labeled as Israel’s “decades-long settler colonial project and apartheid system” and appeared to blame the entirety of the Gaza conflict on Israel while absolving Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that started the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, of wrongdoing.
“We must ask ourselves why every person in Gaza or the West Bank does not elicit the same righteous anger (and frenzied whitewashing or bigotry and divisiveness) that erupted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the paper charged, referring to the American conservative activist who was assassinated in September. “While some — certainly not all — members of Congress have half-heartedly called for a ‘pause’ in the violence at some point, the vast majority of them were simultaneously voting to arm Israel.”
The editorial continued, “The morally bankrupt acts of our representatives made Americans complicit in this genocide. That should enrage and galvanize something in all of us. Sadly, at Georgetown, that’s not what we see.”
Capping off its philippic, the Voice broadsided the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — accusing the civil rights organization of “anti-Palestinian advocacy” and drifting “rightward … under the leadership of current CEO Jonathan Greenblatt” — and calling for Georgetown’s divestment from Israel on the grounds that Israel is an “apartheid regime” in the same mold as Afrikaner-dominated South Africa until the 1990s.
“If the school gives any weight to the values it claims to represent, it will reconsider its rejection of the divestment referendum from last spring and move to cut all ties with Israeli and Israel-supportive institutions immediately,” the Voice concluded, hinting at the expulsion from campus of Jewish groups such as Hillel and Chabad. “We do not say this lightly; taking action is challenging; however, in the face of such atrocities, there are no excuses for inaction.”
The Voice is not the first student newspaper to promote anti-Zionism while curating facts, sources, and quotes to confect a negative image of Israel.
In 2022, The Harvard Crimson, the official newspaper of Harvard University, endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.
“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step,” it said. “As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”
At Georgetown, anti-Zionism may be fostered by foreign influence in the form of exorbitant donations.
According to a report published in June by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) — titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” — Georgetown University has received over $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government over the last two decades. The 132-page document revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
The ISGAP report called on policymakers to take action now and prevent the university’s becoming any closer to a country whose ideals may threaten US interests and ideals.
“It is time to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. As we saw, pro-Hamas antisemitism in the US has moved from rhetoric to outright terrorism on the streets of Washington,” Small said, referring to the antisemitic shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in May. “Just three miles from the site of the murders outside the Jewish Museum, Georgetown has been the center of a 50-year indoctrination campaign aimed at infiltrating the highest echelons of US society with murderous antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Hamas in a Suit’: Melanie Phillips Says the US Must Stop Treating Qatar as an Honest Broker
British author and journalist Melanie Phillips speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2024. Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium via Reuters Connect
The war against terrorism will never end “until the West stops pretending Qatar is neutral,” according to British author and journalist Melanie Phillips.
The prominent commentator told The Algemeiner that Doha’s patronage of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its influence on Western media and universities are among the many reasons not to trust the Middle Eastern monarchy.
“Qatar is Hamas,” Phillips said in a conversation on the “J100” podcast with host David M. Cohen, the CEO of The Algemeiner. “It sponsors Hamas, it shelters Hamas, it protects Hamas’s leadership.”
Speaking from Jerusalem, Phillips called Qatar’s role “the great unspoken scandal” of modern diplomacy, describing how the regime has bankrolled Hamas while posing as a mediator in negotiations with Israel over the Gaza war.
“You can end this war tonight,” she said, “by doing what should have been done long ago: throw Qatar overboard.”
Negotiations have hit several hurdles in recent weeks to halt the advancement of last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire, including the refusal of the terrorist group to disarm in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s pace plan for Gaza.
Despite Qatar’s support for Hamas and far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, the US has designated the country as a major non-NATO ally and committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
For Phillips, the danger runs deeper than money or politics. “It’s Hamas in a suit,” she said. “A power that wears respectability while advancing terror by other means.”
Since 2012, Doha has housed Hamas’s political bureau and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, often with Western approval. Simultaneously, it has built vast soft-power influence, financing Al Jazeera, sponsoring academic programs on Middle Eastern studies, and endowing think tanks and universities across the West.
That dual role, Phillips argued, has distorted the world’s moral compass. “You cannot be both patron and peacemaker,” she said. “That is moral incoherence masquerading as strategy.”
She connected Qatar’s reach to what she called the “eighth front” of Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist network including Hamas — the cognitive front, where perception and truth are under siege. By funding educational and media institutions that frame Israel as the aggressor, Phillips said, Doha helps export the same ideological rot that excuses terrorism.
“You cannot build coexistence on a curriculum of hatred,” she warned. “And you cannot defend civilization if you reward the people funding its destruction.”
Cohen noted that Washington’s posture toward Doha remains contradictory. “You can’t confront a sponsor of terror,” he said, “while treating it like an ally at the same time.”
Phillips concluded that lasting peace requires more than military victory — it demands confronting the global enablers that dignify extremism. “If the West continues to pretend Qatar is neutral,” she said, “then Hamas will never truly be defeated.”
The full conversation — “The Eighth Front Is the Mind” — is available now on “J100” via Apple Podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.
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Australia Lists Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as State Sponsor of Terrorism
Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Australia has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday, following an intelligence assessment that it had orchestrated attacks against Australia‘s Jewish Community.
Australia in August accused Iran of directing two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne and gave Tehran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country, its first such expulsion since World War II.