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Unetaneh Tokef, the High Holidays’ roll call of ruin, is heartbreakingly real for the Ukrainian Jews I’ve gotten to know

(JTA) — A catalog of calamities is central to the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holidays that begin later this week.

We Jews are asked to imagine ourselves perched on the precipice of life and death. Nothing frames it as starkly as Unetaneh Tokef, the roll call of ruin enumerating various disasters that might befall us in the coming year.

With its repetition of “Who by …” fill-in-the-blank awfulness — strangling, stoning, famine and plague — the medieval poem is the stuff of myth and legend, an opportunity to ponder fate and frailty. But for the Jews of Ukraine, the majority of whom remain in the country despite the ongoing conflict, the text is heart-wrenchingly real.

When we Jews pray, we face east, toward Jerusalem. But as the grandson of a Ukrainian Jew, east always conjures “the old country” — that’s where my soul calls home and where I’ve often directed my most fervent prayers. This year, Unetaneh Tokef is a compass for my heart.

I’m sure “who by water” resonates for Lyubov Irzhanskaya. When the Kakhovka dam burst in June, the Dnipro River surged into her second-floor apartment. The 76-year-old retired teacher had hours to decide where to flee.

Damaged buildings stand at the site of a missile strike in Odesa, Ukraine, July 27, 2023. (Peter Druk/Xinhua via Getty Images)

“Who by fire” must send a chill through Lyudmila Dobroyer, 87 — a Holocaust survivor and the primary caregiver for her son Yuriy, who has developmental disabilities. During attacks on Odesa this summer, her building was badly damaged.

And then there are more workaday terrors, fears that keep me up at night half a world away in my safe Ohio bed. What if I lost my job and couldn’t provide for my family? What if it happened amidst power cuts and sub-zero cold?

“Who shall become impoverished” — ask Evgeniy Moshkovitch, 40, a forklift operator who fled Kherson with his family two months into the crisis. With employers skeptical of the displaced, he’s unable to find a job and relies on Jewish community assistance to pay the bills.

Grim as it is, Unetaneh Tokef isn’t about blindly submitting to fate. Instead, it gives us the keys to our own salvation — ”repentance, prayer, and charity,” it exhorts, “can lessen the severity of the decree.”

Our own hands can rescue us, and post-Soviet Jews, who’ve doggedly rekindled identity and community after the Holocaust and communism, could teach a master class. As a longtime staffer at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, the humanitarian organization that for decades has aided needy Jews and built Jewish life across the former Soviet Union, I’ve seen it firsthand.

In Ukraine, I’ve witnessed local Jews volunteering for relief efforts in record numbers and my colleagues delivering over 800 tons of humanitarian aid, home care to the bedridden and Shabbat gatherings during air-raid sirens. We’re also addressing new waves of need: unemployment, educational gaps and trauma — all with an imperative to strengthen lives, even if peace remains elusive.

Hidden in Unetaneh Tokef’s horrors are some best-case scenarios, too: “who shall be exalted,” “who shall reach the fullness of their days.” What if it all goes right, the prayer asks? What if we sustain each other? What if we write our most vulnerable into the High Holidays’ symbolic Book of Life?

Liliya Sumka is the only Jew in her small town in Western Ukraine. (Arik Shraga)

We can do that by marshaling our resources, as my organization has done since February 2022 with tens of millions of dollars from our partners — the Jewish Federations of North America, the Claims Conference, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, individuals, families, corporations and foundations — and by lifting up individual stories so we understand the stakes if we fail to act.

For centuries, Jews have debated the identity of the nameless Unetaneh Tokef writer who gave voice to the cruel uncertainty of human existence and the possibility of redemption even in the darkness.

That anonymity hasn’t blunted the poem’s cold wisdom — life will often disappoint you, but it just might surprise you, too. I’ve learned that by listening to other Jews who could just as easily be lost to history and have just as much to teach.

In western Ukraine earlier this year, I met Liliya Sumka, the last Jew in a small village only accessible by dirt roads. A 54-year-old widow with cerebral palsy, she ekes by on a $52 monthly disability pension.

For her, the difference between “who shall live and who shall die” is sometimes the stack of firewood and food packages delivered by my organization — or finding God in her own still small voice reciting the Shabbat blessings.

“Life?” Liliya chided me with a wry smile. “You can’t make it through that alone.”

May we all remember that, recognizing that we only get to fullness by giving it — showing up with full hearts and a full commitment to aiding those living on a knife’s edge around the clock, not just in the pages of our prayer books.


The post Unetaneh Tokef, the High Holidays’ roll call of ruin, is heartbreakingly real for the Ukrainian Jews I’ve gotten to know appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency

The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.

They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.

Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.

State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.

Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.

Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.

Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.

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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation

Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family

i24 NewsThe body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.

Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.

“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.

“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.

“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”

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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack

A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24

i24 NewsThe stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.

Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.

The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.

“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”

“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”

Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.

After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.

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