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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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Jewish world marks first day with no hostages in Gaza by shedding their symbols of support
(JTA) — After 843 days, Jews around the world put down their masking tape, yellow ribbons and pins: The last Israeli hostage in Gaza was home.
The return of Ran Gvili’s body on Monday ended a two-and-a-half-year advocacy campaign to return the roughly 250 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The campaign galvanized Jews around the world and introduced a visual vocabulary of symbols meant to keep the hostages in the public consciousness and add pressure for Hamas to return them.
Some Jews removed or reduced their hostage displays in October, when all of the living hostages were released. But others said they would not do so until the last hostage was home.
Now, they are shedding their symbols. Israeli President Isaac Herzog posted a video of himself removing his hostage pin.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was murdered in captivity, announced that they would not wear the masking tape marking the number of days since Oct. 7, a symbol they popularized.
“In solidarity with all of the families who have had to bury loved ones since October 7th, 2023, we take off our masking tape and pray for comfort…for us all,” they posted on Instagram.
The return of Gvili’s remains marks the end of a period of intense pain for Israelis and Jews around the world and clears the way for a new phase in the three-month-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. It also raises questions about whether ties between Israeli and Diaspora Jews could suffer without the hostage issue that has united them.
Eylon Levy, a pro-Israel influencer who ascended during the war and has worked with the Israeli government, said he was removing his pin but would keep it in his pocket, not shelve it totally. He said the conditions under which the war ended, with Hamas still armed and in power in much of Gaza, meant it might be useful again.
“The Oct. 7 hostage crisis is over, but it won’t be the last hostage crisis,” he said. “We put the hostage takers of tomorrow back on the streets.”
The post Jewish world marks first day with no hostages in Gaza by shedding their symbols of support appeared first on The Forward.
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The Nazis massacred innocents when their regime was crumbling. What does that say about Minneapolis?
“We are the strongest country in the world,” Scott Bessent, the United States’ treasury secretary, said recently on Meet the Press. “Europeans project weakness. We project strength.”
The events of this month in Minneapolis, culminating with the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents last weekend, show he is incorrect. Mass violence by the government against the people is not a sign of strength, but rather a sign of a nation dangerously divided. “Massacres seem, on one level, to be outcomes of power struggles within weak or crisis laden states,” writes Mark Levene, a professor of Jewish history, in The Massacre in History, adding that a massacre is “indicative not of power at the center but rather, of the lack of it.”
Here is one example from history: On June 10, 1944, days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, the German army entered the French village of Ouradour-sur Glane and rounded up 197 men and 445 women and children. They locked the men in a barn and the women and children in a church, and proceeded to kill them — 642 people, including seven Jewish refugees.
German military power made the massacre possible. But the slaughter took place while the Nazi state was disintegrating. The massacre projected weakness on the part of the failing German power, not strength.
More recent examples are also available.
Within the last month, the government of Iran has killed thousands of its own citizens who were protesting the oppressive regime — violence that has brought the country closer to regime change than at any point since the 1979 revolution.
Already weakened by its inability to protect itself from Israeli and American bombardment last summer, the government’s massacre of its own people has been broadly interpreted as a signal of profound instability. The “despotic regime is fragile and desperate,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells recently wrote in The New Yorker. When the government turns to violent repression, it gambles: It can provoke yet more outrage, or it can succeed in forcing calm — temporarily.
Which brings us to the U.S., which Scott Bessent has claimed is projecting strength. What has occurred in Minneapolis does not yet qualify as a massacre, despite the killings of Pretti and Renée Nicole Good. But our own country’s history provides a warning about the dire signal those killings send, and how much worse things could get.
Directly after the end of the Civil War, Memphis, Tennessee received a flood of immigrants, particularly Black citizens newly freed from slavery. The U.S.army occupying Memphis as part of Reconstruction reacted by arresting many of those free black citizens, and forcing them to work in the cotton fields outside the city. Major William Gray ordered that the streets be patrolled by soldiers from Fort Pickering, tasked with making arrests and forcing those they detained to accept exploitative labor contracts with local planters.
Similarly, the Memphis police, all white, took to beating black people in the street for the crime of “insolence.” After a white policeman was shot during an altercation in 1866, a white mob made up in large part by the municipal police and fire fighters ransacked Black homes and killed 46 Black people.
That massacre took place at a time when the United States was bitterly divided. The Civil War had just ended. The President had been assassinated. In Memphis, federal forces rubbed shoulders uneasily with municipal police. Local and national political powers were profoundly at odds.
The massacre in Memphis offers both an explanation and a warning about what is happening today in Minneapolis — and what could still be in store.
Just as our military kidnapped people off the streets of Memphis, forcing them into inhumane conditions, so ICE is kidnapping people in Minneapolis today. Just as children were arrested in Memphis, children as young as 5 have been detained in Minneapolis.
These parallels are evidence of a weak and woefully unpopular government. What is happening in Minneapolis is appalling; the example of Memphis gives us reason to fear that the stage is being set for something worse.
That said, there are no laws of history. Not every weakened or divided society results in a massacre. But there is an alarming resonance between the legacy of the Nazi massacre in Ouradour-sur Glane; the Iranian regime’s massacre of civilian protesters; the 19th-century massacre in Memphis and the outbreak of official violence in Minneapolis. It is that of a radically divided society, with a weakened government, falling prey to horrendous violence.
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Orthodox Jewish groups have been quiet about ICE. This Minneapolis rabbi wasn’t.
When the heads of major Jewish denominations co-signed a letter last week criticizing “in the strongest possible terms” the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis, Orthodox Judaism was conspicuously absent. Neither the Orthodox Union nor Agudath Israel of America — the two leading Orthodox umbrella organizations — has commented on the mass deployment of ICE and Border Patrol officers to the city.
There’s a reason Orthodox leaders might be choosing their words carefully — condemning ICE would put them at odds with not only a sizable chunk of their membership. Unlike members of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, Orthodox Jews — who represent about a tenth of the American Jewish population — lean heavily conservative, with about three-quarters supporting President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. (The Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel did not respond to separate inquiries.)
There was, however, at least one Orthodox rabbi willing to criticize ICE in public. Rabbi Max Davis, who leads the Minneapolis synagogue Darchei Noam Congregation, was one of 49 Jewish leaders to sign a Jan. 16 letter from the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, which said ICE was “wreaking havoc across our state” and which resolved to “bear witness and make a difference.”
I called Davis to learn more about why he signed and what he’s seeing on the ground. He also spoke about congregants who have been pepper sprayed or arrested at protests, how he approaches politics at the pulpit of an Orthodox shul, why he rejects the Holocaust comparisons some are making and how he’s tried to make a difference.
The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
The Forward: Why did you sign this letter?
Rabbi Max Davis: It felt like a very reasonable, very carefully thought out response to the present situation. I know that there are many within the shul who are looking for some leadership in this moment, and signing was a drop in the bucket compared to what some people are doing.
By the same token, I know that there are other perspectives within my own shul and certainly within the broader Orthodox community, and I strongly believe that it’s not the role of a rabbi to police his congregants’ politics. In our shul, we learn from and respect each other, and there’s an incredible amount of wisdom and life experience beyond my own. So I signed with caution, but with quite a feeling of disappointment and anger in the events unfolding downtown, and the loss of life in particular.
I’m probably the only Orthodox rabbi in the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, and there have been statements issued that I have not signed. But this one was an opportunity I was not going to miss.
What’s been the reaction at Darchei Noam to your signing the letter?
I got several yasher koachs (plaudits) privately. Those who may disagree, I think were and are being polite. There’s definitely been some pushback about politics entering our shul. But I haven’t heard much about the letter specifically. I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised that I signed it.
More broadly, what are things like in your community right now?
Within our kehilla (congregation), there’s a diversity of opinion. But mostly what I’m hearing is deep sorrow and frustration and anger and pain — particularly from those who watch the videos, who are acquainted with individuals suffering directly from the ongoing operations, or who have watched what the operations have been doing to our city and to our community.
Have you seen what’s happening firsthand?
There’s someone in our extended community who just got out of jail and called me about 10 minutes ago to give me a heads up. We have a couple of people in the community who have been pepper sprayed. We have people in the community who have been very active in supply drives and driving children to school because their parents are afraid to come out.
Instead of buying stuff at the sort of generic supermarket I thought I might as well make the money count where people are hurting the most. So I went a couple weeks ago to try and pick up some kiddush supplies down at one of the large Latino markets that I know has taken quite a hit. I was pretty much the only customer. It was a very sad place.
So in those regards, I’ve seen what’s going on. I was down at the march last Erev Shabbos (Jan. 16). It was minus-10 degrees. There were 50,000 people out there in the streets and thousands more in the skyways and in the buildings that we could see. You see banners and signs hanging onto highways. You see people clustered at intersections with signs and upside-down American flags. There’s a tremendous amount of anger out there.
What’s it like to be living through that?
It’s heartening and it’s disheartening. It’s disheartening that it feels necessary; it’s heartening to see community coming together. It’s disheartening to see signs comparing the federal government and ICE to Nazi Germany; I find that, as a Jew, deeply offensive and ignorant. And by the same token, I find all of the messages around community and common decency to be a beautiful sight.
It’s not to say that I have any solutions to the more fundamental politics. I’m not saying that the country doesn’t have an immigration problem. But I do know that you can’t watch the video of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse from the VA hospital, you can’t watch the video of Renee Good in her car and how that unfolded — shootings on streets and in neighborhoods that I know — you can’t watch that and not be highly disturbed and moved.
Have you addressed this moment at all from the pulpit?
I have definitely mentioned it in a couple of drashos (sermons). A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about ignoring the broader humanity and the plight of our neighbors at our own moral peril. Nechama Leibowitz sees a progression in Moshe’s interventions, first on behalf of another Jew against the Egyptian, then for a Jew against another Jew, and finally, with the daughters of Yitro at the well, between two non-Jewish parties. It was a good base for talking about doing what we can, when we can, to be an ohr l’goyim (a light unto the nations). I don’t think I said the word “ICE,” but there was no mistake about the subject matter — I think Renee Good had been shot like two days earlier.
With drashos, I’ve tried to be a little bit more tempered and restrained, because I think a lot of people come to hear Torah and inspiration and political issues are risky business. I’m also careful because I don’t want to ruin people’s Shabbos in other ways. Everyone has so much of this all week long, and I know some people look forward to Shabbos just to take a break. I’ve been told by some people that I’ve been too pareve, and by others that it’s been too much. So maybe I’m succeeding or failing everybody at the same time.
You mentioned the Nazi comparisons. Why do you take offense to those in this context?
That was industrialized murder, and concentration camps — there’s not a word to describe the evil of what that was. That was just exponentially more horrific. And it disturbs me to no end — although I am not surprised to see people make this comparison and I get where they’re coming from — how lightly the Holocaust and the evils of Nazi Germany seem to be treated when people want to trot out a paradigm of evil.
Why did it feel important to you to patronize the Latino grocery store?
I feel for these communities, where these are honest, legitimate, hard working businesses, and they watch their customer base all but dry up — that includes people who are here legally, employees who are here legally. But there are so many stories of individuals who are being racially profiled or being picked up by mistake.
I was very angry about the story of a Laotian man who, in front of his family and children, was pulled out of the shower into 10-degree weather and bundled off into an ICE vehicle and driven around for an hour before they figured out that he was here legally and had no criminal record. He was let go without so much as an apology. He’s got a wife and small children — and I’ve got a wife and kids, you know? This kind of thing is absolutely unacceptable. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that was such an outlier case. And that’s not an America that I believe in.
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