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Dramatic stories of survival, endurance and escape reign as Ukrainian Jews mark 1 year of war
(JTA) — Most of the passengers on the flight from Chisinua, Moldova, to Tel Aviv earlier this month were subdued.
Some had just witnessed scene after scene of hardship on a tour of war-torn Ukraine organized by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. Others, about 90 in all, were Ukrainians in the process of moving permanently to Israel, talking in hushed tones about being on a plane for the first time, their uncertain future and the loved ones they left behind.
Alexei Shkurat was not subdued.
Bespectacled and bearded, he was standing in his seat, making wisecracks that caused the elderly woman in the seat next to him to guffaw despite herself.
“I like joking and communicating. It’s my life, why waste it being nervous?” Shkurat told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in English.
“And anyway, I’m happy, happy, happy I will soon see my sons again,” he added.
Switching to Russian, Shkurat’s brow furrowed and his voice lowered when he recounted how, on Feb. 28, 2022, he had risked his life to transport his sons, 14 and 12, to the border with Poland with their mother and grandmother. From there they would move to Israel.
Shkurat could not go with them. The borders were closed for military-aged men, so Shkurat was forced to drive back to his hometown of Odessa. What happened next, as he recounts it, was harrowing: As he passed an empty field near Lviv, he encountered two Ukrainian soldiers, their AK-74 rifles trained on him. Shkurat raised his hands and was told to step out of his vehicle. He knew that if he made one false move, he would be shot.
The soldiers searched the car and interrogated him, asking him why he was traveling alone after curfew and even asking if he was a Russian spy. Shkurat later learned that 40 Russian paratroopers had recently landed in the area and had stolen ambulances and police cars. He answered the soldiers in Russian, which only raised their suspicions. Ukrainian is the dominant language in western Ukraine, but as a Jew from Odessa, Shkurat’s native tongue is Russian.
“I was terrified. I know that they were only doing their job, but the situation was so scary. Everything I ever knew in life had changed,” he said.
Catch up on all of JTA’s coverage of the Ukraine War here.
By a considerable stroke of luck, Shkurat, a street artist, was able to prove his identity by showing the soldiers his Instagram page, filled with posts of his art in locations all over Odessa.
But according to Shkurat, the story was far from over. The next chapter of his life was far more hair-raising, he said. Pressed on the details, Shkurat grinned and switched back to English.
“I can’t tell you a thing,” he said. “I want to sell the story to Netflix.”
Whatever cinematic experience Shkurat might have had, his fellow passengers surely had made-for-the-movies stories of their own. They had made it through nearly a year of war before deciding to move to Israel, making them the latest of 5,000 new immigrants from Ukraine facilitated by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, working in collaboration with Israeli government entities such as Nativ and the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration. Approximately 15,000 Ukrainians in total have immigrated, or made aliyah, in the last year.
Ukrainian Jewish refugees who fled the war in their country wait on a bus upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, on an airlift of medically needy passengers made possible by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, Dec. 22, 2022. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the group’s vice president, Gidi Schmerling, if there is any upside to the war from Israel’s perspective, it’s that many middle-class Ukrainians — doctors, engineers and high-tech employees — who wouldn’t have otherwise made aliyah are now choosing to do so.
But IFCJ’s mandate also includes the Jews who stayed behind. Since Russian tanks first rumbled across the border a year ago, the group has raised more than $30 million dollars — primarily from evangelical Christians from North America and Korea — for the main Jewish organizations in Ukraine including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, and Chabad. (Both groups do extensive fundraising of their own.) This week, the anniversary of Russia’s invasion, it announced another $4 million in planned spending.
In Odessa, more than 7,000 people currently receive aid from IFJC via local Jewish groups. The Jewish community, once 50,000 strong, now stands at 20,000, according to the city’s chief rabbi, Avraham Wolff. Seven thousand food packages are distributed every month in Chabad centers. Many of the beneficiaries are older — among them some 187 Holocaust survivors — but not all. Several hundred are people who were displaced from surrounding cities, such as Mykolaiv, which was hit much harder by Russian shells, and some are the so-called new poor, those for whom the war has plunged into poverty from loss of income and rising inflation.
Ala Yakov Livne, an 86-year-old widow, is one of many who lined up recently to receive a box with oil, flour and other basic necessities. For Livne, the part that stings most about the last year is the sense of betrayal.
“[The Russians] were our neighbors. Many of them were our friends,” she said.
“Times have changed but some things never change,” Livne went on. “Back then, we were under occupation under the Nazis, back then, they tried to kill us, and now again, we are under occupation and they are trying to destroy us.”
Yelena Kuklova survived the Holocaust by being hidden by non-Jewish neighbors. “We started our lives in war and we’re finishing them in war,” she said. (Deborah Danan)
It was a refrain that would be repeated several times over the ensuing days. In a trembling voice, 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Yelena Kuklova, who as a child was hidden by her non-Jewish neighbors in a suitcase in a closet, echoed the sentiment.
“They killed us then because we were Jews. They are killing us today because we are Ukrainian,” she said, a slow cascade of tears spilling over her cheekbones. “We started our lives in war and we’re finishing them in war.”
And so it was in battle-scarred Mykolaiv, 140 kilometers northeast of Odessa. “What the Germans never managed to do, the Russians did,” said Eli Ben Mendel Hopstein, standing in front of his building, pockmarked from the shrapnel of a Russian missile.
Inside his home, Hopstein rifled through decades-old photos of himself in the navy. “I know danger,” he said, “and I don’t feel it now.” He describes himself as a proud Jew. “First, I am a Jew, then I am Ukrainian, and I never once hid this from anyone.”
Mykolaiv, pro-Russia before the war and now a vanguard of the south, has become a source of pride for its residents because of Russia’s failure to occupy it. Even before the war, Mykolaiv was a desperately poor city. But now, following eight months of daily explosions, destruction is everywhere and the city’s critical infrastructure has been badly damaged.
Damaged buildings are a common sight in Mykolaiv, which Russian troops pummeled during the first year of the war. So are people lining up for potable water. (Deborah Danan)
Like Odessa, the city has no electricity for up to 22 hours a day. For more than half a year, large swaths of the city had no water at all. Today, residents can turn on the tap and get a murky brown liquid known as technical water, but it is far from potable. For drinking and cooking, they are forced to collect safe water in plastic gallon bottles at water stations all over the city, many of which were installed by the Israeli nonprofit IsraAID.
Scenes of people placing buckets outside their houses in the hope of catching rainwater became ubiquitous in Mykolaiv. For its Jewish contingent, Chabad provides truckloads of bottled water. Hopstein credits the IFCJ and Chabad for keeping him alive.
“If it wasn’t for their help, I would have nothing,” he said.
Across the road from Hopstein, 82-year-old Galina Petrovna Mironenko, who is not Jewish, is not so lucky. A Russian S300 missile that appeared to be targeting a nearby university missed its mark and struck Mironenko’s home, decimating her every earthly possession. Mironenko said the only help she gets is a weekly loaf of bread from the government. Standing in her charred kitchen, her red and blue checkered headscarf offering the only color, Mironenko’s expression is almost childlike — a jarring contrast to the words she utters.
Galina Petrovna Mironenko stands in the wreckage of her home in Mykolaiv, destroyed by a Russian missile. Her Jewish neighbor credits aid from Jewish organizations for keeping him alive. (Deborah Danan)
“I have died three times in my life,” she said. “Once when my father died, again when my son died and a third time after the 20 minutes it took for my house to burn.”
Back in Odessa, the sun has set and the city is cloaked in darkness, a cue that soon it will be time to head indoors for the nightly curfew. But first, a visit to the Orlikovsky family who are packing their suitcases ahead of their emigration the next day. On the couch in the tiny living room sit four generations of Jews: Alina; her daughter, Marina; her grandson Andrey; and Andrey’s wife and daughter Viktoria and Sofiya.
Andrey recalls Feb. 24, 2022. “I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. I heard a terrible blast and grabbed my daughter and told my wife, ‘Let’s get out!’ I thought my house was going to collapse like a doll’s house.”
Participants of the Hanukkah celebration in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, received a hot meal — part of the sustained aid that Jewish communities have distributed throughout the war there, Dec. 18, 2022. (Vyacheslav Madiyevskyi / Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
But it would take nearly a year to finally make the move, because of Viktoria’s late mother who was sick and because, in Andrey’s words, “you get used to the bombs.”
“We live without power, we live without heating, very often there is no hot water. We are living like insects,” Alina said. “My children told me, mama, we need to go.”
When the family finished speaking, the electricity came back and the lights turned on. Sofiya, 5 years old, laughed into her mother’s chest.
The first anniversary of the war marks two weeks since Alexei Shkurat and the other 89 new arrivals were greeted on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport by Israel’s new immigration minister, Ofir Sofer. Shkurat is on the lookout for a permanent home in a place where he can sell his art.
“I am getting to know the country and looking for new friends,” he said. “I want to do a lot of beautiful and bright projects. I want to draw a lot,” he said.
He deeply misses Odessa, which he called an amazing city, but being reunited with his sons has soothed the pain.
“Meeting with my children was the best event of the last year,” he said.
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Man charged in Central Synagogue attack linked to posts about Israel, Judaism, and Mamdani
The man accused of attacking a woman and a security guard at Central Synagogue, a prominent New York City congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during Friday night services, had filled his Facebook page with posts about Israel and Judaism in the months leading up to the attack — and, according to his aunt, had expressed a desire to convert to the Jewish faith.
“He’s mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism] — that’s what he’s said,” Myriam Montes, the aunt of Larry Montes, 46, told the New York Post.
“Given what happened, he might not have been in his right mind,” she said. However, she added that she had not spoken with her nephew in three months.
On a Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes, he reposted a video comparing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Other videos reposted on the page focused on Jewish and Israeli topics. One featured a Jewish man disputing claims that the Talmud contains disparaging remarks about Jesus. In 2024, he posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” Another reposted video featured Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
The page also reposted several videos from Ruhama’s Food, a popular Israeli social media account.
The Facebook page’s recent posts are more disjointed. They include screenshots showing attempts to translate seemingly incoherent Spanish text into Hebrew.
Police said Montes had three prior arrests before the Central Synagogue attack, all of which were for robbery.
Montes was charged with two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count of criminal mischief as a hate crime. He is expected to appear in court on August 20.
The post Man charged in Central Synagogue attack linked to posts about Israel, Judaism, and Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.
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Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services
(JTA) —A man who attacked a congregant and a security guard at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue on Friday night is now in custody, according to the New York Police Department.
The individual disrupted Shabbat services before allegedly assaulting the two individuals.
“As synagogue security was escorting him out, he struck a member of the congregation, damaged synagogue property, and then spit at and headbutted a member of the security team,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch stated in a post on X.
Tisch, who grew up attending the iconic Reform synagogue, said that an NYPD sergeant who was working on a paid detail on site “immediately stepped in and took the individual into custody.”
“I have spoken with the rabbi of the synagogue, and I’m relieved that no one was seriously injured,” she said, confirming that those who were hurt are now doing well.
While noting that the investigation is still ongoing, Tisch confirmed that there are no other known threats at the moment, and that additional NYPD resources were deployed to Central Synagogue.
For the police commissioner, however, the event was also personal, as she described the synagogue of her childhood as “a place of comfort and peace,” both “in joy and in sorrow.”
“What happened there tonight is deeply painful,” Tisch added. “A place of worship should never be a crime scene.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X that he was “horrified by the assault at Central Synagogue during services today.”
“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” Mamdani stated.
The mayor emphasized that every New Yorker should be able to practice their religion without fearing violence, describing the event as a “despicable act” that “has no place in our city.”
“Our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” Mamdani added.
Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council, commended the NYPD for its “swift response that brought the individual into custody,” adding that she was “disturbed” by the incident.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James described the assault as “appalling and unacceptable” in a social media statement. She stressed that “no one should feel threatened in their place of worship.”
“I am relieved that everyone is okay and recovering, and my heart is with the Central Synagogue community this evening,” James added.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Assailant attacks congregant, guard at NYC Shabbat services appeared first on The Forward.
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Nigeria has more than 100 synagogues — but no local rabbis. This summer camp wants to change that.
On summer mornings in Abuja, Nigeria, a small fleet of cars fan out across the sprawling capital city carrying unusual cargo: children headed to Jewish day camp.
In a one-story synagogue on a dirt road in Kubwa, a densely populated suburb, children who spend most of the year as the only Jew in their school spill out of cars alongside dozens of their peers. They might spend the day acting out scenes from the Torah, crocheting kippot or competing in color war.
It’s an untraditional location, but almost everything else about Camp Sarah is inspired by Jewish summer camps in the U.S. After all, it was founded by an American.
Debbie Isser, who moved to Nigeria in 2021 for her work with the World Bank, started the camp with members of Abuja’s Jewish community after local mothers told her they wanted their children to have some kind of Jewish education. For Isser, whose own childhood summers at Jewish camp in New Hampshire had been formative, the solution felt obvious.
“I just felt like it was in my genes,” she told the Forward.
Now in its fourth year, Camp Sarah, a two-week-long day camp hosting 80 campers and 20 staff, is trying to give a new generation of Nigerian Jews something their small, dispersed community has struggled to provide: Jewish teachings that will allow them to sustain religious life there.
The hope, of course, is that the children make Jewish friends and learn Torah stories. But organizers also want Camp Sarah to begin producing the religious leaders the community currently lacks — perhaps, one day, even a homegrown rabbi or a shochet, ritual slaughterer, so that kosher Nigerian Jews can finally enjoy meat with their jollof rice.
Fifteen-year-old Shedrack, who is one of two Jewish students at his public school, attended Camp Sarah for the first time last summer. When, during the following school year, his classmates made fun of him for not believing in Jesus, he called his camp friends.
“It’s like being with myself,” he told the Forward. “They understand me. When it’s closing hour from school, I usually call them. We have some chats, ask ourselves some questions and we talk about Torah.”
Nigeria’s Jewish community is itself an unlikely story. Most of its members are Igbo, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, some of whom believe they are descended from one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. Igbo identification with Jewish identity intensified during and after the devastating Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970, when the Igbo-led breakaway state of Biafra was defeated, and at least a million people died.
In the decades that followed, a small number of Igbo who had been raised Christian began practicing Judaism, teaching themselves Hebrew, seeking out Jewish texts and eventually establishing synagogues. Today, thousands of Nigerians practice Judaism, though those who have not formally converted are not considered Jewish by many mainstream Jewish institutions.
But maintaining a Jewish community in Nigeria is no easy feat. While Nigeria has over 100 synagogues, the community has no resident rabbi of its own. Jewish books and ritual objects are few and far between, usually arriving from donations abroad.
Moshe Hezekiah Nwafor, 28, a Nigerian Jew who founded the camp alongside Isser, told the Forward that when he celebrated his bar mitzvah, there was only one Torah scroll in the country. Today, he estimates there are about 10. And without a shochet, his community relies heavily on fish and vegetables because there is no way to access kosher meat.
Nwafor and Isser met by chance. While Isser was looking for a synagogue to celebrate the Jewish holidays after she moved to Nigeria, she came across a WhatsApp number for Nwafor’s congregation. Nwafor answered her message and immediately arranged for someone to pick her up and bring her to the synagogue to celebrate Sukkot.
That night, they made kiddush in a sukkah with walls fashioned from banana leaves; afterward came a l’chaim with local schnapps.
“I thought, OK, I’ve really found a Jewish community here,” Isser recalled.
Isser began returning from trips to the United States with suitcases stuffed with donated tallitot (prayer shawls), siddurim (prayer books) and other Jewish books. Eventually, after one Shabbat service, she sat down with elders of the congregation to ask what a more systematic relationship with American Jews might look like.
The clearest request, she said, came from the mothers. Most of their children attended schools where they were the only Jew. Instead of letting their kids sit idle over the summers, the mothers wanted them to receive a Jewish education and know what it feels like to have Jewish friends – in other words: Jewish summer camp.
The request resonated with Isser, a mother too, for whom Jewish camp had been a formative part of childhood. Her parents had met at Camp Ramah, the camp of the Conservative movement, when they were 16. Her mother went on to become a Jewish educator.
At first, Isser considered sending Nigerian children to camps in the U.S. But she and Nwafor, who had worked as a traveling Jewish teacher among Nigerian communities, quickly landed on a more ambitious idea.
“Immediately, we’re like ‘no, no, no,’” Isser recalled. “’We should do camp in Nigeria.’”
They named it Camp Sarah, in honor of Isser’s mother.
The first summer required some improvisation. Organizers borrowed a car to collect children from around Abuja. Isser recalls one trip taking two hours, the car breaking down and, at one point, 15 children squeezing into a sedan.
Rabbi Kerrith Solomon from Adas Israel, a Conservative congregation in Washington, D.C., came with her two children to help run the camp. Looking back, Isser said, “We kind of laugh because it was pretty disorganized.”
Today, anyone who grew up going to camp would recognize much of Camp Sarah, where campers spend their days competing in relay races or Jewish trivia and writing songs to perform for their peers. Four-year-olds act out Torah stories. Older campers study the Jewish life cycle and discuss what it means to become role models in their communities. Counselors from Nigeria, Uganda and the U.S. compare their Jewish traditions over lunchtime.
But some camp traditions require distinctly Nigerian adaptations. Each Friday, the camp bakes challah. With no conventional oven, sand is poured into the bottom of a cooking pot that rests on a charcoal stove, before unbraided challah dough is placed in the pot and covered for hours.
Many of the Jewish songs sung at camp were written in Nigeria and sound nothing like the standard repertoire in America. Sung in harmony, they are accompanied by traditional Nigerian instruments like the konga drum, a shallow gourd covered in beads known as the shekere and a metal hand bell called an ogene.
Camp Sarah’s ambitions also extend beyond Jewish education. Isser said that during her work at the World Bank, she has watched young Nigerians earn university degrees only to struggle to find jobs in their fields. This year, the team introduced leadership training for the counselors, and activities like soap-making, candle-making and crocheting – skills they hope campers and counselors can turn into sources of income. Organizers have even discussed creating a camp store where staff can sell their handmade tallitot and kippot.
The 20 Nigerian counselors who take long overnight buses from Jewish communities across the country to camp each summer have already started bringing what they’ve learned back home, hosting events for their communities during the Jewish holidays.
Debbie Hezekiah Nwafor, a 25-year-old counselor, said that when she first arrived at camp four years ago, she was terrified of public speaking, but her role forced her to propose activities, teach dozens of children and command the attention of the rowdy group. Today, she leads the camp’s division for 14- to 16-year-olds.
“I used to have stage fright; I thought I’m not really bold enough for leadership,” she said. “But whatever idea I’m bringing, camp is implementing it.”
“This is not just a camp to us.” she added. “For real, this is something really big. I would say camp really changed me.”
Camp Sarah has also become a place to experiment in a way that has proven difficult within established Nigerian congregations. According to Nwafor, women have traditionally played smaller leadership roles in local Jewish communities both because of cultural expectations around gender in Nigeria and because of the community’s limited access to Jewish religious instruction.
For communities that have had limited access to rabbis and other sources of contemporary Jewish religious instruction, Nwafor said, biblical texts have sometimes served as a primary guide for how to live Jewishly.
Isser has seen some of those tensions surface in surprisingly fundamental questions. When visiting rabbis have taught at Camp Sarah, she said, mothers have asked whether Jewish law would require them to marry their husband’s brother if their husband died — a practice described in the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy known as yibbum, or levirate marriage.
But last year, the camp held a service led by women and they did an encore this week. Some of them have even said they would like to become rabbis.
“That’s something you don’t see here, but I’m like, ‘why not?’” Nwafor said. “Just go for it.”
Ruth Munghoho, a Ugandan Jew, flew through Ethiopia to Camp Sarah to teach after studying under Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the first native-born black rabbi in Sub-Saharan Africa. She sees her younger self in her campers.
“I grew up in a Christian community where we had no Jewish friends or neighbors,” she said. It took until young adulthood for her to be able to learn about Judaism. “If I could get this knowledge from childhood,” she said, “I know that I could be more than what I am now.”
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