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A Millennial rabbi built a synagogue where others have closed. Her maverick ideas are becoming a model.
SOUTH PHILADELPHIA — On a cold weeknight, a few dozen people packed into a synagogue that defies every conventional rule of American Jewish life.
It is Orthodox and led by a woman. Its sanctuary is divided not into two sections, but three: men, women, and a small area for nonbinary congregants. It has no mandatory dues. And instead of struggling to survive, it is expanding so quickly that it has already outgrown its building.
Founded in 2019, the South Philadelphia Shtiebel has become a closely watched experiment in American Judaism — an urban congregation built from scratch in a neighborhood where no new synagogue had taken root in decades, and where most religious institutions had long since retreated to the suburbs.
A century ago, the idea of an Orthodox synagogue thriving in South Philadelphia would not have seemed unusual at all. In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was home to an estimated 150,000 Jews — mostly immigrants — packed into row houses within walking distance of work, markets and extended family.
Jewish life revolved not around grand sanctuaries but around dozens of small, informal prayer spaces known in Yiddish as shtiebels. More than a hundred of them dotted South Philadelphia’s blocks, often tucked into storefronts or private homes, intimate rooms where daily life and religious life blurred together.
Most of those shtiebels disappeared long ago, casualties of suburban flight and institutional consolidation. The South Philadelphia Shtiebel takes its name from that vanished landscape not as a reenactment, but as a wager.
The timing could easily have sunk the project. The Shtiebel launched only months before the COVID-19 pandemic upended communal life. Yet even during lockdown, around 40 people were still showing up each Shabbat. When the small Vespa scooter shop where the congregation first gathered became untenable due to the pandemic, the community improvised — meeting in backyards, public spaces and parking lots. Today, the congregation leases a two-story industrial building.
On a typical Shabbat morning, the sanctuary fills with roughly 175 people — a mix of young families, retirees, longtime Orthodox congregants and people still learning the prayers. And as attendance has grown, the question facing the Shtiebel is no longer whether it works, but what happens next, and whether this kind of community can scale without losing what makes it feel human.
What has emerged here is not a nostalgia project, but a congregation aligned with the DIY attitude of how people now choose institutions: voluntarily, relationally, and on their own terms.
Its growth has not been accidental. It reflects a series of choices — about space, ritual, leadership and belonging — made deliberately by its founder.
Welcoming the LGBTQ+ community
Rabbanit Dasi Fruchter grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, the granddaughter of a rabbi who served pulpits across the country. She arrived in Philadelphia single and actively pursuing solo parenthood, but embraced the nonlinear turns of that journey, which led her to connect with and marry Daniel Krupka, a software engineer who had been serving as the congregation’s gabbai. Together they are raising a growing family.
She was ordained at Yeshivat Maharat, the Modern Orthodox seminary in the Bronx, and also holds a dual master’s degree from New York University in Jewish Studies and nonprofit management. She has been trained in community organizing, with an emphasis on relationships over programs.
She launched the Shtiebel with an acute awareness of how easily people fall through the cracks of Jewish life — not because they lack commitment, but because the systems around them are built for someone else.
“The approach here is that everybody is enough,” said Fruchter, 36. “We value the fact that you’re here and we’re not looking around at who’s not.”
Around 15% of the congregation identifies as LGBTQ+, Fruchter said. It’s a figure she offers not as a marker of ideology, but as a reflection of who has found their way into the room. That ethic is visible before a word is spoken. The sanctuary’s three sections all center around the bimah and are separated by a mechitza, or barrier, that still allows everyone to see, and hear, what is happening.
Fruchter is careful about how she describes the choice. It is not, she insists, an attempt to flatten difference or sidestep halacha, Jewish law, but an effort to acknowledge everyone. “We’re not trying to create a perfect solution,” she said. “We’re trying to create a place where people don’t have to disappear in order to pray.”
For Soren Simcha Barnett, a nonbinary congregant who uses they/them pronouns, that distinction mattered. When Barnett, 28, first arrived in early 2022, the idea of praying behind a mechitza was unfamiliar — and uncomfortable. “That would have been a red line for me,” they said. They had grown up in a Conservative synagogue and had never experienced gender-segregated prayer.
Still, they stayed.
What drew Barnett back was that they were taken seriously. They learned the melodies. On Shabbat mornings, they stand close enough to the action to help when the Torah is lifted off the bimah, hands ready, just in case. “I love being in the thick of it,” Barnett said. “We’re literally not in the margins.”
That sense of belonging, Barnett said, came with limits, though. About six months after they began attending regularly, Barnett asked Fruchter about expanding ritual roles for nonbinary congregants, such as leading services. Fruchter said no, a decision rooted in her reading of halacha.
“That hurt,” Barnett said. “I really wanted to be able to do everything I’m capable of.” But again, the disappointment did not send them away.
What mattered, they said, was not the answer but the process: that the question was taken seriously, and that the boundary was named rather than ignored. Barnett stayed. “I was willing to grapple with the complexity,” they said.
If Barnett’s story is about negotiation, Gary Saft’s is about commitment.
Saft, 35, a gabbai and the head of the Shteibel’s volunteer security team, is broad-shouldered, bearded, and impossible to miss. He grew up Reform and spent years assuming traditional Judaism had no place for him. “I didn’t see where I fit,” Saft said.
Saft began searching for a community after his father died in 2020, and he found it at the Shtiebel. Today, Saft prays daily, keeps kosher, walks to shul, and helps run services. “This shul is now a huge part of my life,” he said.
A sense of belonging
By all accounts, what holds the community together, more than anything else, is song.
For many congregants, music is the primary way in. Even those still learning Hebrew can participate fully, buoyed by a group that carries them along. Fruchter’s own voice is strong and steady, but it rarely stands alone. She sings with the room, not over it. Over time, congregants say, that has changed who feels comfortable raising their voice. Women sing loudly. So do people who might once have stayed quiet. Authority here is not projected; it circulates.
Lisa Levy, 66, a three-time cancer survivor, moved to Philadelphia after decades in New York City. She arrived newly retired and living alone. She describes herself as “conservadox” — committed to Orthodoxy, but wary of rigid lines.
What she did not encounter, she said, was pressure. “There are no dues,” Levy said. “You pay what you can afford. No questions.”
For Levy, that mattered. Many synagogues, she said, quietly assume a level of financial stability that leaves some people on the margins — especially older congregants or those navigating illness. At the Shtiebel, presence itself felt like the baseline contribution. “It’s more like a minyan than a shul,” said Levy, who lives three blocks away.
For Jamie Goldberg, 33, the Shtiebel became real when she started showing up pregnant.
Goldberg began attending in mid-2022, just before the birth of her first daughter. She and her husband, Stuart, had grown up in Reform and Conservative settings and spent years searching for something that felt both serious and accessible. “I learned the traditional prayers in my late 20s,” she said. “I didn’t grow up knowing how to follow along.”
Now she has two young daughters and serves on the Shtiebel’s advisory board. In the past year alone, she said, roughly two dozen babies have been born into the community. On Shabbat afternoons, families spill out to nearby playgrounds after naps, an informal ritual that has become its own gathering. Growth here is not abstract. It is measured in strollers.
That future comes with questions. There is no Jewish day school in South Philadelphia. Families will eventually have to drive children to the suburbs or help invent something new. After years of the Shtiebel’s children’s programming being volunteer-run, it’s now supported by a mix of people in paid positions and community members.
“It’s a place where people can grow,” she said.
Where the conversation never stops
During the week, the sense of belonging migrates online. The Shtiebel uses Slack, the messaging platform, as its connective tissue: organizing meal trains, coordinating who will read the Torah at services, sharing names of people who are ill and need prayers, checking in on each other, offering extra seats at Shabbat tables. There is no need for a printed directory or a hallway bulletin board.
Steve Schauder noticed that immediately.
Schauder, 61, the executive director of the Jewish Relief Agency, moved to South Philadelphia last spring after what he called a “trial Shabbat.” He had previously been a dues-paying member of synagogues across denominations. What struck him here was not just the warmth, but the infrastructure beneath it. “It never stops,” he said of the Slack messages. “I wander on every day, just to take a look.”
Schauder was also struck by what didn’t happen at the Shtiebel. The synagogue is intentionally apolitical. It’s careful about keeping partisan politics out of communal spaces. Congregants span the ideological spectrum, he said, and that diversity is treated as a given rather than a problem to solve. “You can walk in there whatever your background and politics are,” Schauder said.
On a Shabbat morning, a Donald Trump voter might be sitting next to a Zohran Mamdani supporter. What matters is not agreement, but a choice, Schauder said, to prioritize what he called “joyful Judaism” over the culture wars that have fractured so many other institutions.
The Shtiebel has taken shape amid the quiet collapse of many American institutions — houses of worship, unions, neighborhood associations — leaving fewer places where people are expected to encounter one another across differences.
In that sense, the congregation is not only a Jewish experiment but a civic one: an attempt to rebuild habits of shared life in a society that has grown increasingly siloed, polarized, and private. What happens inside the Shtiebel — negotiating disagreement, making room for difference, choosing presence over purity — mirrors a broader struggle over whether communities can still hold together without demanding sameness.
But Fruchter bristles at the idea that the Shteibel’s success can be reduced to a program, platform or politics. What she calls the synagogue’s “secret sauce” is not a tool so much as a discipline: “It’s being intentional about seeing and witnessing everybody with what they need,” she said.
Sometimes that attention registers in small ways. A congregant mentions liking Dr Pepper; it shows up at the kiddush they sponsor. Other times it demands structural work: rethinking seating for those with sensory needs, slowing down ritual explanations, or redesigning space so people who would otherwise drift away can stay. None of it is scalable in the abstract. All of it requires time, memory, and a willingness to keep revising.
“Folks who are stepping up and stepping in not only feel belonging,” Fruchter said, “but that they’re really being seen, cared for and nurtured.”
A model, and its limits
What Fruchter built has also reshaped the landscape beyond South Philadelphia. At a moment when many American synagogues are shrinking, consolidating, or aging in place, the Shtiebel has become an unlikely case study in what Jewish life looks like when it grows outward rather than inward.
But growth, Fruchter is quick to note, does not automatically produce stability.
Instead of mandatory dues, the Shtiebel operates on what she calls an NPR-style model, funded through voluntary monthly support. About 120 households currently donate each month, she said — including some supporters who don’t live in South Philadelphia but believe in the mission. Those recurring contributions cover about a quarter of the annual budget. The rest comes from a mix of larger individual gifts — typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range — and national grants supporting the Shtiebel’s work, including initiatives around Orthodox feminism and efforts to reimagine synagogue life.
The result is a congregation that looks robust from the outside, but still operates like a lean startup on the inside. In its early years, Fruchter lived in the synagogue to keep costs down. “I think what happens with that kind of growth is that the infrastructure struggles to keep up,” she said.
One constant challenge, she added, is perception. “Sometimes we’re seen as being very flush because of our success.” The reality, she said, is more fragile: building governance, raising money, and maintaining a physical space while attendance climbs — all at once. “That footing takes time,” she said.
That tension, between visibility and vulnerability, is part of what other Jewish leaders have been watching closely.
Rabbanit Leah Sarna, the spiritual leader of Kehillat Sha’arei Orah in the Philadelphia suburbs, credits the Shtiebel with shifting expectations.
“In Philly, Dasi really normalized the idea of a Modern Orthodox shul led by a woman,” Sarna said. When her own congregation went searching for a spiritual leader and hired her in 2024, she said, opening the role to women did not trigger the kind of upheaval it might have elsewhere. Fruchter even spoke at Sarna’s installation. “By then,” Sarna said, “people had spent a Shabbat at Dasi’s shul. It wasn’t theoretical anymore.”
Sarna said that because the Shtiebel has no membership dues, inclusion comes first, and fundraising never really stops. “That model means you’re constantly in a fundraising stance,” Sarna said.
In a neighborhood of young professionals who want to live urban lives, and not decamp to the suburbs, Fruchter’s approach has been especially powerful. The two congregations, Sarna said, have even developed what she called “purposeful handoffs,” directing people to the other as life circumstances change: city to suburbs, suburbs to city. Rather than competing, they function as part of a shared ecosystem.
Much of the Shtiebel’s cohesion still runs through Fruchter herself — a concentration of responsibility that has fueled its growth, and may yet test its limits. Asked whether the Shtiebel model could be replicated elsewhere, Sarna paused. The structure, she said, might travel. The person at the center of it might not. “You need someone who’s as talented and warm and magnetic as she is,” Sarna said. “That part is the least replicable.”
The greater Philadelphia area, where the Jewish population hovers around 350,000 people, may be uniquely suited to such experiments. “America was founded here,” Sarna said. “It’s the birthplace of ideas.”
The experiment has, perhaps, yet another advantage. Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University in Philadelphia and a thought leader in the Modern Orthodox movement, believes congregations like the Shtiebel should also be seen as competing with Conservative shuls for a slice of the membership who may be looking for something more traditional.
“These sorts of shuls are often born on the decay of mainstream Conservative shuls, which are not growing or are hemorrhaging,” Saiman said. “There’s a market for a community with liberal sensibilities but whose liturgy and Shabbat and kosher practices are more traditional.”
The challenge ahead
For Fruchter, those dynamics are less abstract than personal. Many of the people who find their way to the Shtiebel arrive with long Jewish histories — years in Conservative congregations, half-finished religious journeys, fluency in tradition paired with frustration at the structures around it.
They haven’t rejected Judaism so much as struggled to find a community that fit the way they were living. The work of the Shtiebel, she said, has been to meet those people where they are, and then ask what kind of community they are willing to build together.
“In a shul today,” she said, “we shouldn’t bolt chairs to the floor.”
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Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass?
Last Sunday, the news show “60 Minutes” hosted an outgoing president of one country and, quite possibly, the incoming president of another. While falsehoods and fatuities flowed from President Donald Trump, his interviewer, Ross Douthat frequently, if futilely, tried to push back. Yet when Marine Le Pen, running for the presidency of France, also fibbed or fudged the truth, her interviewer, Trevor Phillips, did little more than arch an eyebrow.
This split-screen experience was unsettling for a few reasons. First, it reminded us that our president’s famous “weave” reflects a mind that is declining as surely as his poll numbers. A glance at the interview transcript reflects the deepening incoherence of the man who occupies the world’s most powerful office. This made all the most startling the cogency of his reply to a question Douthat posed at the end of the interview: whether he could stop hating his enemies if that was the price to enter heaven. To a flabbergasted Douthat, Trump replied, “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
While no one can say whether Trump is destined for heaven or hell, Le Pen’s remarks in her interview suggest that she will make life hell for those men and women who fail to qualify, in her eyes, as French.
Yet, in his interview, Trevor Phillips, formerly of The (London) Times and a recent Bari Weiss recruit, failed to make this as clear as a Mike Wallace, a Dan Rather, or a Scott Pelley would have. Nattily dressed and well-spoken, Phillips presented a segment on the violence that has “erupted in Paris’ romantic boulevards” where “the scent of warm croissants and fresh baguettes has been overwhelmed by the whiff of tear gas.”
Overwhelmed by the weight of silly clichés, Phillips could not help but add “They used to call Paris la ville de l’amour — the City of Love. But there hasn’t been much amour on show lately.” While Phillips does not state who “they” are — given the hoariness of the clichés, perhaps they asked to remain anonymous — he should think twice about his assertion that there is not much love. Of course, the protestors are expressing their anger towards the government of President Emmanuel Macron, but they are also expressing their deep attachment, even love, to the republican tradition that has made Paris la ville de la révolution.
More important than his potted account of the social upheavals in Paris, however, was Phillips’ problematic interview with Le Pen. “In 2011,” he explained, “Le Pen took over leadership of what was then a fringe movement from her father, a tough army veteran convicted and fined for Holocaust denial and hate speech.” Yet nine years earlier, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of this “fringe party” then called the National Front, made it into the second round of the presidential election. Though Le Pen failed to make it into the second round in 2007, that more than 4 million French voted for him suggests that his party and person were hardly fringe. It is also odd that while Phillips noted Le Pen’s Holocaust denialism, he omitted Le Pen’s confession that he had tortured Algerian captives while serving in French Algeria.
No less stunning was Phillips’ description of Marine Le Pen’s decision to banish her father from the party in order “to rid it of its stain of bigotry.” If only it were mere bigotry. The National Front was founded, in part, by former members of the French division of the Waffen SS and sympathizers of the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy. While the daughter has largely succeeded in removing these elements from the party, which she rebranded as the National Rally, she has not removed the “stain” of antisemitism. Little more than a month ago, the French newspaper Mediapart revealed that Le Pen’s second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was trafficking in antisemitic bilge even after he joined the party as a teenager.
Time and again, Phillips posed questions but had not adequately prepared for Le Pen’s predictable replies. When he asked, in his opening question, “What is happening in Europe? Has politics here just become more radical?” Le Pen answered that “the extreme left creates chaos. They generate violence against people.” If Phillips had done his due diligence, he would have confronted Le Pen with the recent study by the historian Nicolas Lebourg revealing that while six murders in France since 1986 were “generated” by the extreme left, nearly sixty were “generated” by the extreme right. Phillips might also have mentioned last month’s mass killing and wounding of French Muslims in the town of Trappes by an individual who marinated in the literature of the extreme right.
Finally, when Le Pen made the jaw-dropping claim that “discrimination does not exist in France” and, moreover, is “the least racist country in the world,” Phillips did, in fact, raise an eyebrow while repeating her words. But it would have been more effective, perhaps, to raise the findings of various organizations, like the Defenseur des droits, which concluded in 2024 that the “perceived origin” of a job applicant weighs more than any other factor in hiring decisions in France.
As for his lack of follow-up questions to Le Pen’s assertion that France is the world’s least racist country, Phillips’ professional malfeasance was made fully manifest. In every presidential campaign, Le Pen has committed to establishing the law of national priority, which in effect would constitutionalize a racist agenda. Based on the extreme rightwing hobbyhorse of the “great replacement” — namely, that France’s white population is deliberately being replaced by third world immigrants — the law will limit employment opportunities, social and housing benefits to French citizens. Such a law not only runs counter to the laws of the European Union, but also to the humanist and universalist grounding of France’s constitution.
Phillips failed to contest this claim. Ironically, he closed the interview with Le Pen’s assurance that “French people have got to know me.” If only Phillips had done so, as well.
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Israel’s parliament sworn in as leaders scramble to form a government
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s 26th Knesset, or parliament, was sworn in on Tuesday, even as national elections two weeks ago produced no clear winner or indication of who will be Israel’s next prime minister.
On Sunday, President Isaac Herzog officially tasked former IDF chief and political novice Gadi Eisenkot with forming the government after a majority of newly elected lawmakers said they would prefer him as prime minister.
Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his parliamentary majority in the vote, even though his party, Likud, remained the largest of those entering the Knesset with 27 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Netanyahu has called on Eisenkot to join him in forming a national unity government, but in his ceremonial toast in the Knesset on Tuesday he ended up pushing Eisenkot’s change bloc even further away from the idea of a unity government under his leadership by casting suspicions on all of their potential partners in a future government.
Eisenkot and his bloc of four parties – his own Yashar Party, B’Yachad headed by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, and the Democrats led by Yair Golan – have campaigned on a promise to change the current government and the prime minister. Following Netanyahu’s speech, Eisenkot said in a statement that now he was even more certain that change was needed.
Eisenkot’s bloc garnered 48 seats in the election, and since then has drawn additional support from the two Arab parties, which together hold 19, and an expression of support from United Torah Judaism, an ultra-Orthodox party previously aligned with Netanyahu. The extra support gives him a shaky majority in the Knesset.
Eisenkot has reiterated that any party, including Likud, is welcome to join him as long as they embrace his four conditions: Recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, acceptance of the values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or civilian service for all, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Ilana Shpaizman, a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that even though a new government has not yet been formed, “the Knesset can act on everything.”
“The Knesset can do oversight, the same thing as it did before; it can also pass legislation… but only private legislation and not government legislation,” she said, adding that the current government under Netanyahu will continue to function until it is replaced, just without the majority it had previously.
Shpaizman added that even if Eisenkot does not succeed in forming a government, and the country goes to another election, the Knesset sworn in on Tuesday will have at least six months to legislate as it chooses.
“This is a lot of time to legislate, so this is very important, and especially things like the finance committee, which can control the budgetary transitions of the government,” she pointed out.
Opening the Knesset swearing-in ceremony, Herzog called on the new Knesset members to “do everything possible to avoid another round of elections.”
“The people who chose you long for routine, security and tranquility,” the president said, outlining many of the challenges that Israel has faced over the past three years.
“The people you represent here yearn to see an outstretched hand that will bring unity to the nation and hope,” Herzog said. “A people that carries within it pain, devotion, and sacrifice longs to see you translate those strengths into cooperation, into unifying dialogue, and into listening.”
He added: “I ask of you: be measured toward one another. Reach out a hand for compromise, even between rivals. Look upon one another with generosity. There is much work to be done here, and it requires the ability and experience found in every part of this House.”
Before the swearing-in ceremony, each of the 11 elected parties held its first faction meeting in the Knesset. Eisenkot took the opportunity to announce that his bloc had reached agreements on nominations for key Knesset positions.
Former minister and incoming MK Matan Kahana from Yashar is slated to be the next Knesset speaker, a powerful position that sets the Knesset plenum’s daily agenda. MK Roy Folkman, also from Yashar, will be nominated as chairman of the Arrangements Committee, which is responsible for organizing the Knesset’s work at the beginning of its term.
In addition, Liberman will take over as chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and MK Liran Avisar Ben-Horin from B’Yachad, will be nominated head of the Finance Committee, another powerful role.
As soon as the swearing-in ceremony concluded, Eisenkot’s party announced that it had submitted a series of bills that would reverse some of the more controversial laws passed by the previous government, including those relating to the judicial overhaul plan.
In addition, a bill was submitted calling for the establishment of a State Commission of Inquiry to investigate Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and how it was allowed to happen.
Of the 120 Knesset members sworn in on Tuesday, 46 are new to the parliament and roughly one in ten members has buried a loved one lost to terror or war, including Eisenkot whose son and two nephews were killed in combat.
According to statistics shared by Herzog in his speech, the most veteran Member of Knesset is Netanyahu, who has served in 15 Knessets since 1988, while MK Yonatan Shalev, a member of B’Yachad, is the youngest MK. At 24 years old, Shalev breaks a 66-year-old record.
In addition, the 5050 Initiative of the Centers for Social Justice, an Israeli non-profit, said in a statement that the new Knesset would set “an all-time record for the number of women serving in the Knesset: 33.”
“Today is a very good day for democracy because the new Knesset is being sworn in,” Shpaizman said. “It means that the election was fair and was peaceful.”
“I think the previous Knesset got to a point where the trust in it as an institution was the lowest ever, so it is a very good thing that new people are entering, new people who come in good faith from both sides who want to bring change and to make Israel better,” she added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Evan Gershkovich survived the terrors of prison in Putin’s Russia. Not every journalist was equally lucky.
This Cursed Beautiful Land
By Evan Gershkovich
Crown, 432 pages, $34
In Evan Gershkovich’s memoir This Cursed Beautiful Land, the Wall Street Journal reporter relives his ordeal to give readers a firsthand account of how Russia’s prisons and its repressive legal system operate under Putin’s wartime regime.
Gershkovich survived 491 days in the Russian prison system and was released as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. His story echoes the way in which Dostoevsky escaped death by firing squad at the last minute. Tsar Nicholas I had already commuted his death sentence to four years of hard labor in Siberia, followed by military service, but ordered the execution to be staged anyway, right up until the soldiers took aim (one of the men condemned along with Dostoevsky lost his mind as а result). In July 2024, after a closed trial, Gershkovich was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years, only to be freed less than two weeks later.
In February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine, Gershkovich was at a high point in his career. He had just joined The Wall Street Journal and, he writes, “was itching to get into the action.” Russia can be especially cruel to this kind of daring.
Gershkovich calls his work as a foreign correspondent a kind of “voyeurism” — and his time in captivity “the ultimate voyeurism” — and admits that he was addicted to the adrenaline. The notion that he was being tailed by Russia’s security service felt energizing. The more action happened around him, the more alive he felt.
In his memoir, he describes how the Russian authorities’ attitude toward reporters for foreign media outlets changed drastically. For years, he writes, the unspoken rule was that foreign reporters could cover topics Russian journalists couldn’t, and would be safe doing so. After Russia’s invasion, the government passed a whole raft of new laws against free speech; independent Russian journalists had three options: go underground and work anonymously (and many are still doing exactly that despite all the personal risks), leave the country, or go to prison.
An ‘undesirable’ journalist
For my part, I tried to stay in Russia for as long as I could. I worked anonymously as a reporter for the investigative outlet Proekt, the first Russian media outlet labeled an “undesirable organization” (this status means that anyone who takes part in its work can be prosecuted and face up to four years in prison). While all my colleagues had already been forced to leave the country, I stayed to report from the inside of Russia on the corruption inside Putin’s inner circle and among the elites that supported the bloodbath in Ukraine. I also reported on the human and economic cost of the war for other Russian banned media.
As a volunteer, I tried to help Ukrainian war refugees, collecting and driving donated clothes, medications, hygiene products and other essentials in the temporary shelters, where people were forced to live with no money and no way to rent housing or find proper work.
On Feb. 4, 2023, I found my name on a Moscow court’s website: An administrative case had been opened against me for “discrediting” the Russian army. The evidence, I learned later, was an interview I had given to TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV channel, which was banned by the authorities. I had gone on air to encourage more people to help refugees, and I talked about my anti-war tattoo, which I got as a reminder that “love and friendship are stronger than war” – those very words discredited the Russian army, according to the case files. A second such case led to a criminal charge that could have resulted in up to five years in prison. I knew I had done enough as a journalist to be charged under a whole range of other articles, including treason. By 5 a.m. the next day, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia. Less than two months later, Gershkovich was arrested.
‘How could I be so naive?’
Gershkovich writes that he believed he “had a responsibility to carry out since Russian citizens could no longer do the kind of reporting he could” and that the Russian authorities would more likely expel than arrest him: “The fact that I didn’t have a Russian passport gave me added confidence,” he says.
In early 2023, the WSJ reporter was working on several stories at once, including one on whether Russia’s war machine could sustain a long war, and another on Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin caterer-turned-warlord, whose Wagner Group had been recruiting prisoners into its ranks and posed a threat to the state’s monopoly on violence.
Gershkovich’s arrest in March 2023 officially marked the end of the period when foreign reporters could consider themselves immune. In wartime, they are seen as enemy spies and potential pawns in hostage diplomacy. As FSB (Putin’s trusted security service and the successor to the Soviet-era KGB) investigator Dmitry Sapunkov told Gershkovich, if they hadn’t gathered enough evidence to arrest him, they would have simply “poisoned” him: “In every country there are enemies that need to be put in prison or be eliminated,” an FSB investigator said.
That was no idle threat: Putin’s regime has a long history of poisoning its enemies. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was poisoned twice — the second time fatally, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle.
The FSB alleged that Gershkovich had been gathering classified information “on instructions from the CIA” about Uralvagonzavod, a major Russian defense plant that manufactures and repairs military equipment.
According to Gershkovich, union activist Pavel Sergienya had told him that he might be able to get information about the factory’s projects. They met at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the Urals, and Sergienya showed Gershkovich notes about the increase in tank production. Moments later, a group of men in balaclavas descended on Gershkovich, handcuffed him, pulled a black sack over his head and forced him into a van. He tried to explain that he was a journalist, but one of them cut him off: “What would your government think if our journalists were working on this kind of article in your country?” they asked.
At the closed trial, as Gershkovich describes it, Sergienya, the prosecution’s key witness, testified that he had begun cooperating with the security service before meeting Gershkovich. In September 2025, the independent Russian media Mediazona identified Sergienya, a Uralvagonzavod employee and representative of the trade union Solidarity, as an FSB provocateur: He was also a key figure in the “terrorism” case against Andrei Vogel, a 65-year-old opposition activist from Nizhny Tagil.
Gershkovich berated himself for trusting Sergienya. “How did I not see it? How could I be so naive?” he asked himself. “‘’You can’t tell the story if you’re dead,’ a colleague had once told me,” he writes, “and now I thought of a coda: You can’t tell the story if you’re in prison either.”
Fortunately, he managed to tell it.
‘A valuable commodity’
Gershkovich is the son of Jewish immigrants who left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. His great-grandfather vanished after he was arrested in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror.
Among Russian journalists there is a shared understanding: In prison, you are of no use as a journalist; you become a burden and source of constant pain for your loved ones. Gershkovich shares similar thoughts from Lefortovo prison, where he is consumed with doubts about whether he’ll ever be swapped. He realizes that he might never again see his mother, who managed to provide him with kosher food (ahead of the start of Passover) even though he was “in a prison cell in the country she had chosen to leave.” “In that moment, I felt like I had done something unspeakably cruel,” he writes.
Gershkovich quotes Vasily Grossman on how an oppressive regime can dwarf a person: “Only people who never felt such force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it.” The WSJ reporter couldn’t be absolutely certain an exchange would ever happen or how many years he might have to spend in the prison cell; he was aware of the fate of Paul Whelan, a former US marine, convicted of espionage (charges he denied) and waiting for a swap since 2018.
In his small cell, the reporter is caught in the grip of a thousand-eyed Leviathan that keeps peering in at him: “With time, I would learn to recognize the eyes of each guard checking in on me, six times an hour, more than a hundred times a day.” Yet Gershkovich manages to reveal the human faces behind the function they play in the repressive system; he even makes conversation with his FSB investigator about the corruption of the Russian political system.
To protect the identities of his cellmates, he merges them into a composite character he calls “Seryoga,” who was accused of running an illegal weapons shop and had admitted his guilt. “On the outside, we would never have been friends,” Gershkovich writes. “But here, in these circumstances, we got along and he made me laugh.”
Seryoga, who considers himself an alpha male, tries to educate Gershkovich about the proper way to enter a cell (or khata in Russian prison jargon, which is also the Ukrainian word for a house): Never step over the threshold without wiping your feet on the rag by the door (hygiene is essential; as Seryoga put it, “we shit where we eat”), and be ready for the first questions: “What’s the trouble?” or “Is everything even in your life?” Both phrases mean “What are you in for?” That is, which article of the Russian Criminal Code were you charged under? The “uneven” articles, the so-called 130s, cover sex crimes such as rape and child sexual abuse. They automatically put a prisoner at the very bottom rung of the prison: Most likely, he will eat last and be subjected to sexual violence.
Seryoga also teaches his American cellmate the saying at the heart of the prison brotherhood in Russia: “From the soul, soulfully, into the soul. Hugged you, picked you up, and put you back down.” Gershkovich already knew the phrase “from the soul” when he was on the outside. It is shorthand for “thanks” — a vivid example of how prison slang has seeped into the Russian language and culture.
Gershkovich understood that in state custody he was seen as a “valuable commodity,” and that he hadn’t faced any real FSB interrogations: no beatings, no electrocutions, no waterboarding, no stringing up, no harassment. “They want to present a humane face to the world. They took a journalist who they know will write about the experience, so in the meantime they will treat him well,” he remembers thinking.
Gershkovich was kept safe because he was seen as leverage to secure the release of Vadim Krasikov, an FSB assassin, convicted for life in Germany of shooting dead an exiled Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park in August 2019. In the last part of the memoir, Gershkovich that he felt “guilty” that because of him Krasikov was now free, and Putin was able to show the security services that if they committed to executing dangerous operations for him, he would have heir back.
Not every journalist swallowed up by Russia’s repressive machine is as lucky as Gershkovich. Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was tortured to death in Russian custody. When her body was returned to Ukraine, her eyeballs, brain and part of her larynx were missing.
Another brick in the wall
Gershkovich calls Russia both “cursed and beautiful” and the country undoubtedly means a great deal to him. It’s where he found love (his girlfriend, Maria, is a well-known Russian journalist), made close friends, and did some very good reporting.
A Russian journalist would never tell an FSB interrogator that “people will rally in their support,” as Gershkovich did, but fortunately, he turned out to be absolutely right.
His defense lawyers, Tanya, Maria and Andrei, went through every procedural step, even though they knew a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion. “What’s the point?” Gershkovich once asked them.
“One day all of this will come crumbling down,” Andrei told him. “Right now, we’re trying to preserve some semblance of a foundation from which to rebuild.” The stubborn work of the lawyers was a powerful form of a protest — perhaps the only one possible, without being locked away, in a dictatorship.
Maybe Gershkovich’s book will be one of the bricks in that rebuilding, too.
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