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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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He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
Heading into his audition for Marty Supreme, Isaac Simon was nervous. But not for the reasons you’d expect.
“I was taking a long lunch break from the museum,” he said, “and at the time I was three or four months into my job.”
Appearing in a Josh Safdie movie was something Simon, who runs internship programs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, had genuinely never dreamed of. He wasn’t an actor, or an aspiring one. He’d never taken an acting class or been in front of a camera.
But two years after he was scouted at a baseball card convention, Simon was invited to try out for the role of Roger, a cocksure amateur who gets hustled on the ping-pong table by Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser. Standing 6-foot-9 with ice-blue eyes, low eyebrows and flowing brown hair, Simon had the look, the paddle skills and, clearly, the temperament to land a pivotal part in an Oscar-bound — and richly Jewish — cinematic hit.
“I don’t get starstruck,” Simon, 31, said. “I get excited.”
The slew of non-actors who feature in Marty Supreme alongside A-listers like Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tyler, The Creator has already become part of the film’s lore. Safdie and veteran casting director Jennifer Venditti have a penchant for casting street regulars; among the first-timers in the movie are basketball legend George Gervin, viral TikTok and YouTube personas and the guy from Shark Tank.
But perhaps none had as personal a connection to the film’s story of post-war Jewish striving as Simon, a native New Yorker whose graduate study at Queens College focused on the development of Holocaust studies in the U.S. In Marty Supreme, which is loosely based on the story of real-life midcentury table tennis star Marty Reisman, one of the protagonist’s best friends is a Holocaust survivor; one of the film’s most arresting scenes is an Auschwitz flashback.
Simon’s day job is, of course, at the largest Holocaust museum in New York. The fateful coincidence of his casting, Simon said, was “like a bizarre lottery ticket I was able to cash in.”
A fateful encounter
The story of Simon’s star turn begins in the summer of 2022, when Venditti spotted him at a baseball card show in Long Island. Venditti was there with Safdie; Simon — then still in grad school — was there with his dad.
Venditti said they was there to cast extras and non-actors for a baseball-related movie, and asked if she could take a two-minute video of him talking about himself. He obliged, and in the recording told her where he was from (New York City) and what he was doing at the show (chasing the famously rare T206 tobacco card series).
“I thought to myself, ‘Wow, could I really have been at the right place and the right time for something I wasn’t even expecting?’” Simon recalled. Then two years passed, and the run-in faded from memory.
It was not until the summer of 2024 that he received an email from Venditti: “Isaac Simon audition opportunity – scouted at card show.” No script was provided and nothing about the project was disclosed — just a date and a location.
On his elevator up to the audition, he heard the hollow bouncing of a ping-pong ball. Having seen a headline about Chalamet being attached to a Reisman biopic a few days earlier, he realized what the next few minutes might entail.
“The first audition was a total blur,” Simon recalled. “I remember playing ping pong with the assistant casting director and he was like, ‘Oh you’re good!’” At a subsequent callback, he played out a few improv scenarios — some light trash talking, or being cheated in a game. A few weeks later, he got called in for costume fittings.
He hadn’t solicited any acting tips, or studied film prior to his audition. But his work at the museum, where he trains educators on how to teach the Holocaust in 90 minutes, had prepared him.
“Because teaching is a performance, there is sort of an inherent performative quality to the work I do,” Simon said. “And so I think that that lent itself well — or at the very least, it didn’t hurt — to the work I was being asked to do for Josh.”
‘Cast for a reason’
Having run through his lines with his dad and his girlfriend, Simon headed upstate that fall to play Roger — and play opposite Chalamet. (This time, he took two days off of work.)
Roger, the reigning hotshot at a humdrum bowling alley, features in two scenes. In the first, he’s goaded into wagering $40 against Marty, who’s feigning amateurism, and loses. He reappears a few minutes as Marty fills up at a nearby gas station, realizing he was hustled by the reigning American champion; he and his pals want their money back.
Walking into the converted Bowlero where they shot the first scene, Simon was floored by the set. “Each individual looked like they were from the 1950s, and yet their outfit was distinctly their own,” he recalled. Miyako Bellizzi, the costume designer, had fitted him in a striped button-up and faded blue work pants; Simon’s hair was slicked back and to the side.
He hadn’t met Safdie before he got to set, and his cues from the Uncut Gems co-director were limited.
Over the course of his scenes, there were times when he wasn’t sure he was doing what Safdie wanted. Here, it was his inexperience that Simon drew on. “I kept reminding myself that I was cast for a reason, and I was cast as a non-actor for a reason,” he said, “and what I’m bringing to this experience is inherently different than what a trained actor would be. Therefore, if I were a trained actor, I would not be what Josh was looking for in the scenario.”
He didn’t have too much time to banter with the film’s stars during the shoot; most of his time on set was spent with other bit-players. But when the camera was shooting other actors, Safdie wanted to keep the sound of live table tennis in the background, so he had Chalamet and Simon play each other off-camera.
As to who had the upper hand? “We’re probably about even,” Simon said.
Jewish mythmaking
Even after the shoot, Simon couldn’t quite believe it was real. He told almost no one outside his family, superstitious that the scene would get cut. But then the premiere arrived. “It was surreal,” he said.
He’s now seen the film nine times — yes, all the way through — indulging friends who want to see it with him. And his acting has won some praise, with one X post calling it an “incredible underrated performance” liked more than 2,000 times.
Simon likes the movie, if you couldn’t tell, echoing its director and star in calling it a love letter to New York. The film, Simon said, touches on Jewish identity in a way that reminds him of his own family and their experience in this country.
“The way in which it captured intergenerational relationships in Jewish homes in post-war America, in New York specifically, felt very autobiographical for the way that my relatives talked amongst each other,” he said. “There’s a love there that transcends.”
As a Holocaust educator, Simon felt the movie handled that theme appropriately. He found the honey scene — an Auschwitz flashback too intense to explain here — moving, and the Holocaust humor tactfully dispatched. He loved the yiddish.
Yet Simon still couldn’t wrap his head around his own involvement in such a fitting project. His work passing on the history and memory of the Holocaust to future generations was already meaningful before he got an IMDB page.
“So to be cast in a film and have a speaking line,” he said, “and it just so happens that that film is also this incredibly Jewish film — which has direct references in the scene at Auschwitz — is equally bizarre, but also really beautiful, and oddly perfect.”
The post He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’? appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed?
The United States has in effect broken with Israeli policy, cleverly engineering the Palestinian Authority’s return to Gaza.
President Donald Trump’s plan for the second stage of the Gaza ceasefire, the launch of which was announced Wednesday, involves the creation of a transitional Palestinian technocratic authority with strong ties to the PA. This collapses fictions Israel has sustained for years: that Gaza can be stabilized without the PA, which was ousted from the territory by Hamas in 2007; that the PA is no better than Hamas; and even that Palestinian governance itself is illegitimate, a belief held by the most extreme Israeli nationalists.
Reality has finally prevailed, and that reality is that the PA, flawed though it is, remains the only Palestinian political body capable of replacing Hamas in Gaza.
The logic expressed by those, like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who aim to keep the PA out of Gaza, has brought Israel to the brink. Splitting Palestinian governance between Hamas and the PA, long Netanyahu’s strategy, led to unmitigated disaster, and public anger is at a boil.
Which means that the PA must return to Gaza not only for the sake of Palestinians, but also for Israelis. The Zionist project must be steered away from permanent war, international isolation and internal decay. That means finding a way to work toward a sustainable future with the Palestinians — which almost certainly means, in turn, accepting the PA as their legitimate government.
Decades of misleading rhetoric
Since the establishment of a ceasefire, brokered by Trump’s administration, in September, Hamas has reasserted control over large parts of Gaza. Militarily weakened, it survived politically — because Israel still refused to empower any viable Palestinian alternative.
That return to the status quo in many ways serves Netanyahu’s agenda. Keeping Hamas in power allows for a state of permanent emergency and despair about the chances for peace — the very forces that Netanyahu has, for decades, successfully turned into political capital. “There is no difference between the PA and Hamas” became a mantra — as if a political bureaucracy and a theocratic militia that massacres civilians and rejects coexistence on principle could be legitimately compared.
Now, as long as Hamas rules Gaza, its very presence constitutes an emergency narrative that Netanyahu can use to delay the accountability over his responsibility for Oct. 7: Wartime is no time for politics.
The Palestinian Authority, by contrast, has been treated as dangerous because it represents a measure of pragmatism.
The PA, ineffective as it has been, could be the basis of a functional political framework that would force Israel to confront the need for separation from the Palestinians, real borders, and eventual Palestinian statehood. That’s especially true because there’s the potential for actual peace with a Palestine run by the PA, which already coordinates with Israel at enormous political cost in the West Bank, where its security forces arrest militants and dismantle extremist cells.
New governance for Gaza
The technocratic committee put forward to govern Gaza under Trump’s second phase plan is formally nonpartisan, but its personnel and legitimacy are largely drawn from the ranks of the PA, with Ali Shaath, a former PA deputy minister, set to lead the effort. Others come from the same institutional ecosystem, because there is simply no other reservoir of Palestinian administrative experience. The PA has publicly endorsed the framework. Israel must now also meet its own obligations under the Trump plan — no matter how distasteful its leaders might find the plan’s endorsement of the PA to be.
That means, chiefly, that Israel must declare clearly that once Gaza is stabilized by the technocratic committee, it is prepared to enter negotiations toward a Palestinian state, with final borders to be determined later. Israel can openly state its intention to retain major settlement blocs in the West Bank and seek long-term security arrangements in the Jordan Valley. But it should also affirm in principle its readiness to recognize a Palestinian state and guarantee access arrangements in Jerusalem.
These statements would not resolve the conflict, by any means. But they would go some way toward restoring credibility.
To get there, Hamas must surrender its weapons in Gaza, with an international stabilization force present to keep the peace. The best chance for disarmament is if the weapons are handed to Palestinians. By default, the PA security forces will be the best candidates for the job, as the new technocratic government lacks a security arm. Hamas’s senior leadership should probably be allowed to exit into exile.
To build a Palestinian consensus in this direction, regional powers — Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey — must make reconstruction conditional on disarmament. The choice must be unmistakable: real recovery without any trace of a Hamas militia – or years in tent cities.
If all this is achieved, the real work begins. Areas under the new authority must visibly improve. Adequate housing, electricity, water, education, employment, and free movement must return in ways Palestinians can measure. The comparison with Hamas rule must be obvious.
Reformations in the PA — and Israel
Such a process with the PA should also be made conditional.
As existing U.S. proposals suggest, the PA must be required to undertake concrete reforms, including by overhauling educational materials that appear to condone violence against Israelis and ending payments to the families of imprisoned militants.
Senior PA officials have already signaled willingness to move on both fronts. These are achievable changes,
The payoff would be immense, potentially including normalization with Saudi Arabia, broader reconciliation of Israel the Arab and Muslim worlds, the gradual erosion of the global delegitimization campaign against Israel, and renewed international cooperation — especially in confronting Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and regional militias. In time, Zionism would once again be seen as a serious national project capable of difficult, mature decisions.
The catch: Little of this is likely to happen under the current Israeli government.
That is the central truth of 2026, an election year: a change of leadership in Israel is not optional for anyone who wants a better future. The disaster of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack was the culmination of years of strategic failure, ideological paralysis, and the reckless empowerment of Hamas. This is what happens when complacent societies repeatedly elevate unfit leadership in the face of existential danger.
So Israelis must decide: will they support a government that thrives on permanent conflict, or endorse the possibility of peace?
The post Trump’s new Gaza plan marks a radical break from Israeli policy — can it succeed? appeared first on The Forward.
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California’s Gavin Newsom Proposes Budget Increase for State Universities Amid Federal Funding Threats
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento, California, US, on Aug. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a rumored potential candidate for US president in 2028, has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds for state universities amid the Trump administration’s policy of canceling federal grants and contracts held by institutions which it accuses of failing to combat campus antisemitism.
Newsom previously sought to cut funding to the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) by 8 percent during the 2025-2025 fiscal year (FY), before dropping that figure to 3 percent. Then on Friday, the governor proposed a new budget which would increase next year’s appropriation by $350.6 million for UC and $365.7 million for CSU, raising the state’s general fund for the schools to $5.3 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively.
“The budget introduced today by Gov. Newsom continues to provide critical support for the university and our students,” UC president James B. Milliken said in a statement responding to the news. “State support is more important than ever, as we face tremendous financial pressures stemming from rising costs and unprecedented federal actions. UC campuses rely on funding stability to serve students and maintain the academic and research excellence that has made UC the world’s greatest research university.”
He added, “An investment in UC is an investment in California’s future. I look forward to our ongoing partnership with Gov. Newsom and the legislature to ensure that our students have what they need to succeed at UC and beyond.”
The move, even as it defers $129.7 million for UC and $143.8 million for CSU to a later date, gives the schools breathing room as they fear the Trump’s administration’s confiscation of funds. Last year, for example, the administration impounded $250 million from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
US President Donald Trump ordered the money canceled in August after determining that the school exposed Jewish students to discrimination by refusing to intervene when civil rights violations transpired or failing to correct a hostile environment after the fact. He ordered the move even after UCLA agreed to donate $2.33 million to a consortium of Jewish civil rights organizations to resolve an antisemitism complaint filed by three students and an employee.
UCLA was sued and excoriated by the public over its handling of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that an anti-Zionist student group established on campus in the final weeks of the 2024 spring semester. Witnesses said that it was a source of antisemitism from the moment it became active, and according to the lawsuits, students there chanted “death to the Jews,” set up illegal checkpoints through which no one could pass unless they denounced Israel, and ordered campus security assigned there by the university to ensure that no Jews entered it.
Many antisemitic incidents occurred at UCLA before the institution was ultimately sued and placed it in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.
Just five days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, anti-Zionist protesters chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic. Other incidents included someone’s tearing a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, titled “Loudmouth Jew,” and leaving it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, as well as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) staging a disturbing demonstration in which its members cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
On the same day that UCLA settled the suit, the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ruled that UCLA’s response to antisemitic incidents constituted violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic antisemitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement at the time. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: the [Department of Justice] will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”
Newsom has positioned himself as an ally of higher education throughout its clash with Trump. In August, he demanded that Harvard University president Alan Garber resign rather than reach a deal with the Trump administration that would restore federal funding to Harvard in exchange for the school’s agreeing to conservative demands for addressing campus antisemitism and shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“You don’t work with Donald Trump — only FOR Donald Trump,” Newsom protested, writing on the X social media platform. “Looks like Harvard has chosen to surrender. Alan Garber must resign. An absolute failure of leadership that will have demonstrable impacts to higher education across our country. He should be ashamed.”
He added, “California will never bend the knee.”
Newsom had days earlier criticized Trump’s effort to combat antisemitism and reform higher education, denouncing it as “disgusting political extortion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.