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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.”
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When Hate Hides Behind Nuance, Babka and Protest Cannot Rise Half‑Baked
A Breads Bakery location in New York City. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
This weekend, a crowd wrapped around the corner of 63rd and Broadway in New York City, lining up for babka and bread at Breads Bakery. But this wasn’t the usual pre-Shabbat rush. It was a quiet show of solidarity with the Israeli-owned bakery, after union activists urged it to sever ties with Israel.
A line for pastries became a reminder that antisemitism doesn’t always announce itself with slurs or slogans. Sometimes it appears in smaller, more familiar spaces — through pressures and demands that seem benign on the surface.
When New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, revoked a series of executive orders aimed at combating antisemitism, the justification was familiar: overly broad, insufficiently nuanced, potentially chilling to free speech. For many Jews in this city — especially those who are visibly Jewish or openly supportive of Israel — this reversal did not feel like balance restored. It felt like protection withdrawn.
New York is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and Mamdani’s decision came at a moment when antisemitic threats are rising nationally and globally, when synagogues and schools require armed guards, and when fear is not theoretical but lived.
One word — nuance — has stayed with me.
Not long before the mayor’s announcement, a friend objected to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism: Too broad, too political, not nuanced enough. I had heard the argument before — but hearing it again, now, felt revealing.
Can we fight hate in the language of nuance?
For decades, we have treated language as a tool of moral repair. We revised terminology to be more inclusive, more precise, and more humane. We expanded our understanding of gender and identity. Language evolved to widen the circle of belonging.
Names matter. If language shapes how people are seen — and how they see themselves — then these changes matter.
But somewhere along the way, the project of inclusion began to drift.
Refining language stopped functioning as a starting point for justice and became a substitute for it. Linguistic correction began to stand in for moral and institutional accountability. We treated vocabulary changes as progress, even when the underlying structures remained unchanged.
We changed the words without changing the world.
As we focused on more delicate modifiers and culturally sensitive phrasing, we also became cautious in how we described injustice — so cautious that we often avoided confronting it at all. Language became a tool to minimize, camouflage, or justify inaction.
Nowhere is this clearer than in how we talk about antisemitism.
At a time when antisemitic incidents are rising, the insistence on narrower definitions and softer language feels less like rigor and more like retreat. Definitions tighten just as hostility becomes more explicit, more public, and more emboldened.
And the question lingers: Are we blurring the reality of antisemitism out of fear that naming it clearly will constrain legitimate criticism of Israel? Are we reinforcing old tropes equating Zionism with racism, legitimizing a wave of boycotts and, increasingly, outright acts of violence against Jews?
Would we ask other marginalized communities to soften the words used to describe the hatred aimed at them?
If we would not ask it of others, why do we ask it of Jews?
Outside of Breads Bakery, the protest didn’t sound like a protest. No bullhorns, no chants — just a line of New Yorkers waiting for pastries to push back against a union’s demand that the bakery cut ties with Israel. It turns out that you can fight antisemitism with babka.
But the gesture can be quiet only if the definition is not. We cannot fight what we don’t hear, and we cannot hear what we refuse to name. When antisemitism hides behind nuance, policy, or the polite language of activism, clarity stops being optional. Even a line for babka can become a battleground against hate — but only if the hate is named plainly. Buying bread may seem like a Beijing form of activism, but when the message it sends is clear, hate can no longer hide in the shadow of nuance.
Gillian Granoff is a New York–based writer focused on Jewish identity, the Israel–diaspora relationship, and the challenges of navigating antisemitism after October 7. Her work draws on personal experience and time spent in Israel, bringing cultural insight and emotional clarity to her essays. She holds a degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University and spent more than a decade as a senior reporter for Education Update, an award-winning New York education newspaper.
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Somali Regions Reject Mogadishu’s Move to Cut Ties With UAE
People hold the flag of Somaliland during the parade in Hargeisa, Somaliland, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri
Three self-governing regions in Somalia that have close relations with the United Arab Emirates have dismissed a decision this week by the central government to sever ties with the UAE, a long-term sponsor.
On Monday Somalia annulled all agreements with the UAE, including in the field of security, accusing the Gulf country, which has trained and funded Somalia’s army and invested in its ports, of undermining Somalia’s national sovereignty.
Somalia did not provide further explanation of its reasons for the move. Mogadishu is investigating allegations that the UAE whisked a separatist leader out of Yemen via Somalia. Separately, the UAE has been linked to Israel’s recognition last month of Somaliland, a breakaway region of northern Somalia, as an independent state.
The UAE‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Somalia’s decision. The UAE has longstanding interests in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea regions, where it has frequently vied with other wealthy Gulf states for influence.
Somaliland and two semi-autonomous states, Puntland in the north and Jubbaland in the south, said they would not recognize the decision by Mogadishu to cut ties with the UAE.
“Somalia’s daydreaming changes nothing … The UAE is here to stay, no matter what a weak administration in Mogadishu says,” Khadar Hussein Abdi, Minister of the Presidency of the Republic of Somaliland, said late on Monday.
The Jubbaland regional government said Mogadishu’s decision was “null and void” and existing “security and development agreements will continue to exist.”
Puntland said the decision would have no impact on relations between it and the UAE, including over the coastal city of Bosaso where a subsidiary of the UAE‘s DP World has a 30-year concession to run the port.
EXPANDING INFLUENCE
The UAE has long leveraged its wealth to expand its influence across the Horn of Africa, using a mix of economic, military and diplomatic clout to exert regional power.
For decades Somalia’s federal government has possessed only limited authority across the country, and has failed to defeat Islamist militants, despite years of international support, including African peacekeepers and US air strikes.
The UAE trained hundreds of Somali troops from 2014-2018, and still covers salaries and provides logistics for around 3,400 Somali military police and special forces troops in and around the capital, according to senior Somali sources.
It has also forged bonds directly with regional governments, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to ports and military infrastructure on the coast along global shipping routes.
Two Somali officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, told Reuters that in place of UAE military funding the country could turn to the UAE‘s wealthy Gulf rivals Qatar or Saudi Arabia for help.
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Syria’s Kurds Protest Aleppo Violence as Fears of Wider Conflict Grow
Syrian Kurds attend a protest in solidarity with the people in the neighborhood of Sheikh Maksoud and Ashrafiya, as the last Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters left the Syrian city of Aleppo on Sunday, state-run Ekhbariya TV said, following a ceasefire deal that allowed evacuations after days of deadly clashes, in Qamishli, Syria, Jan. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Orhan Qereman
Several thousand people marched under the rain in northeast Syria on Tuesday to protest the expulsion of Kurdish fighters from the city of Aleppo the previous week after days of deadly clashes.
The violence in Aleppo has deepened one of the main faultlines in Syria, where President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s promise to unify the country under one leadership after 14 years of war has faced resistance from Kurdish forces wary of his Islamist-led government.
Five days of fighting left at least 23 people dead, according to Syria’s health ministry, and saw more than 150,000 flee the two Kurdish-run pockets of the city. The last Kurdish fighters left Aleppo in the early hours of Jan. 11.
On Tuesday, several thousand Syrian Kurds protested in the northeastern city of Qamishli. They carried banners bearing the logos of Kurdish forces and faces of Kurdish fighters who died in the battles – some of whom had detonated explosive-laden belts as government forces closed in.
FEARS OF WIDER CONFLICT
Other posters featured the faces of Sharaa and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, crossed out with red “X”s and carrying the caption “Killers of the Kurdish people.”
Turkey accuses the Syrian Democratic Forces – the main Kurdish fighting force which runs a semi-autonomous zone in northeast Syria – of links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara considers a terrorist organization.
Many Kurds say last week’s bloodshed has deepened their skepticism about Sharaa’s promises to govern for all Syrians.
“If they truly love the Kurds, and if they sincerely say that the Kurds are an official and fundamental component of Syria, then the rights of the Kurdish people must be recognized in the constitution,” said Hassan Muhammad, head of the Council of Religions and Beliefs in Northeast Syria, who attended Tuesday’s protest.
Others worry that the bloodshed will worsen. Syria’s defense ministry on Tuesday declared eastern parts of Aleppo still under SDF control to be a “closed military zone,” and ordered all armed forces in the area to withdraw further east.
Idris al-Khalil, a Qamishli resident who protested on Tuesday, said the Aleppo violence reminded him of the sectarian killings last year of the Alawite minority on Syria’s coast and the Druze minority in the country’s south.
“Regarding the fears of a full-scale war – if they want a full-scale war, the people will suffer even more, and it will lead to division among the peoples of the region, preventing them from living together in peace,” Khalil said.