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
Republican Rep. Calls on Georgia Hospital to Cut Ties With Iranian Regime-Connected Physician
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) Source: Youtube
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) has called on Emory University and Georgia medical regulators to fire a physician with familial ties to a top Iranian official, amid international furor against that official for his role in the brutal suppression of protests in Iran.
In a letter dated Jan. 22, the Carter urged Emory University to terminate Dr. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani’s appointment and asked the Georgia Composite Medical Board to revoke her medical license, arguing that her connection to her father, Ali Larijani, poses national security and patient trust concerns. The letter contends that allowing someone with such ties to practice medicine in the United States is “unacceptable,” especially given recent U.S. actions targeting Iran’s leadership and repression apparatus.
“Allowing an individual with immediate familial ties to a senior official actively calling for the death of Americans to occupy such a position poses a threat to patient trust, institutional integrity, and national security,” Carter wrote.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury this month sanctioned Larijani, who serves as Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, for his role in coordinating the Iranian government’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters that erupted in late 2025 and continued into January 2026. According to the Treasury, Larijani publicly called on security forces to use force against demonstrators demanding basic rights, and his actions are tied to thousands of deaths and injuries.
Those sanctions, announced Jan. 15 by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, target Larijani along with nearly two dozen other officials and shadow banking networks that finance the Iranian regime’s repression and global destabilizing activities. The move is part of a broader U.S. effort to increase economic pressure on Tehran, using executive authorities related to human rights abuses and support for terrorism.
The sanctions designation bars Larijani and the other named individuals from the U.S. financial system and prohibits American persons and companies from conducting business with them. Treasury officials said the measures also aim to disrupt the financial networks that allow Iran’s elite to launder revenue from petroleum and petrochemical sales funds that the U.S. says are diverted to repression and support for proxy groups abroad.
Larijani’s role in the crackdown has also been highlighted by a former Iranian government insider, who spoke with the IranWire outlet, alleging that Larijani played a central role in orchestrating the January 2026 suppression drawing comparisons to historic violent suppressions and suggesting the strategy was part of internal power consolidation within Iran’s leadership.
Protests that began in Iran in December have left at least 5,000 people dead, more than 7,300 injured and upwards of 26,800 detained, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. The unrest was initially sparked by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, skyrocketing inflation, and a plummeting currency. However, the demonstrations quickly expanded into a wider movement opposing the country’s ruling establishment. Iranian authorities released their first official death toll on Wednesday, reporting 3,117 fatalities. The government said 2,427 of those killed were civilians or members of the security forces, while the remainder were labeled “terrorists,” without offering a detailed accounting of civilian versus security force casualties.
Uncategorized
Iran Claims Long-Range Missile Progress as US Boosts Military Presence Amid Deadliest Crackdown Since 1979
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 17, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran claimed this week it successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of striking the US’s East Coast, as Washington bolsters its military presence in the region and tensions soar amid Tehran’s intensifying crackdown on protesters.
According to state-affiliated media, the Iranian government conducted a successful missile launch test this week from an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base in Semnan, a city in north-central Iran, firing it toward Siberia with Russia’s approval.
Even though the missile was reported to have a range of up to 3,700 miles, it is unclear whether it reached its target, as the launch video shows little beyond a projectile soaring through the clouds.
Last year, a report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) warned that Iran could possess up to 60 intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2035, signaling the regime’s growing long-range strike capabilities and the potential future threat to the US and its allies.
“Missile threats to the US homeland will expand in scale and sophistication in the coming decade,” the report said. “North Korea has successfully tested ballistic missiles with sufficient range to reach the entire Homeland, and Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”
Meanwhile, as regional tensions mount over the regime’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, the United States has moved a range of military assets into the area — including the USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group.
In the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that he may take “decisive” military action against Iran if the regime continues killing protesters.
“We’re watching Iran,” Trump said on his way back from the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I’d rather not see anything happen but we’re watching them very closely.”
“We have a large fleet moving into the region. We’ll see what happens if we have to use it,” he continued. “We are building a very large force there, and we are closely monitoring their actions.”
For his part, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Thursday accused the United States and Israel of fueling the widespread anti-government protests, calling it a “cowardly revenge … for the defeat in the 12-Day War.”
IRGC commander Gen. Mohammad Pakpour also threatened Israel and the United States over any potential military action, warning them to “avoid any miscalculations” to prevent what he described as a “more painful and regrettable fate.”
“The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and dear Iran have their finger on the trigger, more prepared than ever, ready to carry out the orders and measures of the supreme commander-in-chief,” Pakpour was quoted as saying by local media.
With pressure mounting at home and abroad, experts say it remains unclear how Tehran will respond — whether by escalating militarily beyond its borders or by offering limited concessions to ease sanctions and mend ties with the West.
The nationwide protests, which began with a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran on Dec. 28, initially reflected public anger over the soaring cost of living, a deepening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plummeting to record lows amid renewed economic sanctions, with annual inflation near 40 percent.
With demonstrations now stretching over three weeks, the protests have grown into a broader anti-government movement calling for the fall of Khamenei and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even a broader collapse of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.
According to the US-based human rights group HRANA, 4,519 people have been killed during the protests, with another 9,049 fatalities under review. At least 5,811 people have been injured, and 26,314 arrests have been recorded.
Iranian officials have put the death toll at 5,000 while some reports indicate the figure could be much higher.
On Friday, the UN Human Rights Council said that the current wave of violence against protesters is “the deadliest crackdown since the 1979 Islamic Revolution,” citing credible evidence that the actual death toll is “much higher” than official figures, which already run into the thousands.
With Iranian authorities maintaining an internet blackout for over two weeks, the actual number of casualties remains difficult to verify. Activists fear the internet shutdown is being used to conceal the full extent of the crackdown on anti-regime protests.
Uncategorized
Jewish K-12 Teachers in US Report Facing Rampant Antisemitism on the Job Amid Rising Incidents in Schools
A high school campus in Wyoming. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.
Jewish K-12 teachers in the US face widespread antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying in both public and non-Jewish private schools, according to preliminary results of a new survey conducted by the research arm of the StandWithUs advocacy group that were shared on Thursday.
The survey, to which the country’s leading scientific ethics committee conferred approval, found that 61.6 percent of the 584-person sample have been both targets and witnesses of antisemitic conduct in a professional setting. Meanwhile, nearly half suffered antisemitism perpetrated by their teachers unions, purportedly their advocates and representatives in collective bargaining.
School districts, obligated to comply with civil rights laws which proscribe discrimination, fail at prevention, according to the data. Of the 65 percent of respondents who said they are required to take anti-bias trainings, only 10 percent said those trainings address antisemitism.
“This first of its kind empirical study sought to understand antisemitism experienced by Jewish educators in K-12 education. Over 60 percent of respondents reporting that they personally experienced or witnessed antisemitism in their profession is an astounding number,” StandWithUs data and analytics director Dr. Alexandra Fishman said in a statement. “StandWithUs is deeply committed to rigorous research that serves both academic and lay audiences.”
She added, “While this study is being prepared for peer review, we are releasing some results now because Jewish educators cannot wait for academic publishing timelines to address the discrimination they face daily in our schools.”
Alyson Brauning, interim chair of the National Education Association’s Jewish Affairs Caucus, added, “These findings, while disturbing, do not come as a shock. They reveal a serious disconnect between stated commitments to equity and the lived realities of Jewish educators.”
K-12 antisemitism has been fostered by the importation of anti-Zionist ideologies into the classroom, multiple advocacy groups have said.
On Tuesday, StandWithUs, joined by the North American Values Institute (NAVI), wrote to New York City’s public schools chancellor about the local United Federation of Teachers (UFT) union’s promotion of an anti-Israel event organized by a group which calls itself “NYC Educators for Palestine.” It targeted “kids ages 6-18,” according to social media screenshots included in the groups’ letter, violating New York City prohibition on indoctrinating schoolchildren with views held by schoolteachers.
“NYCPS [New York City Public Schools] teachers’ speech can be considered government speech, as opposed to private speech, depending on the context. The teachers involved in advertising and speaking at the event are proactively sharing their status and training as NYCPS teachers to attract attendance,” the groups said. “Doing so risks misleading families as to whether the event is sponsored or supported by the DOE [Department of Education].”
The UFT has been criticized for violating political neutrality before. According to a report published in September by the Defense of Freedom Institute (DFI), the union has gone from fostering popular support for anti-Zionism among students to seeking cover from government by placing one or more of its fellow travelers in high office. To that end, the UFT endorsed the New York City mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani in July, calling the avowed socialist and Hamas sympathizer a potential “partner.”
Civil rights groups have argued that pushing anti-Zionism in the classroom can have a profound impact on students, who in many cases perpetrate antisemitic incidents. On Thursday, for example, local media reported that two 15-year-olds were arrested on suspicion of having graffitied 60 swastikas all over a playground in Brooklyn.
“Words are not enough. Condemning is not enough,” community activist Devorah Halberstam told local station WABC. “There has to be change. Immediate change.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.