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Among Ukraine’s Jews, a year of war has transformed the ordinary into the sacred
TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine (JTA) — Nearly 600 Jews stand shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes trained on the young man leading the service to close out Shabbat. The crowd sings a soulful havdalah tune that lifts up its final words: “hamavdil ben kodesh l’chol” — ”the One who divides between sacred and ordinary.”
It looks like a Shabbat gathering anywhere else in the world, but I’m in the western Ukrainian city of Truskavets, where — from every part of their conflict-scarred country — these Jewish community volunteers have come together for a four-day retreat, energized by the chance to learn from each other and take a deep breath.
I’m back in Ukraine for the first time since the crisis began to learn from these men and women making miracles happen. I came to document and share stories from this gathering. Remarkably, it’s the largest-ever in the former Soviet Union arranged by my organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, which has worked to aid needy Jews and build Jewish life in the region for decades.
With its wine and sweet-smelling spices, havdalah eases the transition from the holy purity of Shabbat to the workaday mundanity of the week. Surrounded by hundreds of Ukrainian Jews, I felt uplifted, as I always do when I travel to this region and see its defiant, vibrant Jewish life.
The usual rules don’t apply. Here, the ordinary becomes sacred.
On this, my 14th trip to the former Soviet Union in 10 years, I’ve come to know it as a place where that switch is truly flipped. Rebuking a painful history, from the Holocaust to Soviet oppression, everyday actions become lifesaving and essential. That’s never been more true than this past year, as Jewish communities here worked overtime to meet the enormous humanitarian needs of this crisis.
Simple flashlights become beacons enabling home care workers to reach the bedridden elderly Jews they serve. Bus trips between cities are transformed into escape hatches for those fleeing rocket attacks. A box of nonperishables is manna from heaven for those faced with empty grocery shelves, and each call from a volunteer is a life raft for the loneliest seniors and most vulnerable at-risk families.
Over the last year, more than 3,000 volunteers engaged in projects affecting 36,000 people. This work is part of our expansive response to this crisis — supported by the Jewish Federations of North America, the Claims Conference, International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, individuals, families, corporations and foundations. It includes providing uninterrupted assistance to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and the delivery of 800 tons of humanitarian aid. Among those we help are the elderly and families, internally displaced people, and the new poor who have lost their livelihoods in the devastation.
A song leader leads participants in havdalah at JDC’s volunteer Shabbaton in Truskavets, Ukraine, February 2023. (Arik Shraga)
Not blind to the challenges they face, Jews and Jewish communities here are resilient and resolute in the knowledge that there’s something more important at play. It’s a clarity of purpose that means, against all odds, they’ve grown even stronger.
“My fears were boiling me alive,” said Tatiana Chumachenko, a 34-year-old Odessa mother of two. She started volunteering this summer and now runs weekly cooking classes and art therapy sessions for elderly Jews. “So I made the decision to widen my world — to take on more responsibility, to take care of more people. And volunteering literally saved me.”
Thousands of Ukraine’s Jews just like Tatiana have chosen determination, not despair. They’ve driven through besieged cities delivering medicine and firewood, power generators and portable heaters. They know their Jewish values demand action and compassion, and so they’ve stepped up.
Daria Yefimenko, the head of our network of 25 volunteer centers across Ukraine, is that resolute determination personified. The air raid siren went off the other day as I was interviewing her — a shocking noise, made more frightening by its maddening vagueness: What’s happening? Where? Am I in danger, or is this just background noise?
I learned later that just a few hours before I arrived in Ukraine, a missile had struck Drohobych, only 10 kilometers from the Shabbaton.
Yefimenko seemed unshaken. She and her team — her “family of superhero volunteers” — live here, of course. They must cope with brutal shelling and unpredictable electricity cuts. They have daily fears for their loved ones, and rising anxiety about what the future holds. They help their neighbors even as they share their pain and struggles.
And they keep on going.
Alex Weisler joins the massive group havdalah at JDC’s volunteer Shabbaton in Truskavets, Ukraine, Feb. 18, 2023. (Arik Shraga)
There are so many stories in this part of the world — World War II stories, Soviet stories, stories of rebuilding and reimagining Jewish life after the Soviet Union fell. I’m curious about the one we’ll tell when this is all over.
Will we remember how Jews supported each other in the darkest days? We should.
Before the massive Shabbaton havdalah, I led a smaller version at the hotel down the road where we have housed hundreds of internally displaced people since the earliest days of the Ukraine crisis.
Six elderly Jews from the Zaporizhzhia region joined me for their first havdalah ever. Among the group was 76-year-old Alla Hodak, who fled from a place with significant devastation.
Alex Weisler leads a group of internally displaced Ukrainian Jewish community members in their first-ever havdalah ceremony, Feb. 18, 2023. (Arik Shraga)
Here, observing Jewish rituals in a third-floor alcove, she had begun to form a makeshift community—not quite home, but not alone either. “You made sure we were never abandoned to fate,” she told me.
In that moment of stark intimacy, our small group blessed the wine, smelled the cinnamon, and felt the warmth of the braided candle. It bound us together and reminded us that drawing a distinction between then and now can be holy, too.
As we take stock of a year of grief and grit, we must guarantee that the next one is a kinder one. We must recognize our own hands as sacred tools and each member of our global Jewish family as holier still.
There’s nothing ordinary about that. Each person and each day has become an opportunity to do good for those who need us most and build their future together. That’s the only way forward.
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British Jews could be offered asylum in the US, Trump’s UK-born Jewish lawyer says
(JTA) — The Trump administration might be considering granting asylum to British Jews, according to Trump’s personal lawyer, who said “the UK is no longer a safe place for Jews.”
Robert Garson, a Jewish attorney from Manchester, England, with rising influence in the Trump administration, said he proposed the move to the State Department in an interview with The Telegraph.
Garson said his proposal was well received despite the Trump administration’s general anti-immigration stance.
“I thought: Jews are being persecuted in the United Kingdom,” Garson said. “They fit a wonderful demographic for the United States. They are, on the whole, educated. They speak English natively. They’ve got businesses. They’re exactly the sort of immigrant the United States should want to attract. So, why not?”
Garson said his views on the future of Jews in Britain hardened after the terror attack on a synagogue in his hometown last year. Two people were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation on Yom Kippur after a man rammed his car into a crowd of people and stabbed others.
In October, the White House announced that it would restrict the number of refugees admitted to the United States to 7,500 in 2026, mostly reserving those spots for white South Africans. The number represents a steep drop from former President Joe Biden’s ceiling of 125,000 in 2024.
The administration’s privileging of white South Africans has been widely criticized in South Africa, including by Jews. The country’s chief rabbi Warren Goldstein, otherwise a vocal Trump supporter, called the move a “mistake.”
Garson was hired by Trump in 2022 to sue investigative journalist Bob Woodward for $50 million over Woodward’s publication of Trump interviews in an audiobook. (The lawsuit was dismissed in July.) Donald Trump Jr. has also hired Garson as a lawyer for his publishing house, Winning Team Publishing, which has published the president, Charlie Kirk and other prominent conservatives.
Garson’s rise continued with an appointment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in May. He was among several Trump allies that the president named to replace members appointed by Biden, including Doug Emhoff, the Jewish husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time, “President Trump looks forward to appointing new individuals who will not only continue to honor the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, but who are also steadfast supporters of the State of Israel.”
Garson moved to New York in 2008 and now lives in Florida, where he is the head of armed security at his synagogue. After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Garson became a National Rifle Association-licensed instructor and has offered to train any Jews who are interested.
He believes that “if there had been 6 million guns in 6 million Jewish hands, there would have been 6 million fewer deaths” in the Holocaust, he told The Telegraph.
Garson laid much of the blame for dangers to British Jews at the foot of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying that he “allowed rampant antisemitism to become commonplace in society and has allowed it to come from those who really don’t have Britain’s best interests at heart.”
Garson has expressed particular concern about the influence of Muslim immigrants in England, charging that non-Jewish Brits would also soon face “sharia-compliant areas.” He said, “They are coming for the Jews and then they are coming for your pubs.”
Some British Jewish groups have rejected the idea that British Jews would seek to leave for the United States. The Community Security Trust, an antisemitism watchdog, told Haaretz that “Jews were murdered by hateful terrorists in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom” last year, so there was no refuge to be found there.
David Aaronovitch, a British journalist and broadcaster, also rebuked Garson’s proposal in a Jewish News op-ed addressed to Trump.
“British Jews wouldn’t be safer in the US, simply because no one is,” said Aaronovitch. “The homicide rate in your country is six times what it is here; in fact, in Mr Garson’s new domicile, Miami-Dade County, it’s over 20 times the rate here in London.”
He also noted the debate in Trump’s own party over its inclusion of avowed antisemites such as Nick Fuentes.
“It hasn’t escaped the notice of many British Jews that some of the most vocal and influential new media supporters of your administration have either given themselves over to overt, old-style antisemitism or have shown themselves happy to tolerate others who have,” said Aaronovitch.
Ofir Sofer, Israel’s minister of aliyah and integration, also responded dismissively to the idea that British Jews should leave for the United States. “The home of British Jewry, and of Jews around the world, is the State of Israel,” he said.
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How ‘a bundle of letters’ became a cornerstone of life advice for American Jews
January 20, 2026 marks the 120th anniversary of A Bintel Brief, the Forward’s advice column, launched in 1906 by the paper’s founder and publisher, Ab Cahan. Tackling the personal challenges of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Cahan and the Bintel Brief columnists who followed him would dispatch their advice with humor, compassion, and honesty.
By 1906, Der Forverts, as the Forward is known in Yiddish, had grown over its initial three decades to become the leading Yiddish-language newspaper in the United States. But A Bintel Brief — Yiddish for “a bundle of letters” — was something the paper hadn’t tried before. Well, not exactly.
In his introduction to the very first Bintel Brief, which is preserved online at the National Library of Israel, Cahan explained that the new column had been inspired by a section of the paper devoted to letters to the editor that launched three years earlier.
A Bintel Brief, however, would be an advice column, focusing on letters “that expressed issues of … human interest,” Cahan explained. He continued, “Readers will find in the Bintel Brief letters an interesting turning of pages from the Book of Life … Hundreds of diverse emotions, interests and lost opportunities will be expressed here. Hundreds of various vibrations of the human heart will be heard here.”
History would prove him right. Over the next 120 years, A Bintel Brief would explore the “various vibrations of the human heart” with homespun Jewish advice, tens of thousands of times over, and along with its contemporary advice columnists like Dorothy Dix inspire countless advice columns across U.S. newspapers, including “Dear Abby” and Ann Landers (née Esther Friedman).
In his autobiography Pages from My Life, which Cahan published 100 years ago in 1926, he recalled, “I had always wished that the Forverts would receive stories from ‘daily life’ — dramas, comedies or truly curious events that weren’t written at a desk but rather in the tenements and factories and cafés — everywhere that life was the author of the drama … How to do this? Not an easy task — much harder than writing an interesting drama or comedy.”
“One day in January 1906,” he continued, “[my secretary, Leon] Gottlieb told me about three letters that had arrived which didn’t seem suited for any particular department … All three letters were of a personal nature rather than a communal one, and each told an individual story. I considered the three letters and my response was: Let’s print them together and call it A Bintel Brief.”
There’s also the apocryphal version of the story, illustrated by cartoonist Liana Finck while working on a series of cartoons inspired by A Bintel Brief that eventually became a book in 2014. “Rumor has it, the letter on the top of the pile Abraham Cahan’s secretary brought him that strange day in 1906 was two feet long and sewn together with scraps of industrial thread. The spelling was atrocious, but the tears that spewed out of the letter were real — Cahan tasted them to make sure.”
While perhaps nothing more than a mayse, the story rightly captures the willingness of Forverts readers to share their individual problems with A Bintel Brief and seek advice.
And some of them still resonate today.
For example, in the first edition of the column, a bride-to-be reached out because of a debate that erupted with her fiancé after she suggested that mothers are more faithful to their children than fathers because they are the ones saddled with the responsibility of childcare, to which the fiancé angrily replied that women make too big of a deal of their role as caregivers, and that fathers are more dependable. Cahan replied that “smart, serious minded parents raise children that are both truly loyal and have both feet on the ground” like the mother and father. To this, he added, “It’s best for your future children that you read all you can, attend as many lectures as possible, and develop together and grow intellectually. That will create a pair of parents who best know how to raise their children and will be of service in their devotion and love.”
It also did not take long for questions regarding interfaith relationships to emerge in the column. One letter that same year featured a newlywed Jewish man describing the fraying relationship with his Christian wife over the first year of marriage. “Mixed marriage between a Gentile and a Jew is a complicated affair,” Bintel acknowledged, before putting a spin on the then-common story of Jewish parents sitting shiva for their son marrying a Gentile woman: “Not enough has been said about the Gentile family. For while the parents of the Gentile girl may accept the Jewish son-in-law and tolerate the marriage, the girl loses many of her friends, former classmates and relatives.”
Writing for the Forward in 2014 about Finck’s book, Yevegeniya Traps noted that letters like these offered “a succinctly potent representation of the lives of Eastern-European immigrants trying to make their way in early-20th-century New York.” She added, “No artist or journalist could render the doubt, uncertainty and backbreaking work of life in the New World as clearly and honestly as the words of sufferers seeking wisdom” from A Bintel Brief.
Or as Cahan concluded in his autobiography, “Everyone wrote about that which was closest to their hearts. The result was that the Bintel Brief would be assembled out of those letters that revealed the most interesting nooks of people’s souls.”
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How Trump’s first year back in office destabilized our country — and our Jewish community
One year into President Donald Trump’s second term, the American Jewish community is reeling — just like the rest of the country.
For generations now, presidents have at least paid lip service to steadying the ship of state. Trump has taken an axe to the mast.
And as he has destabilized the United States since being sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2025, he has destabilized American Jews.
To mark the end of Trump’s first year back in office, I looked at how a series of his policies and pronouncements have exaggerated already-deep divides in the Jewish community — and bewildered his supporters and detractors alike.
Rooting out antisemitism, or nurturing it?
Trump’s approach to addressing antisemitism has shuttled between a slap and embrace, deeply unbalancing American Jews.
He correctly called out intimidation tactics on college campuses, especially during the anti-Gaza War protests, that violated the civil rights of Jewish students — preventing them from accessing parts of campus or speaking out freely as other students.
But the measures he took against those universities, which included cutting off funding for unrelated research, deporting foreign students for exercising their First Amendment rights, and undermining laudable efforts at diversity, alienated Jews with legitimate concerns about campus antisemitism.
A May 2025 poll from GBAO Strategies reflected the disconnect.
Some 65% of younger Jews expressed concern over antisemitism on college campuses, and 71% said deporting campus protesters made that antisemitism worse.
Any relief Jews felt that Trump was addressing a long-festering problem quickly morphed into the concern that he was using it to carry out an ideological score-settling that had nothing to do with Jews, and that could ultimately backfire on them.
Meanwhile, there’s Tucker Carlson. The ideological Svengali of the GOP, Carlson has used his popular podcast to give a platform to neo-Nazis, push ever more intricate antisemitic conspiracy theories, and suggest that Jews were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
And more recently, he’s provided a serious hint that Trump’s focus on antisemitism isn’t particularly earnest.
“I think we don’t need them,” Trump recently told the New York Times about antisemitic elements in the GOP. “I think we don’t like them.” He thinks, because, well, sometimes he apparently does need them: Carlson lunched twice at the White House this week.
For Trump, antisemitism appears not to be an absolute evil, but yet another issue to use to his political advantage. And as he’s gambled with our community, he’s brought more strife to it. Now, we battle one another over the question of whether Trump has been just what we needed — or the very worst thing that could have happened to us.
Triumph in Gaza, despair in Iran
In October, Trump forged a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza that pleased liberal Jews even as it upset many on the Jewish right with its tacit endorsement of an eventual two-state solution. He cashed in the goodwill he had banked with Israel, and, through incessant horsetrading with the Gulf States, leveraged a diplomatic breakthrough.
“He did something so many of us yearned for in the last two years, and he made it happen, and Biden didn’t make it happen,” Abraham Foxman, former CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told JTA at the time.
Yet Trump started the year making promises to assert U.S. control in Gaza and turn it into a land of luxe resorts, to the horror of many liberal Jews. What can we make of the fact that he then turned around and accomplished a diplomatic feat that so many of us yearned for?
Even this week I find myself rooting for Trump — not something I normally do — to push through his idea of an international Board of Peace to oversee Gaza reconstruction, over the opposition of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yet at the same time Trump has worked for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, his Iran strategy now verges on incoherent, if not cruel. He joined with Israel in attacking and degrading Iranian missile and nuclear ability, and bragged that doing so stripped decades of progress from Tehran’s nuclear program, though evidence suggests the operation brought much more moderate success.
He then threatened to attack again, to stop Iran’s bloody crackdown on protesters who have swarmed the streets this month. That issue is particularly close to the hearts of many American Jews, both because of the Iranian regime’s vehement antagonism toward Israel, and because so many Jews here have roots in Iran and have personal or familial experiences of the regime’s brutality. Then he backed down, convinced, reports say, of Iran’s promise not to execute its political opponents.
“It is unconscionable to say ‘Help is on the way’ and then do nothing,” Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Iran envoy in the first Trump administration, told Jewish Insider. “I hope the president will change his mind.”
Yes, intervention is a tricky business. But to those American Jews who would see Trump take decisive action to change the status quo in the Middle East, his choice to step aside from this fight seems baffling. And for all of us, it raises questions: Does he actually have a long-term vision for the region, and if so, is he able to commit to a path to deliver it?
The Minneapolis worry
The May GBAO survey found that 74% of American Jews disapproved of the job Trump was doing in office. That was five months into office, before the Gaza deal, but also before — the rest.
Signals differ about where, exactly, Trump stands in American Jewish public opinion. But there are some leading indicators, and they all center around Minneapolis.
The killing this month of Renée Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent there; Trump’s knee-jerk defense of the shooting; and his decision to flood the city with more ICE agents prompted a rare attack ad from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which does not normally weigh in on issues unconnected to, well, Israel.
The ad criticized former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who is running in a Feb. 5 primary for the House seat vacated by New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, for voting in favor of more ICE funding in a bipartisan 2019 border bill.
“We can’t trust Tom Malinowski” to stand up to Trump over ICE, said the ad.
Even if it was a cynical use of an issue to undermine a candidate AIPAC may oppose for other reasons — Malinowski is a former director of the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, which accused Israel of apartheid — AIPAC correctly understands how American Jews feel about Trump’s use of ICE: worried sick.
The abuse of state power, the breach in civil liberties, and the atmosphere of intimidation echoes some of the darkest times in Jewish history.
Nothing in Trump’s response to the situation — or his past efforts to engage with civil protest — suggests he will work to calm the situation, back down, or change the approach to international and domestic affairs that has unsettled Americans and American Jews.
And that suggests the most disorienting fact of all, for Jews as for all other Americans: There’s still three years left.
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