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In Ukraine, Hanukkah candles are a lifeline in the midst of power outages
(JTA) — In the days before Hanukkah, which starts Sunday night, a few men and women from two Conservative institutions in Israel will travel to the small Jewish community in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, with a supply of needed items.
Amid the power outages stemming from Russian attacks, the volunteers will have blankets and sweatshirts for the cold, as well as menorahs and kippahs for religious observance purposes.
The 300 boxes of Hanukkah candles will do double duty.
These days, the power in Chernivtsi, a city of around 250,000 (before the war) in western Ukraine, is more off than on. So the candles will do more than allude to the story of the Maccabees — they will help light Jewish homes across the city.
“This year it’s really important” to have and use Hanukkah candles, said Lev Kleiman, leader of the city’s Conservative Jewish community, in a recent Zoom interview.
Although the need is urgent, “We will hold onto the candles until Hanukkah,” Kleiman added, his words in Russian interpreted by Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya, the Russian-born and Jerusalem-based “circuit rabbi” of the Conservative movement’s Schechter Institutes and executive director of its Midreshet Schechter Ukraine. The organizations are coordinating the transport of holiday supplies to Chernivtsi.
Among a few “couriers” bringing needed items to Jewish communities in Ukraine, Gritsevskaya has made several trips there over the last 10 months. At the start of the war, she urged Jews in other cities to make their way to Chernivtsi, which was far from the intense fighting on the eastern border.
Chernivtsi, which served as a place of refuge for thousands of displaced people from elsewhere in parts of the Soviet Union threatened by the Nazi army during World War II, is again attracting refugees from throughout the country. Earlier in the current war, Kleiman turned his synagogue into a refugee center for some of the millions of Ukrainians fleeing their homeland. The city also became a gathering site for worldwide faith leaders who have denounced the violence and expressed solidarity with the embattled Ukrainians.
In addition to no heat and light in Chernivtsi, lack of electricity means lack of TV and radio use, along with spotty internet service. (Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Located on the Prut River, Chernivtsi (known at one time as “Jerusalem upon the Prut” for the strength of its Jewish community) is 25 miles north of the Romanian border and home to one of the country’s most active Conservative communities. The city’s Jewish population before the war began was estimated at 2,000, including many Holocaust survivors.
And today, following the invasion? The number could be larger or smaller, no one is counting — but some western cities have experienced population growth due to all of the migration.
“No one knows,” Kleiman said. “Many left, but many came.”
As in other Ukrainian cities, many Jews in Chernivtsi — especially women, senior citizens and children, everyone except draft-age males — have migrated. But uncounted other ones have come to a place of relative safety, either renting apartments or staying in ones under the auspices of the Jewish community. Most of the Jews in Chernivtsi now are those exempt from military service, Kleiman said. Others stayed in order to be with their husbands and fathers who joined the Ukrainian army after the war began, or to care for their aged parents.
Despite signs of war — rifle-carrying soldiers and policemen on the streets, empty shelves in stores because of shortages, people hurrying to safety when they hear sirens — Jewish life there has continued, according to Kleiman. The most active organizations in the city are the local outpost of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the JDC-supported Hesed Shoshana Welfare Center and Kleiman’s Kehillat Aviv Synagogue (his official title is coordinator), which sponsors daily Jewish activities.
The synagogue — located near the Chabad center, with which it cooperates on relief activities — is housed in a small, two-story building that contains an office, a kitchen and a large multi-function hall. Kleiman says Hanukkah in 2022 will be more important than in past years because in addition to its ability to bring people together,the holiday also asserts Jewish survival.
“There are a lot of parallels,” Kleiman said of the holiday and his community’s current situation.
Electricity in Chernivtsi flows only a few hours each day, and at night, no street lights are on, thanks to incessant Russian bombing of Ukraine’s infrastructure, and to government-imposed restrictions designed to conserve the little available resources.
A holiday of lights sans lights? “We’ve never done it before,” Kleiman said, adding that the Jews in his city understand the holiday’s symbolism.
Some will come to the synagogue for a communal candle-lighting, according to Kleiman. Others will light their candles at home, in their windows. Like all other buildings in Chernivtsi, Kleiman’s office and apartment are subject to periodic electricity blackouts, often announced in advance.
“With G-d’s help we will soon have a generator” – and 24/7 lights and heat in the synagogue, he said. Until then, he and the other residents of Chernivtsi will shiver. The temperature in the city was 29 degrees Fahrenheit during the Zoom interview, and a light snow was falling.
Lev Kleiman is shown with his community’s Torah ark. (Courtesy of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies)
Though no Russian missiles have fallen inside Chernivtsi itself, some have reached the outskirts, causing damage to the area’s infrastructure and utilities. Other parts of the country have not escaped the Russian onslaught; two months ago more than 4,000 Ukrainian towns, villages and cities had experienced outages, and 40% of the country’s grid was crippled. The bombing of power stations is a major part of Vladimir Putin’s plan to weaponize Ukraine’s weather to bully the country into submission as winter sets in. (In addition to candles and other supplies, some Jewish groups are sending generators and heaters.)
Home in past years to such prominent Jews as actress Mila Kunis, the late Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, former Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein and the late poet-translator Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel), Chernivtsi has an honored place in the country’s history. On the eve of World War II, some 45,000 Jews lived in the city, about a third of the country’s total Jewish population. The collaborationist Romanian authorities, who ruled the area, established a ghetto in Chernivtsi where 32,000 Jews, including many from the surrounding region, were interned; from there, they were shipped to concentration camps in the nearby Transnistria area, where 60% died.
A third of the city’s Jews survived the war. The population grew to about 17,000 when widespread migration from the USSR began in the late 1980s. Like many cities in the former Soviet Union, Chernivtsi has experienced a modest Jewish revival since Communism fell and open expression of Judaism was allowed again. The revival was spurred largely by the arrival of Chabad emissary couples and programs sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
But though Chabad, an Orthodox movement, is the prime Jewish mover in Ukraine, there is also a growing non-Orthodox presence in the country. The Israeli branch of the Conservative movement sent its first full-time representatives to Ukraine a decade ago. The movement’s Jerusalem-based Masorti Olami organization sponsors a network of synagogues, schools, camps, youth groups and kosher certification services across Ukraine. A few decades ago, Kleiman attended the Midreshet Yerushalayim day school in Chernivtsi and Camp Ramah Ukraine.
In addition, the Reform movement’s World Union for Progressive Judaism has established 10 congregations in the country; the movement estimates that 14,000 Ukrainian Jews identify as members.
Even though the need is urgent, Kleiman said his community will wait to use the candles until the start of Hanukkah. (Courtesy of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies)
These are boring days in southwest Ukraine. TV and radio are only available when electricity is available, and internet and cellphone service is always spotty. Kleiman calls the war a test of the people’s mettle, a spur to their growing national unity. As a form of solidarity, many have switched the language of their conversations from Russian — the lingua franca during the Soviet days — to Ukrainian.
Nobody in Chernivtsi’s Jewish community is starving, Kleiman said. Kosher food is available at the synagogue, and volunteers bring supplies to people unable to travel. Overall, the morale of the Jewish community is good, he says. Native-born members of the community “support each other,” while some people from other parts of the country, separated from their families, with fewer personal connections, are depressed, he said.
In the boxes of materials that Rabbi Gritsevskaya is to bring to Chernivtsi from Israel are also some Israeli-style dreidels, whose Hebrew letters stand for the words “Nes gadol haya po”: “A great miracle happened here.” On dreidels used in the Diaspora, the last word usually is sham, “there.”
The linguistic symbolism in a land under siege is clear, said Kleiman, who plans to explain the message to the members of the community taking home a dreidel.
“I understand — they will understand too,” he says. “I hope the miracle will also happen in Ukraine.”
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The post In Ukraine, Hanukkah candles are a lifeline in the midst of power outages appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Meet the only Jewish president of a Catholic university
Synagogue president and Catholic university president aren’t typically jobs one holds concurrently.
But in 2023, Greg Weiner became president of both Assumption University, a Catholic college in Worcester, Mass., and Congregation Beth Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the area.
Weiner’s inauguration in March of that year made him the first and only Jewish president of a Catholic university — one with the motto “Until Christ be formed in you.”
To him, the combination just made sense.
“I never had any hesitation at all about whether being a Jewish president would work — quite the opposite,” Weiner told the Forward. “The divide in society between people who do and don’t treat religion seriously is much wider than between particular religions.”
Shortly after Weiner’s inauguration, college presidents found themselves in the national spotlight as pro-Palestinian protesters built tent encampments on college campuses across the country in the aftermath of Oct. 7
During that time, Weiner became a figurehead for an unconventional idea: that Jewish students who felt unwelcome at secular universities ought to consider attending Catholic institutions like Assumption instead.
Now, Weiner continues to make the case that Catholic schools have much to offer Jewish students.
“The challenge for Jewish families, Jewish parents, Jewish students, is we have to ask ourselves: Do we value education, or do we simply value the prestige that’s associated with certain universities?” Weiner said. “Because, in a lot of cases, those seem to be inversely correlated.”
How Weiner became president
To state the obvious: Appointing a non-Catholic to head a Catholic university was not a risk-free choice.
How would students, faculty and trustees react? Would the university, founded in 1904 by the Catholic Augustinian order known as the Assumptionists, be accused of turning away from its Catholic history, character and mission?
Historically, Catholic universities were exclusively led by priests from the Catholic order that founded the school. Universities like Notre Dame have continued that tradition; every president since its founding in 1842 has been a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross.
But as Catholic universities have increasingly sought to attract students of all faiths — and as the number of priests available to lead universities has declined — more laypeople have taken the helm. For instance, Loyola University in Chicago named the first laywoman instead of a priest as president in 2016. The Jesuit Fordham University did the same in 2022, breaking with its 200-year tradition.
“I wouldn’t entirely downplay some tensions here, as much as the motto of our university is ‘Until Christ be formed in you,’” said the Rev. Dennis Gallagher, an Assumptionist priest who serves as Vice President for Mission at Assumption University. “Clearly, he’s not going to give personal credence to that particular expression.”
But Gallagher said he was won over by how Weiner articulated the value of a Catholic liberal education, which emphasizes inquiry and debate — values that also happen to be very Jewish.
An Assumption education asks humanity’s’ “enduring questions,” and attracts the kind of students who “haven’t determined that they know the answers to those things before they arrive,” Gallagher said.
Weiner, who draws parallels between Talmudic debate and Assumption’s inquiry-driven approach to education, was well-positioned to promote those ideals, Gallagher said.
Weiner was also not an outsider at Assumption. After a career in Democratic politics that included working as press secretary for then-Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey and getting his PhD in government at Georgetown University, Weiner joined the faculty at Assumption in 2011 as a political science professor. He quickly rose the ranks, becoming provost and vice president for academic affairs in 2019. After former Assumption President Francesco Cesareo announced his retirement in 2022, Weiner became interim leader.
Gallagher said he didn’t think trustees were seriously considering Weiner for the job of president at the time. But when Weiner excelled in the interim role, the choice became clear.
“I remember saying, ‘I think what we’re looking for is right here with us,’” Gallagher said. “Somebody that can both understand and communicate what a Catholic — albeit not being Catholic himself — what a Catholic liberal education is about.”
In the end, Weiner’s appointment drew far more celebration than controversy, with the university actively embracing his Jewish identity. A rabbi bestowed a special blessing upon Weiner at his inauguration.
A Jewish haven?
Weiner, who grew up as a member of the lone Jewish family in the small town of Luling, Texas, is comfortable with being the only Jew in the room.
When a childhood friend expressed concern that Weiner was going to hell, he took it as “a very ham-handed way of expressing genuine caring,” he said. “I was born without the gene that tells you to get offended quickly.”
That same instinct carried into his career. At first, Weiner said, he didn’t publicly lean into his Judaism as part of the presidency. But in the aftermath of the attacks of Oct. 7, he felt “a particular responsibility to speak out.”
In December 2023, Weiner made a splash with a Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting Jewish students feeling alienated from Ivy League campuses ought to consider Catholic schools like Assumption.
At the time, other Catholic schools were also explicitly courting Jewish students amid turmoil over Israel and antisemitism on college campuses across the country.
Still, it was an unconventional pitch: Assumption has no Hillel or Chabad on campus, and students are required to take Catholic theology courses where they learn about Christian morality, sacraments and other church doctrine.
But whatever Assumption lacked in Jewish religious life, Weiner said it has made up for in campus culture. Assumption had no student encampments protesting Israel after Oct. 7, in part, Weiner said, because Assumption students are more interested in arguing over ideas in a philosophy class than organizing a protest.
Weiner, who has written four books on political theory and previously worked as a political aide for several Democratic politicians, said students on campus hold a range of views about Israel. But Assumption is not a place filled with student activists.
“Too many campuses have encouraged moral certainty, intellectual certainty, when Socrates says, ‘Philosophy begins with a confession of ignorance,’” Weiner said. “Education requires a certain amount of humility.”
Eli Beberman told the Forward he initially chose Assumption in 2018 because it was close to home and had a strong secondary education program. He expected being Jewish at a Catholic school might require some adjustment. He never imagined the university’s president would become Jewish his senior year.
“Seeing upper level leadership at Assumption also be Jewish was a really cool experience for me,” Beberman said.
Assumption was a place where interfaith friendships thrived, Beberman said. Though there was no Hillel on campus, Beberman was able to pray in an interfaith space with a Torah. He also celebrated Jewish holidays with non-Jewish friends, hosting Shabbat dinners and a Hanukkah party in the dorms, where his parents brought over their “famous brisket.”
“I was able to practice my religion how I wanted to, and I felt very comfortable on campus being a non-Catholic student,” Beberman said.
Jewish faculty members, too, said Weiner’s presidency changed how they saw the university.
Samantha Goldman, a Jewish associate professor of special education at Assumption, said she didn’t seek out a job at a Catholic institution. But once she got there, she was surprised at how natural the environment felt.
“Having a Jewish president of a Catholic institution really communicates this sense of welcoming and inclusivity that might not otherwise be apparent,” she said.
Others were drawn specifically to the culture Weiner fostered. In 2024, Mary Jane Rein left her job as executive director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She said Clark had failed to properly support her after students protested a talk she helped organize featuring an Israeli reservist. That inspired her to come to Assumption, where she launched the Center for Civic Friendship, which helps students engage in civil discourse across ideological divides.
“To my surprise as both a scholar and a Jew,” Rein wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “I feel a warmer welcome and more commonality of purpose at a Catholic institution than at Clark, a secular one.”
That same year, Weiner was reappointed for a five-year term through May 2030 in an announcement trustees said reflected “deep confidence in his leadership.”
To Weiner, the success of his presidency is evidence that Judaism and Catholicism are not as far apart as they may seem.
“Obviously, [there are] some foundational theological differences,” Weiner said. “But with respect to the educational commitments, I think they’re quite compatible.”
The post Meet the only Jewish president of a Catholic university appeared first on The Forward.
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The secret Jewish history of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’
“Rocky Horror,” which opened in London cinemas on this day in 1975 is the cultural phenomenon that simply refuses to die. Rather, since its first incarnation as a 1973 London stage musical, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has been continuously reborn on the silver screen, in subsequent Broadway stage productions, and, in 2016, as a direct-to-TV film, starring Laverne Cox of “Orange Is the New Black” fame as the transgender Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the mad-scientist role originated by Tim Curry.
In all its incarnations, however, “Rocky Horror” has always been more than just a performance. Its appeal has been widely driven as a participatory event. Film critic Roger Ebert summarized it best writing about the original 1975 film: “‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ is not so much a movie as more of a long-running social phenomenon,” because “the fans put on a better show than anything on the screen.” What Ebert refers to is the interactive tradition that has grown up around “Rocky Horror,” whereby fans attend midnight showings primed for a party as much as a screening: reciting the lines out loud along with the characters and interspersing them with “callouts” — responses that have been accepted into the Rocky Horror canon much as the Talmud is commentary on the Mishnah that has in and of itself become part of the sacred text. In the case of “Rocky Horror,” this also includes activities, such as throwing rice or confetti in the air when the married couple in the film leaves the church; squirting water pistols during a rainstorm; and tossing rolls of toilet paper when one character says “Great Scott!”
In one of the most overtly Jewish moments in and outside of the film, a speech by Dr. Frank-N-Furter hailing the creation of the Golem-like creature of the title, Rocky Horror, is met by chaotic noisemaking on the part of the partygoers onscreen and off. In the original film, some of the crowd generates noise with ratchets – a percussion instrument that looks suspiciously like a gragger, as if Dr. Frank had said “Haman.” There are other Purim-like touches in the film, such that temple congregations have made “Rocky Horror” into part of their annual ritual, such as a “Rockin’ Hora Purimshpiel” in which several of the musical numbers are rewritten as Purim songs.
Other Judaized versions of “Rocky Horror” that have appeared over the years include “Hebrew Horror,” which was staged in Los Angeles in 2007, and the “Rocky Hora Chanukah Song” by the Jewish punk-rock parody group, the Shlomones (sort of a redundancy, since several members of the Ramones were in fact Jewish, as was their outlook in numerous ways, including their song, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.”
The original London stage version was produced by British-Jewish theatrical impresario Michael White, who was born to Eastern European Jewish-immigrant parents in Glasgow, Scotland. White’s credits had already included the boundary-shattering “Oh! Calcutta!” — the first all-nude revue in commercial theater — and he went on to co-produce the “Rocky Horror” film as well as “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
The original musical and film were decades before their time in celebrating the sexual fluidity of the LGBT world – indeed, there wasn’t such a term as LGBT, much less a socio-political acceptance of it, for years to come. The new TV film version is in no small part an effort to seize this cultural moment when LGBT, and particularly transgender issues, are now part of mainstream political and cultural discussion, especially what with the casting of openly trans actress Laverne Cox.
The original did, however, have a political consciousness beyond its seemingly outrageous effort to provoke. Dr. Frank-n-Furter’s lab coat in the movie was inspired by a Nazi concentration camp inmate uniform and was adorned by the pink triangle that the Nazis used to label what we now call LGBT inmates. And in the film at least, there were implications that Frank’s rival, Dr. Scott was a Nazi.
The 2016 version was again produced by music industry legend Lou Adler, who was responsible for turning the stage musical into the original film starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf. In that version, Eddie was played by American Idol star Adam Lambert, the role played by Meat Loaf in the original Broadway cast and film. Lambert, who starred as Joshua in “The Ten Commandments: The Musical,” has achieved fame as a solo artist and as the replacement for the late frontman Freddie Mercury in the rock band Queen. Lambert’s Jewish mother, Leila, was a dental hygienist.
Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor to the Forward.
The post The secret Jewish history of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Sister of pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham secures GOP Senate nomination
(JTA) — South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham defeated U.S. House Rep. Ralph Norman in a special primary runoff on Tuesday, putting her in a dominant position to win the Senate seat left vacant with the death in July of her older brother, the pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham.
The Associated Press called the race two hours after polls closed at 9:01pm. By the time 99% of votes were tallied, Darline Graham had secured 52.3% of the votes to Norman’s 47.7%.
“Tonight is a great victory, but it’s not the finish line,” Graham told her supporters on Tuesday night. “In fact, it is the starting line for an even bigger fight, which lies ahead.”
If Darline Graham goes on to win November’s general election against Democrat Annie Andrews, she will have big shoes to fill. Her brother served 23 years in the Senate and eight in the U.S. House. He traveled to Israel about a dozen times between Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on the Jewish state and his death at age 71.
Heading into the primaries, analysts expressed no doubt that Darline Graham would be pro-Israel. But matching Lindsey Graham’s level of foreign policy activity, they warned, would be a formidable task. Meanwhile, her campaign to date has largely avoided discussion of international affairs. Instead, she has focused on domestic concerns like reducing spending, securing borders and promoting Trump-backed policies.
During a debate aired on C-SPAN last week, Graham struggled to respond to a foreign policy question about Taiwan and the South China Sea, ultimately admitting that she’s “not that informed on national security.”
“I’m not a polished politician up here,” she said. “National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise.”
Later addressing issues of affordability, Graham linked the domestic economic situation to the war in Iran and said she trusts President Donald Trump “to get the Strait of Hormuz open.” She also voiced her preference for financial sanctions over putting troops on the ground.
Asked about the country’s relationship with Israel, Graham described the Jewish state as “one of our strongest allies.” Recognizing her brother’s close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, she added that during a recent meeting with the Israeli premier, she vowed to “continue supporting Israel in any way” she can.
“We have to stand with Israel,” Graham said.
At their previous face-off, Graham had secured 33% of the vote, while Norman came in second place, at 25%, against eight fellow Republicans. But South Carolina requires primary winners to earn a majority of votes in order to avoid a two-candidate runoff. In the November general election, Graham will contend with Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who is unlikely to prevail in the solidly Republican state.
Tuesday’s runoff marked the third time in two months that South Carolina Republicans came to the polls to select a Senate candidate. Lindsey Graham, won the first primary in June but died suddenly the next month from an aortic dissection.
A few days later, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, appointed Darline Graham to finish her brother’s term. Though she only had minimal policy experience, including a leadership role at the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, she earned President Donald Trump’s endorsement and declared her candidacy in the full race.
Trump celebrated Graham’s nomination in a Tuesday night Truth Social post, writing that “Darline Graham rides Trump endorsement to win GOP nomination for brother’s South Carolina seat.”
Graham thanked Trump profusely during her Tuesday night acceptance speech, recognizing the president as one of her brother’s “closest friends” and crediting him for helping her secure a victory.
Norman, meanwhile, thanked his supporters on Tuesday night for their “prayer crusade of a campaign,” stressing that he “did not prepare a concession speech.” He accused “outside PACs” of spending $8 million opposing him and blamed the Democrats for this situation, adding that “they got what they wanted.”
He recognized Trump’s role in the race as a supporter of Graham, noting that he “never understood why he got involved” but that it is the president’s prerogative to do so. Nonetheless, Norman pledged that there “won’t be any tears” and that he planned to back Graham.
“I’m not supporting a Democrat, so I will support her, Darline, as best I can,” he added. “We’ll live to fight another day.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sister of pro-Israel stalwart Lindsey Graham secures GOP Senate nomination appeared first on The Forward.
