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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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Antisemitic vitriol claims an unlikely new victim — a flamboyant and popular French DJ
The celebrated French DJ Barbara Butch, whose flamboyant performance at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was condemned by Catholics and conservatives, is proudly lesbian and unabashedly Jewish. Last week, the latter quality sparked yet another flare up of antisemitism in France.
On the evening of July 18, about 20 minutes after Butch began a concert in the city of Grenoble, about 150 protestors who had entered the hall with the rest of the audience unfurled pro-Palestinian banners denouncing the brutal destruction of Gaza. Many of them began to fling antisemitic insults and glass bottles at Butch. Stunned by the sudden explosion of violence, Butch soon left the stage. At that point, the municipal authorities intervened. “Confronted by threats aimed at the artist Barbara Butch, and to guarantee the safety of both the audience and performers,” they declared, “the city of Grenoble has taken the decision to cancel the performance.”
This eruption of antisemitism parading as anti-Zionism was as predictable — and as predictably ignored by the local government — as are the fires now consuming swathes of western France. In the weeks leading up to the concert, a petition was launched by the local section of La France insoumise (France Unbowed), the extreme-left political party founded and led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who has recently and plausibly been accused of flirting with antisemitism. The petition condemned Butch for supporting a proposed law in 2025 that penalized “new forms of antisemitism,” which potentially included expressions of anti-Zionism and even criticism of the Israeli government.
There were two problems, though, with the petition. First, there is the obvious issue of banning an artist from presenting or performing their work because one disagrees with their political statements. (Statements that do not, of course, inspire acts of racial hatred or violence.) Second, and no less obviously, Butch had almost immediately regretted and publicly retracted her initial support of the proposed law, one she realized could suppress legitimate criticism of Israel’s brazenly illegal and brutal actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
All this was for naught, though. The tract distributed in early May by the local office of Unbowed France demanded the cancellation of Butch’s concert by the city government, which had sponsored the music festival it was part of. Fair enough. Not so fair, though, was the tract’s lurid montage, which placed Butch against the background of an LGBTQ flag spattered in blood and stamped with the Star of David, accompanied by the claim that she was “complicit with the genocide” committed in Gaza.
Equally startling was the role played by Allan Brunon, a parliamentary member of Unbowed France who is also president of the party’s local chapter. Not only did he lead the protestors at the concert venue, but he also insisted that, as far as he could see, their behavior never degenerated into violence, even though videos of the ruckus confirm that bottles and other objects hit the stage, as does the eyewitness testimony of Laurence Ruffin, the mayor of Grenoble, who was also in attendance. Brunon’s faux naïve explanation for the expletives shouted at the concert was equally insulting; they were aimed, he insisted, at Butch’s “political position and not who she is.”
Leaders from across the political spectrum, from the extreme right to traditional left, have denounced the role played by Unbowed France at the concert. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally who never misses an opportunity to bash Unbowed France and bury her party’s own antisemitic origins, decried “the antisemitism, repeated appeals to violence, and totalitarian nature and project of the extreme left,” while the former prime minister and centrist politician Gabriel Attal, in a mocking allusion to an earlier claim made by Mélenchon, observed that the party’s “antisemitism is anything but residual.” As for the leadership of Unbowed France, Mélenchon has kept silent while the leader of the parliamentary group, Mathilde Panot, spoke in the conditional case, stating that “we would never support, if they occurred, either flung insults or bottles.” (my emphasis).
Wittingly or not, Attal’s remark reaches much further back than last week. Ever since the late 19th century, the extreme right in France has not had exclusive dibs on antisemitism. Édouard Drumont, the author of the virulent antisemitic 1886 bestseller La France juive and editor of the La Libre parole, the newspaper that sparked the Dreyfus Affair, thought of himself as an anti-capitalist and man of the left. It required the immense reserves of eloquence and decency of Jean Jaurès, the Socialist leader, to persuade the rank and file to rally to Dreyfus’ cause. As late as the 1950s, the French Communist Party unhesitatingly followed Moscow’s lead during the late stages of Stalin’s paranoia, featuring spectacles like the “Doctors’ Trial” of 1953, that targeted Jewish “counterrevolutionaries” intent on undermining the Soviet Union.
Of course, the French left has come a long way since then. But to paraphrase Mathilde Panot, if Unbowed France’s apparently uncowed leader, along with a large contingent of his party, are suffering from more than a dollop of residual antisemitism, the future of a democratic and liberal France is at risk.
The post Antisemitic vitriol claims an unlikely new victim — a flamboyant and popular French DJ appeared first on The Forward.
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Why I stand with Israel
I’m often asked why I take a public stand on behalf of Israel. Some have asked how I have the fortitude to do so. Others wonder about the “reputational risk.” Still others wonder about subjecting myself to the “awful” comments. To me, they’re like weather reports — a way to gauge the sentiments of those with whom I disagree.
“Just stop talking — if for no other reason than for saving yourself the embarrassment of being heard by anyone.”
“You Zionists are just mad that no one’s buying your narrative anymore”
“F— Israel”
“Hey Peter! When did you drop the second “n” in your last name? When your family eluded capture when Germany surrendered back in 1945?”
“You are so full of $hit! Mamdani condems a genocide unless you think as long a Santanyahu who happens to be a Jew should be able to kill innocent children day in and day out and get away with simply because he is a jew.”
“I have absolutely loved your music over the decades (my favourite artist) but I have difficulty in listening to it now. The meaning behind your lyrics resonates differently with me now — sorry.”
I support Israel, not because of any government, any particular policy, or anything having to do with geopolitics. I support Israel because half the world’s Jewish population lives there. This is about peoplehood — my people. I understand well how this kind of particularity is easy to criticize, how in an era where the ideology of oppressor versus oppressed has caught the imagination of many people, where thinking about one’s sense of belonging to an ancient nation is thought to be anachronistic, and where a vague notion of universalism has become the new moral imperative.
But as I’ve written many times in my column, all love and all concern begin with specificity. We only learn how to love and be concerned about others through the ways we have loved — and have been loved — by our own.
I see it this way. There are seven million Jews in Israel. They are people of many races and ethnicities, many talents, and many political affiliations. They and their supporters worldwide are now under siege. They have been fighting for their survival, surrounded by neighbors seeking their destruction since before the Jewish state came into existence in 1948— and they have continued to do so since the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023.
Some have asked me, by way of accusation: do you now believe in genocide? Have you become a warmonger? (I assume my former fan, above, feels this way.) Do you support the murder of children? What happened to the man who wrote songs like “Been Set Free,” Impermanent Things,” and “Mission Of My Soul”? Have you suddenly become cruel, hard-hearted?
The questions are too absurd to warrant a response.
For me, support of Israel and the Jewish people more broadly doesn’t take special courage or insight.
If someone were attacking a close relative or friend, my reaction would be the same. It would be reflexive, instantaneous. What consequence could outweigh the idea of sitting back while your loved ones are imperiled? There are those who have argued that whatever cruelties have been meted out are “acts of resistance” and justified military actions by the oppressed against their oppressors. One wonders what logic brought Hamas and its supporters to conclude that K’fir (who was 10 months old at the time of his murder) and Ariel Bibas (who was 4 years old at the time of his murder) were oppressors deserving of death by strangulation.
Such is the strangeness of the current moment, when it feels as though much of the world has once again chosen to place a target on the backs of Jews. Justifications are conjured up and offered, just as they were during the pogroms in Europe, the forced conversions and auto-da-fés of Spain, the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia, the institutionalized anti-Jewish and anti-Israel campaigns of the Soviet Union that found expression at the United Nations in 1975, and in the demonstrations that erupted immediately after Oct. 7 — before Israel had fired a shot.
Synagogues in America are more than three times as likely as other U.S. houses of worship to employ armed security guards. Jewish day schools too, like the ones my grandchildren attend, face extraordinary security costs. Today, the average Jewish institution spends more than $400,000 annually on security. That represents an average increase of roughly 125% since before Oct. 7.
Let’s pause here.
This means that after the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah, synagogues and Jewish schools have to spend 125% percent more to protect themselves from another one. The idea should stun any normal thinking person. Though sadly, I believe it would stun very few people these days.
Most recently, in NYC, Mayor Zohran Mamdani employed the magic words that brought him more attention on social media than ever before. The last time I checked the video in which he said the following received upwards of 90 million views: “I will arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York City.”
Not long afterward, a brutal double stabbing occurred, amid shouts of the now all-too- familiar “Allahu Akbar. One of the victims was a man wearing a kippah as he left a synagogue service. The attack happened on the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av, no more than a two-minute walk from my daughter’s apartment.
I leave it to you to decide whether this kind of rhetoric helps create a more peaceful New York City.
So I ask: How could I not speak up? How could I not use my voice in support of my people at a time like this? Isn’t it obvious? And why shouldn’t anyone who cares about Jews and Israel use their own voice?
You don’t need a huge platform. You simply need to speak out in whatever sphere you find yourself. This is the moment your parents and grandparents hoped you’d never see.
How you choose to act matters. It matters a great deal.
The post Why I stand with Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Over 12 Torah scrolls stolen from Paris suburb synagogue
(JTA) — Over a dozen Torah scrolls have been stolen from a French synagogue in an attack the local rabbi called “antisemitic.”
The burglary hit the Grand Synagogue of Levallois-Perret, a wealthy suburb of Paris, between Sunday night and Monday morning. Rabbi Chalom Lellouche said the Jewish community was “violated” by the theft.
“It is, of course, a criminal act, but it is also an antisemitic act that specifically targeted the Torah,” Lellouche said in a joint video statement on Monday with Philippe Cohen, the president of the local Jewish community association.
The des Hauts-de-Seine prefecture, which handles local state administration, said on X that the stolen scrolls represented not just a “simple theft,” but “an entire community of believers that was wounded to the depths of its soul.”
Prefect Alexandre Brugère and elected officials met with Jewish communal leaders in Levallois-Perret on Monday evening, promising to identify the thieves and secure the return of the scrolls. A police investigation is ongoing, according to Cohen.
Cohen said the burglary was the work of a “professional team” that bypassed security systems and said the synagogue’s security was being reassessed. He called the incident “a profound spiritual trauma for the entire Jewish community in France and around the world.”
“It was the Torah — and only the Torah — that was targeted,” said Cohen. “No property was damaged, and nothing else was stolen apart from Torah items of immeasurable value.”
France recorded 1,320 antisemitic incidents in 2025, accounting for 53% of anti-religious acts, according to the Ministry of the Interior. Jews make up less than 1% of the French population.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Over 12 Torah scrolls stolen from Paris suburb synagogue appeared first on The Forward.
