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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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Klimt Portrait That Helped Save Jewish Subject From Nazi Persecution Sells for Record $236 Million at Auction
Painting by Gustav Klimt ‘Bildnis Elisabeth Lederer’ (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer) on display at Sotheby’s auction house new global headquarters on Madison Avenue in the Marcel Breuer building in New York, NY on Nov. 12, 2025. Photo: Lev Radin/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A Gustav Klimt portrait that helped safe its Jewish subject from Nazi persecution during the Holocaust sold on Tuesday for a record-breaking $236.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” is a 6-foot-tall painting that the artist worked on for two years between 1914 and 1916. It depicts the 2o-year-old only daughter of August and Szerena Lederer, wrapped in an East Asian emperor’s cloak adorned with dragons. The Lederers, who were Jewish, were Klimt’s greatest patrons and also the second wealthiest family in Vienna, Austria, only behind the Rothschilds. Klimt painted portraits of other Lederer family members as well and their art collection included many Klimt paintings.
The painting is one of only two full-length Klimt portraits that remain privately owned, while the majority of the rest are in museums. The portrait sold for $205 million plus premium to a buyer over the phone. It marks a record for a piece of modern art and doubled the previous record for a Klimt painting, according to Reuters. Sotheby’s declined to share the identity of the portrait’s buyer.
Following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, which took place two years after August Lederer died, Nazis looted the Lederer art collection but left behind the family portraits because they were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” was on loan for three years.
In an attempt to save herself from Nazi persecution, Elisabeth fabricated a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her real father. The fact that Klimt had a reputation as a philanderer and spend years obsessing over Elisabeth’s portrait helped support her story. Szerena even signed an affidavit supporting the false claim about Klimt’s paternity in an effort to save her daughter, according to the National Gallery of Canada. The Nazi regime ultimately gave Elisabeth a document stating that she was descended from Klimt and along with help from a former brother-in-law, who was a high-ranking Nazi official, she lived safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.
The painting was then looted by the Nazis and nearly destroyed in a fire during World War II, but miraculously survived. It was returned to a Lederer family member in 1948, who kept the piece until selling it in 1983. “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” joined the art collection of Estée Lauder heir and Jewish billionaire Leonard Lauder in 1985. He died in June at 92 and five Klimt pieces from his collection have sold at Sotheby’s for a total of $392 million.
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Iran Seeks Saudi Leverage to Revive Stalled Nuclear Talks With US
Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman speaks during a meeting with US President Donald Trump, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Nov. 18, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Iran has asked Saudi Arabia to persuade the US to revive stalled nuclear talks, underlining Tehran’s anxiety over a possible repeat of Israeli airstrikes and its deepening economic woes, two regional sources with knowledge of the matter said.
A day before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the White House earlier this week, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian sent a letter to the de facto Saudi leader, Iranian and Saudi media reported on Monday.
In the letter, Pezeshkian said Iran “does not seek confrontation,” wants deeper regional cooperation, and remains “open to resolving the nuclear dispute through diplomacy, provided its rights are guaranteed”, the sources told Reuters.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said on Wednesday that Pezeshkian’s message to the Saudi crown prince was “purely bilateral.” The Saudi government media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
IRAN‘S NUCLEAR SITES BOMBED IN JUNE
Prior to the 12-day war in June triggered by Israeli airstrikes, during which US forces struck three Iranian nuclear sites, Iran and the US held five rounds of talks on the Islamic Republic’s contentious uranium enrichment program.
Since the war, the negotiations have hit an impasse, even as both sides insist they remain open to a deal.
One of the sources in the Gulf said Iran is seeking a channel to reopen talks with Washington, and that the Saudi leader also favors a peaceful solution and conveyed that message to US President Donald Trump during his visit.
“MbS [the Saudi crown prince] also wants this conflict to be over peacefully. This is important to him, and he relayed this to Trump and said he is ready to help,” the Arab Gulf source said.
On Tuesday, the Saudi ruler told reporters: “We will do our best to help reach a deal between the United States and Iran.”
Riyadh and Tehran have been long-time strategic rivals in the Middle East, often backing opposing sides in regional proxy wars, until a China-brokered rapprochement in 2023 eased hostilities and restored diplomatic relations.
Saudi Arabia’s growing political weight has made it an increasingly decisive actor in regional diplomacy. Its deep security ties with Washington – and particularly the leadership’s close relationship with Trump – endow Riyadh with leverage few others in the Middle East possess.
Meanwhile, Iran‘s regional standing has weakened over the past two years from devastating military blows inflicted by Israel on its allies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the fall of its close ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“Shifting mediation channels from countries such as Oman and Qatar to Saudi Arabia – a country with structural power, direct influence in the US and a practical resolve to reduce tensions – is the best strategic decision under current circumstances,” said Hamid Aboutalebi, a former senior Iranian diplomat.
“These characteristics make Saudi Arabia an effective mediator and a genuine channel for conveying messages, a position that neither Oman nor Qatar nor the Europeans possess,” Aboutalebi wrote on X.
Given that it is seeking to establish its own uranium enrichment programme, Saudi Arabia has an interest in promoting a US-Iranian nuclear deal, said Firas Maksad, Washington-based managing director at consulting firm Eurasia Group.
During MbS’s Washington visit, he and Trump signed a declaration to complete talks on a civilian energy program, without saying whether Riyadh would be able to enrich.
“The Saudi quest for enrichment is related to US-Iran nuclear diplomacy,” Maksad said. “Saudi has an interest in promoting the US-Iran nuclear talks via a quiet back channel.”
IRAN, US SAY THEY BACK DIPLOMACY, BUT DEMANDS CLASH
The stakes for reviving nuclear diplomacy are high.
Conditions set by Tehran’s clerical establishment and the Trump administration remain sharply at odds, and a failure to narrow differences risks igniting a new regional war.
Gulf states, wary of being dragged into a broader conflict if Israel strikes Iran again, have previously acted as intermediaries – particularly Qatar and Oman.
Iran accuses Washington of “betraying diplomacy” by joining its close ally Israel in the June war, and insists that any deal must lift US sanctions that have crippled its oil-based economy. Washington, meanwhile, demands that Tehran halt uranium enrichment on its soil, curb its ballistic missile program and stop backing regional militia proxies – terms Iran has rejected.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have warned they will not hesitate to strike Iran again if it resumes enrichment, a potential pathway to developing nuclear bombs.
Western powers and Israel accuse Tehran of using its declared civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing bomb material. Iran says it seeks only peaceful atomic energy and vows a “crushing response” to any more Israeli aggression.
ECONOMIC ISOLATION, PUBLIC ANGER PUSH RULERS TO SHIFT COURSE
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a hardliner who has the final say on foreign policy and the nuclear program, has ruled out negotiations under threat.
“They want to impose their demands and advance their goals through military and economic pressure. This approach is unacceptable, and Iranians will not submit to it,” he said.
But that line-in-the-sand approach does not cut it for many ordinary Iranians struggling with the privations of daily life.
The economy is buckling under a collapsing currency, soaring inflation and chronic shortages of domestic energy and water – chiefly driven by years of mismanagement and sanctions.
Hemmed in by mounting public anger and the risk of further Israeli attack if nuclear diplomacy fails, Iran’s clerical elite is scrambling for a breakthrough with Washington to ease its crushing economic isolation, two senior Iranian officials, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Kamal Kharrazi, a senior adviser to Khamenei, last week appealed to Trump to pursue “genuine talks with Iran grounded in mutual respect and equality,” according to Iranian state media.
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Israel Expects to Keep Regional Military Edge Despite Planned Sale of F-35s to Saudi
An F-35 jet performs at the Dubai Airshow in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Nov. 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
Israel expects to maintain access to more advanced US weaponry, a government spokesperson said on Thursday when asked about Washington’s plan to sell F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia.
Israel is the only Middle East country operating the F-35, one of the most advanced warplanes ever built. US law guarantees Israel a “qualitative military edge” in the region.
“The United States and Israel have a long-standing understanding, which is that Israel maintains the qualitative edge when it comes to its defense,” spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian told reporters.
“That has been true yesterday, that has been true today, and the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] believes that will be true tomorrow and in the future,” she said.
The spokesperson’s remarks were the first official comment from the Israeli government on the Saudi sale, announced earlier this week by President Donald Trump.
Saudi Arabia does not officially recognize the state of Israel. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, said during a visit to Washington this week that the kingdom wanted official ties with Israel but also wanted to ensure a clear path for a two-state solution with Palestinian independence.
Israel‘s Netanyahu opposes Palestinian statehood.
US officials have said the Saudi jets will not have superior features found in Israel F-35 fighters, which include advanced weapons systems and electronic warfare equipment.