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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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Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
The data is clear: American Jews are feeling increasingly alienated from Zionism. But a new progressive coalition is failing to reckon with why the Zionist ideology their members mostly reject was so powerful in the first place.
On May 18, more than 40 Jewish organizations launched the Jewish Diaspora Movement, which, in their words, rejects “the vision of Judaism that is state-centric, militarist, ethno-nationalist.” The organizations declared on their website they want to build “an ethical future for Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism” and that they “joyfully view wherever we are in the entire world as our home.” They charge the Jewish establishment with “conflating antizionism with antisemitism” and “refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue with dissenters.”
JDM is right that too many Jewish spaces exclude thoughtful criticism of Israel. But even as it seeks to build new Jewish spaces, where Jews can live freely and practice their version of Judaism without hindrance, JDM isn’t reckoning with the fact that Zionism itself sprang out of exactly this kind of desire for Jewish self-determination — or the clear historical explanations for why it did.
What the movement is
Rabbi Alissa Wise, one of JDM’s organizers, has said the rollout was meant to be “an agitation.”
The founding members of the Jewish Diaspora Movement include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, the American Council for Judaism and the magazine Jewish Currents, as well as synagogues and prayer groups in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
JDM has no executive, no paid staff, and no physical location. It says it will be run horizontally, through a referendum of member organizations, under the fiscal sponsorship of a project called Beloved Garden, supported by the Fetzer Institute and Henry Luce Foundation.
Whatever one makes of its aims, JDM is a serious attempt to build parallel Jewish institutions, based on an old argument made new again.
The flawed argument of ‘hereness’
As the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, a different vision for the Jewish future was emerging in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Jewish Labor Bund emphasized doikayt, or “hereness,” the idea that a Jew’s future belongs to the place where they already live. The Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem argued in 1920 that “a national home in Palestine would not end the Jewish exile.” The Jewish Diaspora Movement makes the same point: that “all Jews live in diaspora.”
The Bund was right that Jews should be able to live freely in whatever community they were already in, whether it’s Vilnius or Warsaw, Baghdad or Tehran, Paris or Amsterdam, Buenos Aires or New York. But the reason Jews so intensely debated questions of home and future was largely because of forces outside of their control.
My late grandfather did not choose to be deported from Lithuania, the birthplace of the Bund, to a Soviet gulag. My grandmother did not choose, as a young child, to run away from her Polish neighbors who chased her and other Jews in her town with sticks and knives. The Jews who had lived across the Islamic world for centuries did not choose to be expelled after the creation of the State of Israel. Whether they believed in “hereness” as an ideology turned out not to matter.
Even today, emigration to Israel is frequently driven not by idealistic Zionism or a rejection of the diaspora, but by the cold calculus of safety. Many contemporary French and British Jews, for example, describe the sense that they have no future in the place where they grew up. They are not dismissing “the joy of intermixing and learning from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors,” which JDM describes as one of its core values. Rather, they are increasingly — and justifiably, amid an upsurge in violent antisemitic attacks — scared of their neighbors.
It’s telling that across a lengthy FAQ and thousands of words on their site, the single mention the Jewish Diaspora Movement makes of antisemitism appears to be an objection to conflating it with anti-Zionism.
A flawed reaction to a real issue
JDM is right to point out the ways in which establishment Jewish spaces have shut off criticism of Israel, including foundations who cut off funding for Jewish organizations that speak in favor of Palestinians and rabbis who have been fired for talking about Gaza.
Years ago, while interning at a legacy Jewish institution, I pressed its leadership on their silence about Palestinian casualties during Israel’s 2021 Guardian of the Walls Gaza operation. The head of the organization told me that he held his tongue because there was enough criticism out there already — even as he allowed that people inside the organization might privately object to some of Israel’s actions.
Mainstream Jewish leaders increasingly recognize, however, that shutting down criticism risks creating alienation. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute warned on a podcast this past January that narrowing the bounds of acceptable dissent threatens “to irreparably change the boundaries of Jewish identity itself.”
For many counter- and anti-Zionists, opposing Zionism offers the clearest way to stand against the things Israel does wrong. But JDM, at least in one domain, risks taking things too far.
To say that “all Jews live in diaspora, even those who live in Jerusalem” as JDM does, is to tell nearly half the world’s Jews that the place they live is not really home — even if JDM may view diaspora as a theological or spiritual condition rather than a geographic one.
It’s one thing to say Jewish people don’t need to center Israel to live a full Jewish life. It’s quite another thing to tell Israelis themselves that the place they see as home isn’t. Just as it’s fair to say that legacy Jewish organizations shouldn’t get to define a single diaspora attitude toward Israel, it’s fair for Israelis to say this new diaspora organization shouldn’t get to define them.
Rather than seek to redefine, JDM might follow the example of someone like the progressive Zionist author Joshua Leifer, who resigned as a contributing editor from Jewish Currents after Oct. 7. In his book Tablets Shattered, Leifer writes that the “ethical task of global Jewish life is now to make the modern experiment in Jewish sovereignty a just one.” Or like Rabbi Sharon Brous, a progressive Zionist, who has described the war in Gaza as a spiritual catastrophe.
Neither of these figures loosened their attachment to Israel to make room for their criticism.
Escalating Alienation
American Jewish life is being driven to the extremes by escalating alienation. Each side increasingly acts as if to acknowledge the other’s valid points is a concession they cannot afford. And each such refusal becomes the next side’s alibi for digging in.
Many Jews live somewhere in the middle. They might believe a Jewish state has a right to exist, and be critical of the Israeli government.
I count myself among them. I’m an American Israeli who is furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and those who ignore the state’s misconduct. But I’ve simultaneously become estranged from former friends and colleagues on the political left who have engaged in Hamas apologism and crossed the line into antisemitism.
So I understand JDM’s impulse to create a communal space for those who feel excluded, even if I wouldn’t feel at home in their framework.
When you feel you cannot live your Judaism freely in the institutions you have, you make your own. But the act of building parallel Jewish spaces concedes that Jews do not simply get to define how we live. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the terms are sometimes set by others, and that the freedom to practice on our own terms must be deliberately built.
That is the animating spirit of Zionism, bubbling up in a movement trying to leave it behind.
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It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
Why have I, a longstanding democratic Zionist who lived in Israel for five years and loves the country passionately, abandoned my belief in a democratic Jewish state?
My short response is that I did not abandon democratic Zionism. Democratic Zionism abandoned me.
More than two-and-half years after Hamas slaughtered close to 1,200 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, after Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, growing numbers of liberal Zionist American Jews like me have reached a crossroads. Cognitive dissonance over Israel has left us feeling homeless and bereft.
In our horror at the indiscriminate killing of civilian Palestinians, we are alienated from the mainstream American Zionist echo-chamber, dominated by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, which rejects almost all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Yet we also cannot make common cause with stridently anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, which demonize Israel and Israelis, with no distinctions, as the enemy.
Fortunately, there is a little known but compelling third way, known as post-Zionism.
Post-Zionism focuses on supporting efforts to build a shared society in which all the people residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — Israelis and Palestinians alike — can live side by side in peace and security. It sees the structure of this shared society as less important than ending the mentality of “us against them” that has animated both Jewish and Palestinian national movements for more than a century. Such counter-productive ideologies must give way now to a true sharing of the Holy Land, in which the rights of all people are cherished and protected.
A return to principles
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence contains a promise: the new country would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Yet successive Israeli governments led by both left and right-wing Zionist parties have, in the decades since the 1967 Six-Day War, sabotaged the dream of a democratic Jewish state by deliberately building Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. By prioritizing settlements over peace, Israel has worked to ensure that there will be no Palestinian state alongside a democratic Jewish Israel, but instead an apartheid Jewish state ruling over millions of Palestinians without rights.
That means in short, the only morally acceptable form of Zionism has been effectively taken off the table by Israel itself.
Instead, a return to post-Zionism — which emerged in the 1980s, and went into abeyance with the collapse of the Oslo peace process — is called for. Difficult debates over definitions of Zionism aren’t changing anything. To ensure that Israel survives and inspires generations of diaspora Jews to come, a new way forward is needed.
A common land
Roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs live between the river and the sea. The path down which they are presently hurtling leads directly to mutually assured destruction, and must be abandoned.
The present Israeli course of action — oppressing and seeking to again disperse our Palestinian neighbors in the name of Jewish security — has led to a state of perpetual if unofficial war, which places the security and well-being of Israelis and diaspora Jews at ever-graver risk. The strategy of Palestinians and their supporters around the world — holding out some vague hope that Israel will somehow cease to exist — is similarly dysfunctional.
Post-Zionism, in contrast to both current strategies, advocates acceptance between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and a shared embrace of our common land.
In adopting a post-Zionist perspective, I’ve found a route out of paralysis. And I think it could provide an avenue for Jews like me — who feel alienated from what Israel has become but retain deep ties to it — to contribute to building a shared Israel-Palestine. That coexistence could look like one state, two states, or my personal favorite possibility, an Israeli-Palestinian confederation with two states bonded together by a European Union-like structure. Post-Zionism also allows its adherents to maintain our abiding love for and spiritual connection to the land of Israel; as opposed to anti-Zionist Jews’outright rejection of “next year in Jerusalem.”
Ideological change comes slowly. Substituting the vision of a safe home for Jews in the Middle East for that of an explicitly Jewish state will take time. Right now, the key post-Zionist priority looks much like that of left-Zionism: convincing the Israeli public that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansionist agenda of Jewish-supremacism is morally and politically unsustainable, and to bring about the beginnings of change by ousting his coalition in upcoming elections.
On the domestic front, post-Zionist American Jews must work together to strengthen ties with interfaith allies, including the Muslim community, to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia, and to defend democracy and pluralism. We cannot work for a truly democratic Middle East without a truly democratic government of our own.
Embracing post-Zionism does not mean refusing to work together with Zionists who also want freedom, safety and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But it means thinking about the course of history that brought us to this point differently. I and so many post-Zionists have come to understand that the ideology of Zionism, while representing genuine liberation for Jews, had within it a fatal flaw: forcing the structure of a Jewish state on a land that was only partly Jewish. The idea that this could somehow have worked out was, from the beginning, a form of self-delusion.
Right now, post-Zionists and left-Zionists are working together fruitfully in collaboration with Palestinians in a variety of movements and NGOs dedicated to peace and reconciliation, including through increasingly prominent groups like Standing Together.
We must continue to open our minds to a broader range of better futures for the Middle East. Every civilian in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank deserves peace, security, justice and equal rights. That possibility may feel far off, but to paraphrase Theodore Herzl himself, if we will it, it is no dream.
Walter Ruby, formerly a Forward correspondent in Moscow, is co-author with Sabeeha Rehman of We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship at a Time.
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Majority of House Democrats vote to defeat Lebanon war powers measure
(JTA) — A House resolution aimed at preventing U.S. involvement in hostilities in Lebanon failed Thursday.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and fierce critic of Israel, forced a vote on the House floor Thursday. It was defeated 324 to 92, with 91 Democrats voting in favor. The sole Republican vote came from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary.
The resolution, which would have ordered President Donald Trump to remove U.S. troops from Lebanon within seven days, was defeated after Democratic Party leaders noted in a joint statement that there are “no U.S. servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
The statement issued by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar continued: “We stand with the Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces in their efforts to live peacefully and defeat Hezbollah, a violent terrorist organization that is a sworn enemy of the United States.”
Jewish Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York also voted “no” on the resolution, writing in a joint press release that their opposition “should not be taken as an approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prosecution of Israel’s military action in Lebanon.”
“To the extent that American armed forces are present in Lebanon, it is to support the current Lebanese government, which deserves our assistance,” the statement continued.
But Tlaib defended her resolution in a post on X Thursday ahead of the vote. “The people of Lebanon can’t wait another month for Congress to act,” Tlaib wrote. “Every day that we do nothing, 11 more Lebanese children are killed or injured by the Israeli military in this U.S.-supported invasion. Congress must pass today’s Lebanon War Powers Resolution.”
Tlaib was citing a UNICEF report of data from Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health last month that found 77 children in Lebanon had been killed over the course of a week as Israeli strikes continued to pummel the country.
Some of those who opposed Tlaib’s resolution, including Nadler and Goldman, said they would vote for an alternative version of the resolution that would preserve cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces in their fight against Hezbollah.
The defeat of the resolution came the same day that Hezbollah rejected the latest ceasefire agreement brokered between Israel and Lebanon, as fighting between the Iranian proxy and Israel has intensified in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, the House narrowly passed a resolution for the first time that would limit President Donald Trump’s power to continue the war in Iran. While the development was largely symbolic, it marked a rebuke of the president’s increasingly unpopular strategy in Iran.
On Friday, 85 members of Congress also signed onto a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling on the Trump administration to “use every available diplomatic tool to halt imminent settlement construction in the E-1 area of the West Bank,” a corridor east of Jerusalem.
Citing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s orders to demolish a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank last month, the letter, which was led by Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, argued that the issue of settlements in the area had reached a “critical and final inflection point.”
“The window for meaningful diplomatic intervention is closing rapidly, and we believe it is not too late for the United States to act,” read the letter, which was also signed by Nadler and Jewish Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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