Uncategorized
Ukrainian Jewish life has always taken place in Russian. Now a race to translate is underway.
LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) – The rabbis sat around a breakfast table, discussing Russia’s war on the country where they work in a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. They named their hometowns as Lugansk, Lvov and Dnepr, the Russian names for Ukrainian cities that have vaulted into international headlines since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Although they were focused on Ukraine’s progress in the fighting, the rabbis uttered not a single word in Ukrainian. How could they? Like the vast majority of Jews in Ukraine, none of them speaks the country’s official language.
Russian has long been the first language for a wide swath of Ukrainians, including the majority of the country’s Jews. But after the Russian invasion, many Ukrainians decided they wanted to speak less Russian and more Ukrainian. Many Jews, similarly horrified by the sight of thousands of Russian soldiers pouring over Ukraine’s borders and wishing to demonstrate their Ukrainian bonafides, have made the same choice — even as it means disrupting a long linguistic tradition.
So when the rabbis’ successors meet for pancakes and sour cream, they will be far more likely to introduce themselves as the rabbis of Luhansk, Lviv and Dnipro, the Ukrainian names for their hometowns that have become the standard in English. They will also likely be able to hand their students and congregants Ukrainian-language versions of central Jewish texts that simply do not exist now.
“Many of my friends say that they are embarrassed to use Russian as a language. They say that we are Ukrainian Jews, and that Russia is a terrorist country fighting us and that we shouldn’t use their language,” said Rabbi Meir Stambler, from Dnipro. “Others say that [Russian president Vladimir] Putin doesn’t own the Russian language. It is an issue.”
He added, “This is something that people are discussing all the time.”
A decade ago, half of Ukrainians said they spoke Russian as their native language. That number has declined to 20%, fueled in part by resentment over Russia’s aggressions in Crimea, a contested region that it annexed by force in 2014. But Jews have remained predominantly Russian-speaking, even in parts of western Ukraine where Ukrainian has long been the dominant language. (Russian and Ukrainian are related linguistically, but their speakers cannot understand each other.)
Russia’s war on Ukraine has Ukrainian Jews playing catchup. Stambler, who heads the Federation of Jewish Communities, a body affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement that operates a network of 36 synagogues around Ukraine, offers a stark prediction: “Within 10 years, every Jew in Ukraine will speak Ukrainian.”
The dominance of Russian among Ukraine’s Jews, who numbered in the tens of thousands before the war, has deep roots.
“The historical trajectory of Jews in what is now Ukraine led them in the 19th century to adopt Russian rather than Ukrainian,” says historian Natan Meir, a professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University. “That was because Ukrainian was perceived as a peasant language that did not have any high culture associated with it, and because there were no economic advantages to adopting Ukrainian at the time.”
Now, the upside of switching to Ukrainian — demonstrating a national allegiance during a time of war — couldn’t be clearer.
“Jews feel quite integrated into Ukrainian society, but a shift, even if it is a gradual shift, to Ukrainian is going to make that more tangible than ever,” Meir said, calling the Russian invasion “absolutely game-changing” for Ukrainian Jews. “They will be perceived even more strongly than they have been as being wholly Ukrainian and part of the fabric of Ukrainian society.”
Most Ukrainian Jews, especially those educated since the collapse of the Soviet Union, can now speak some Ukrainian. But their ability often depends on where they grew up: Many Jews in traditionally Russophone cities such as Odesa, Dnipro or Kharkiv can struggle with the language, while their grandparents often cannot speak it at all.
Books in both Hebrew and Russian sit on a bookshelf at Medzhybizh. (Jacob Judah)
“Not more than 20% were Ukrainian-speaking at home,” says Stambler. “Take President [Volodymyr] Zelensky. He knew Ukrainian, but he didn’t speak it at home, and he had to polish it up when he became president.”
It will not be simple for the Jewish community to suddenly switch to Ukrainian, the most widely spoken European language without a standardized translation of the Torah.
Two years ago, a team of translators working in Israel, Austria and Hungary began working to produce Ukrainian-language Jewish texts. But before the Russian invasion, the effort had so far produced only a Ukrainian book of psalms, or tehillim.
In May, two months into the war, a decision was made to accelerate work on a daily prayer book. A Torah could follow.
“The chumash is difficult,” said Stambler, who oversees the half-dozen-strong team of translators from his base in Dnipro, using the Hebrew word for the printed form of the Torah. “We are working on it.”
While translating sacred texts can take years, other changes have come faster. The leaflets, brochures and calendars that are a fixture at any Jewish center in Ukraine were quickly swapped out Russian for Ukrainian, at least at the federation’s headquarters. Before February, these had often been produced and printed by Russian Jewish communities and shared with those in Ukraine, for simplicity’s sake.
“This differentiation from Russian Jewry is going to be huge,” said Meir, the historian. “Up until this point they have essentially formed one linguistic and cultural space that all Jews, whether they were in Ukraine, Russia or Belarus could move freely between.”
Now, the ties between those communities are both logistically complicated to maintain — trade routes have been ruptured — and also potentially a liability at a time when anyone in either Russia or Ukraine showing an affinity for the other country can face suspicion or penalties.
“This shift, if it actually happens, is going to be marking out a totally new cultural space for Ukrainian Jews and almost a declaration of independence,” Meir said “Or at least that is the aspiration, because there is so much of their heritage which is still based in the Russian language that it is going to be a long time before they can fully separate.”
That separation process, which began to take shape most clearly after 2014, has quickened. “We started doing things ourselves,” said Stambler. “We used to do about 20% in Ukrainian for the Jews in western towns like Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod, but we are making a much stronger push now.”
He estimates that some 75% of material being distributed to Ukrainian Jewish communities by the Federation of Jewish Communities was in Ukrainian by September, up from 20% to 35% in January.
Young rabbis who come from the United States or Israel to serve small Jewish communities across Ukraine now say that they have had to add Ukrainian alongside their Russian classes.
“I began with Russian,” said one of those rabbis who works in Vinnitsya, until he decided over the summer that he had to learn Ukrainian. “I realized that I had to learn Ukrainian because I needed it on the street. I needed it to speak with the government and with the media.”
Signs in a synagogue in Ukraine are written in both Ukrainian and Russian. (Jacob Judah)
Some Ukrainian Jews are voting with their voices.
“My whole life, I spoke only Russian,” said Olha Peresunko, who before the war lived in Mikolaiv in southern Ukraine. “But after the 24th of February I am speaking only Ukrainian.”
Peresunko was speaking outside a Lviv synagogue this fall, where she and other refugees were waiting for food parcels. She had fled Mikolaiv, which has sustained repeated assault by Russian troops, for Lviv with her mother and two children while her husband is on the frontlines.
Her children are finding it hard to adjust to the exclusive Ukrainian environment in Lviv, but she is confident that they will make the shift. “They will speak Ukrainian as their first language,” Peresunko said.
Exactly how much the shift to Ukrainian will change local Jewish communities is a matter of debate. Rabbi Shalom Gopin, who fled to Kyiv in 2014 from his home community in Luhansk, an overwhelmingly Russophone city seized by Russia-backed separatists at that time, said he, too, believes that Ukrainian will displace Russian as the lingua franca of Ukrainian Jewry.
A Ukrainian woman displays her Ukrainian-language Jewish calendar as a source of pride, September 2022. (Jacob Judah)
“They are starting to slowly speak Ukrainian,” he said. “It is no problem. There are lots of Jews in America who speak English. We live here, and we speak the languages of the places that we live. It is normal.”
But Gopin said the linguistic shift “means nothing” amid other issues facing Jews in Ukraine, where Russia’s war is threatening to undo 30 years of Jewish community building, largely though not exclusively led by Chabad, Gopin’s Orthodox movement.
“The problem for the Jews of Ukraine is not language,” he said. “It is about how much they are going to synagogue, or how many children are going to Jewish schools, not about what they are speaking.”
Natalia Kozachuk, 45, a Jewish businesswoman in Lviv, sees only upside to shedding Russian, her native language. She has started to speak to her children only in Ukrainian.
“It will be hugely positive if Jews speak more Ukrainian,” Kozachuk said. This is the only way that Jews can truly “learn more about the Ukrainian people,” she said, “about their history and the positive qualities and strengths of Ukraine.”
“Only good can come of it,” she added. “We will understand each other better.”
—
The post Ukrainian Jewish life has always taken place in Russian. Now a race to translate is underway. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering
(New York Jewish Week) — A new Jewish tradition has taken hold at a private, non-Jewish school in Manhattan.
On a recent Friday, about 240 students, parents and educators from the Town School, located on the Upper East Side, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.
It was the third time in as many years that the school had held a Shabbat celebration, and more than half of the students and parents in attendance weren’t Jewish.
“I think there is a real enthusiasm and excitement for families who are not Jewish to come into their first Shabbat or learn more about it again,” said Pierangelo Rossi, the Town School’s director of equity and community action.
Originally from Peru, Rossi is not Jewish. His first Shabbat experience ever was at the Town School in 2024, after Jewish parents organized a gathering in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
For years, the school had special “affinity groups” and spaces for students and parents of color, for “white anti-racist” students, and for queer students and their allies. The attack, and the surge of antisemitism that followed, spurred Jewish students and parents to work with the school to create their own.
While the Town School does not collect information about students’ religion, officials estimate that at least a quarter of the student body is Jewish.
“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it became clear to all of us — that our Jewish community was looking for that sense of affirmation in a way they hadn’t before,” said Head of School Doug Brophy.
Brophy, who has led the Town School since 2018, understood how they felt. He is also vice president of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Affinity groups have emerged as a hot-button issue in the debate over DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. While their proponents say the groups give minority and marginalized populations desperately needed spaces of their own, critics of DEI say the groups can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into schools and other institutions.
Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have particularly criticized the affinity group framework for too often forcing Jewish students into a binary framework about race and privilege that does not recognize the complexity of Jewish identity.
At the same time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York City private schools. The head of one elite private school stepped down last summer after members of the school community clashed over identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza war.
At the Town School, officials and parents say, those tensions have been absent. Instead, the entire school community has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the other special events held to honor students’ traditions, such as a lion parade on the school’s block to mark Lunar New Year and a Persian New Year observance led by parents.
“Whether it’s coming from a vulnerability or a difference, it’s [about] wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, and not just our Jewish families and colleagues feeling a sense of identity, but everyone else developing a greater sense of empathy,” Brophy said.
The Town School is not the only non-Jewish private school in the city to hold Shabbat celebrations in recent years: Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx says 700 people attended its November 2024 gathering. But it has committed to annual gatherings, which are growing in attendance.
That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Wise; and this year, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Upper West Side’s Rodeph Sholom School and the Pelham Jewish Center.
“For me, it was really a very different context where you have non-Jews that are interested in learning about what is it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz said. “And it was beautiful.”
To create an educational plan that was still engaging for children of all ages, she narrowed the focus of the event to two words: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” meaning “Sabbath” and “peace.”
“I need to use vocabulary, and I need to work with the room only, with those with concepts that are universal,” Turkienicz added. “And there is a lot. There’s a lot in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ that are universal.”
She taught the guests the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic word for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the younger children decorated placemats, while the older children hung out with their classmates.
14-year-old Daniel Rybak stuck around near the school after his last class of the day got out so he could attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.
Rybak, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the Town School for nine years.
“Just talking about the greater world at this point, with all the troubles in the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, as well as just the general sense, I suppose, that things are getting a little more violent around the world — it’s just a nice thing that brings people back to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re family, we’re OK, we’re getting through this,’” Rybak said. “It just shows that even throughout all that that’s happened everywhere, there’s still pockets of community and of real hope.”
This year, the Shabbat gathering took on added meaning for some attendees as some of New York’s Jews feel increasingly alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s office.
“The whole time I was thinking: 20 blocks north from here, there is a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish community in New York,” Turkienicz said. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we have a private, non-Jewish school doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”
Katy Williamson, a Jewish parent who helped organize the last two Town School Shabbats and attended this year’s, said she was “really blown away by the sense of community” and surprised by how many people attended.
“I read the news. Obviously, we live in New York City. I’m very aware of what’s going on outside of this, just in the world right now,” she said. “There was just this really warm feeling. … So many people from the school community joined and wanted to be a part of it.”
The post Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk
(JTA) — A disagreement over how to define the sources of rising antisemitism in Europe escalated into a public clash this week between two prominent Jewish leaders, with tech billionaire Elon Musk intervening to back the U.S. government’s antisemitism envoy over a prominent European rabbi.
The dispute centers on remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum by Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, during a panel discussion on antisemitism, extremism and social cohesion.
Responding to a question about the surge of antisemitism in Germany and beyond, Goldschmidt said the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel had triggered a dramatic global rise in antisemitic incidents, including what he described as organized and state-sponsored activity on university campuses and in public spaces.
Goldschmidt then linked broader political developments in Europe to immigration-related anxieties.
“I think the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East,” he said.
He went on to argue that combating antisemitism and Islamophobia together was in the shared interest of Jewish and Muslim communities, pointing to past interfaith initiatives he said had helped promote social cohesion.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, publicly criticized Goldschmidt’s remarks on X, calling them a misreading of the drivers of contemporary antisemitism in Europe. The intervention marked one of Kaploun’s first major public statements since his Senate confirmation in December.
“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Kaploun wrote, arguing instead that mass migration has played a significant role in recent antisemitic violence and threats to Jewish safety.
“I am proud to serve in an administration that understands that mass migration is a huge driver of antisemitism,” Kaploun wrote. “It creates dramatic social changes and threatens the safety of all citizens. This administration, led by President Trump and Secretary Rubio, recognizes and confronts today’s challenges with clarity. Mass migration itself threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”
Musk, the owner of X, amplified Kaploun’s critique by reposting his comments and replying, “Exactly. Thank you for speaking up,” a move that quickly broadened the dispute beyond Jewish communal circles.
Goldschmidt responded within hours, rejecting the characterization of his remarks and saying they had been taken out of context. He said he did not blame European culture for antisemitism and reiterated that he views antisemitism as stemming from multiple ideological sources, including the far right, the far left and radical Islamist violence.
“I never blamed ‘old Europe’ for the current rise in antisemitism,” Goldschmidt wrote, adding that his Davos comments were intended to explain political reactions to immigration, not to excuse antisemitic attacks.
The exchange highlights a growing divide among Jewish leaders over how to frame antisemitism amid polarized debates about immigration, integration and public safety — debates that have increasingly spilled into partisan politics in the United States.
Kaploun’s emphasis on migration echoes language used by Vice President JD Vance, who said in December that reducing immigration was “the single most significant thing” the United States could do to curb antisemitism, while dismissing claims of rising antisemitic sentiment within the Republican Party.
The dispute also reflects longstanding institutional tensions. Kaploun is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has grown into a dominant force in Jewish communal life in Russia and parts of Europe. Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to endorse the war in Ukraine, represents a European rabbinic establishment that has at times clashed with Chabad over authority and representation.
The post Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota
(JTA) — At least one local rabbi was arrested Friday in Minneapolis as hundreds of faith leaders from around the country gathered to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities.
Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport.
In photos and video from the protest just before the arrest, Kipley-Ogman can be seen delivering brief remarks while wearing a rainbow tallit and standing in a line at the airport’s arrivals gate with several other faith leaders who hold hands and pray. Kipley-Ogman did not immediately return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, was also demonstrating at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”
“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the overall mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”
He continued, “The clergy brought out the best of what faith does, which is lifting people up, building community and speaking up for justice. There was song, there was prayer, a lot of relationship-building. The crowd was calm but also very clear, calling to the end of the atrocities that ICE is committing.”
In an Instagram video from the airport, Rabbi Daniel Kirzane of the Reform KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago, wearing a beanie from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he had come to the protest because “the Torah teaches us that society and government are meant to protect people, not to scare them and not to brutalize them.”
The three were among an estimated 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders on the ground for “ICE Out” events across the Twin Cities Friday, after local clergy issued a broader call for a show of strength to combat the region’s intensified ICE activity over the past few weeks. Many local Jewish institutions, including the federation, the JCC, Jewish day schools and Jewish social services groups, have condemned ICE’s presence.
While mainstream Jewish groups say they are not opposed to responsible immigration enforcement, a steady stream of distressing incidents in Minnesota — including including the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, the detention of a 5-year-old child, and agents reportedly forcing open the door of a U.S. citizen — have galvanized a faith-based response in starkly moral terms.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one visiting rabbi, Diane Tracht of Reform-affiliated Temple Israel near Gary, Indiana, told Religion News Service while patrolling a heavily Hispanic and Somali region looking for ICE activity. “If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.”
Dozens of the rabbis on the ground Friday were activated through T’ruah, the Jewish social justice network. Also present were Rabbi Jonah Pesner, head of the Union for Reform Judaism’s religious action center; Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook; Bend the Arc CEO Jamie Beran; and members of Conservative Judaism’s social justice commission, among others.
“It’s all rooted in the biblical commandment that we were slaves in Egypt, and we’re to love the stranger,” Pesner told TC Jewfolk, a local Jewish news site. “The biblical text repeats that 36 different times in 36 different ways, and it really calls our clergy to action.”
The airport protest was just one of several anti-ICE events that local and national clergy staged in the Twin Cities area Friday, amid frigid temperatures that saw wind chill as low as 40-below. Temple Israel, a prominent Reform congregation in Minneapolis, also hosted an interfaith prayer service.
“Each and every one of our traditions believes in the dignity of every human being,” Temple Israel Senior Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman told the gathered crowd Friday morning, to applause.
After extolling the virtues of the region’s diversity, Zimmerman added, “When I began this work, and I was ordained in 1988, I said these words. But it wasn’t against the reality that we have today. Now we have to walk these words. We have to live these words. And it is, in my mind, the moment that history will define us. And guess what, history is on our side.”
Another local Jewish leader took a different protest tactic, urging a day of fasting on Friday.
“In Jewish tradition, when a community faces crisis, violence, injustice or moral collapse, we do not look away. The Talmud describes an ancient custom of instituting communal fast days,” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, senior rabbi at the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said during an interfaith press conference earlier in the week. “Fasting is not about self-affliction. It is about clarity. It is about refusing to numb ourselves to suffering.”
Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis on Thursday, where he sought to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies while also hoping to “turn down the temperature.”
Faith communities have emerged as a crucial dimension of the protests, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing Thursday the arrests of three anti-ICE protesters who had been involved in disrupting a church service over the weekend. A planned anti-ICE rally in New York City Friday afternoon was set to feature Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, as one of the speakers.
The post Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota appeared first on The Forward.