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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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US Ambassador Urges Belgium to Drop Charges Against Mohels, Warning Case Threatens Religious Freedom
A Orthodox Jewish man is seen in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Photo: Reuters/Belga Photo Dirk Waem
US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White has urged local authorities to drop all charges against three trained circumcisers known as mohels whose homes were raided last spring amid a government probe into illegal circumcisions — with Jewish and political leaders warning the case is a direct threat to religious freedom.
The US diplomat slammed the Belgian government’s legal action against the mohels as a “ridiculous and antisemitic prosecution.”
“Antisemitism is unacceptable in any form, and it must be rooted out of our society,” White wrote in a social media post on X.
The mohels “are doing what they have been trained to do for thousands of years,” he continued. “Stop this unacceptable harassment of the Jewish community here in Antwerp and in Belgium.”
White also called on Belgian Minister of Health Frank Van den Broecke to deregulate the Jewish ritual, effectively lifting government restrictions and allowing it to be practiced freely.
“It’s 2026, you need to get into the 21st century and allow our brethren Jewish families in Belgium to legally execute their religious freedoms!” the US diplomat said. “It’s disgusting what’s happened to these fine men and their families because of your inaction.”
Anti Semitism is UNACCEPTABLE in any form & it must be rooted out of our society.
President TRUMP @POTUS @realDonaldTrump @JDVance @VP @SecRubio @StateSEAS @DeputySecState and I call upon all of Belgium to do a much better job on this subject !
TO BELGIUM,
SPECIFICALLY YOU…
— Ambassador Bill White (@BillWhiteUSA) February 16, 2026
In May last year, Belgian police raided three locations in the Jewish Quarter of Antwerp, a northern Belgian city, seizing circumcision tools from several mohels after a local anti-Zionist rabbi filed a complaint accusing them of performing unauthorized or illegal circumcisions.
A mohel is a trained practitioner who performs the ritual circumcision in Jewish tradition known as a bris.
Among the homes raided by the Belgian police was that of Rabbi Aharon Eckstein, a highly experienced mohel and a prominent leader within the Antwerp Jewish community.
According to a police report, the searches had been ordered by a judge following a complaint filed in 2023 by Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an anti-Zionist activist previously accused of Holocaust denial, against Eckstein and other mohels within the Jewish community.
Since 2024, prosecutors have been investigating illegal circumcisions in the country amid concerns from local authorities that some Jewish circumcisions were being performed by individuals without proper medical training.
Now, the three mohels face charges for performing a medical procedure without a license, with prosecutors saying they have gathered enough evidence to secure a conviction, Belgian Member of Parliament Michael Freilich, the country’s only Orthodox Jewish lawmaker, told The Times of Israel.
However, a trial date has not yet been set and could take several months to schedule.
In his complaint, Friedman had accused six mohels, whom he identified to the police, of endangering infants by performing the metzitzah b’peh ritual, in which the mohel uses his mouth to suction blood from the circumcision area.
Eckstein and other rabbis, along with parents of children circumcised by them, have denied such accusations, insisting that they do not perform this practice.
In Antwerp, Friedman is known for publicly criticizing several customs that are important to ultra-Orthodox Jews, who represent the majority of the city’s 18,000 Jewish residents.
At the time, Jewish and political leaders accused local authorities of using the raids as part of a broader effort to intimidate religious figures in Belgium.
Ralph Pais, vice-chair of the Jewish Information and Documentation Centre (JID), commended White for his efforts, emphasizing the message of solidarity it sends to the local Jewish community.
“America continues to honor a commitment that Europe has also vowed to uphold: protecting Jewish life and ensuring that Jews can live openly and safely,” Pais said in a statement. “We expect Belgium to fully comply with the very principles and democratic values it claims to defend.”
Last July, dozens of European Jewish leaders called on the European Union to take action against Belgium, arguing that the Belgian police’s actions “represent a breach of an EU fundamental right, that of freedom of religion” and warning that this “echoes one of the darkest chapters in European history.”
Despite several attempts to ban the Jewish tradition cross Europe, ritual circumcision remains legal in all European countries, though many — including Belgium — limit the practice to licensed surgeons and often perform it in a synagogue.
In 2024, the Irish government arrested a London-based rabbi for allegedly performing a circumcision without the required medical credentials, marking the first arrest of a rabbi in Europe in years related to a bris.
The Conference of European Rabbis, through its Union of Mohels of Europe, is working to create a system of self-regulation and licensing for mohels, aiming to reduce the need for government oversight.
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Qatar’s Children Still Study Antisemitic Textbooks That Whitewash Hitler, Promote Violent Jihad, Study Finds
Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani speaks after a meeting with the Lebanese president at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, Feb. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Emilie Madi
Despite Qatari leaders’ rhetoric seemingly promoting peace and opposing hate, the Middle Eastern country continues to educate students with textbooks that celebrate terrorism, hide the Holocaust, and demonize the Jewish people by affirming longstanding antisemitic tropes, according to a new study.
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a nonprofit organization that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula around the world, reviewed 52 textbooks officially approved for the 2025-2026 State of Qatar national school curriculum, in addition to checking them against previous editions for potential revisions. The books covered topics ranging from social studies, geography, and history to Islamic education, Arabic language, and Arabic literature. IMPACT-se applied UNESCO-derived standards and guidelines of peace and tolerance in education.
The researchers found that the same problems from the 2021-2022 school year had not improved, as the textbooks “continue to reproduce antisemitic narratives, religious intolerance toward non-Muslims, and legitimization of violent jihad, all of which were documented in IMPACT-se’s earlier reports.”
The antisemitic material includes promoting stereotypes of Jews as arrogant liars obsessed with opposing Islam. The texts also cast Jews as “fleeing in fear, spreading discord, breaching agreements,” and possessing an “excessive attachment to material wealth, thereby reinforcing an image of Jews as fundamentally untrustworthy.”
In historical recounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the textbooks depict Jews as manipulating global affairs and deny Jewish historical connections to the Land of Israel. Maps of the region describe the borders of Mandatory Palestine, the name for the area from 1920-1948 when it was under British administration, as split between “Palestinian territory” and “Israeli expansion.”
The textbooks for Qatari children also glorify violent jihad and death in the name of Islam. They teach that students should “love jihad” and expect entry into paradise for those who choose martyrdom. These instructions accompany demonizations of non-Muslims as “infidels,” “pagans,” and “polytheists.” The textbooks offer little objective information about other faiths. They also promote an Arab nationalist ideology, oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and describe Hamas terrorist attacks as “military operations.”
IMPACT-se researchers cite an Islamic education book for sixth graders as an example of the curriculum’s promotion of terrorism.
“An Islamic education lesson teaches that one of the ways to measure a good Muslim woman is to raise children to sacrifice their lives, in what is understood to be violent jihad,” the report states. “The chapter about classical Islamic figure Nusaybah bint Ka’b praises the fact that she raised her children ‘to love jihad,’ pointing out that her three children later ‘died as martyrs for the sake of Allah Almighty.’ The textbook authors describe this type of upbringing as ‘optimal.’”
For seniors in high school, the report describes how an Islamic education text instructs that “God will reward men and women who fought and died for Islam, and will grant them entry to Paradise. The lesson does not attempt to caution that dying as a result of violent struggle should not be considered the utmost objective, and students are offered no alternative interpretations of this Qur’anic verse.”
An eighth-grade Islamic education book demonizes Jews with one lesson that insists “Jewish people are forever cursed by Allah to never accept the truth of Islam, which is why they consistently reject Islam.”
Eleventh graders learn that Jews “worship (or have worshipped) the Golden Calf, that they revere a character called Uzayr, that they believe themselves to be God’s own children, and that they venerate the Talmud more than the Torah (the latter of which is recognized by Islam as a heavenly-inspired text).”
IMPACT-se explains that this misinformation about Judaism is intend “to promote an antisemitic portrayal of Jewish people as exceptionally arrogant and disloyal to God, both of which are grave offenses from an Islamic point of view.”
As Qatar continues to fill its own students’ heads with anti-Israel propaganda and antisemitic tropes, so too does the country’s monarchy, the House of Thani, seek to spread its ideology in other countries’ educational institutions.
Earlier this month a US federal judge ordered Carnegie Mellon University to reveal its connections to Qatar involving a $1 billion financial relationship in response to the case of a top DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and civil rights official allegedly failing to respond to antisemitism. Money from Qatar reportedly paid the employee’s salary.
“Foreign governments with appalling human rights records are funding the very offices meant to protect students’ civil rights. This should alarm every parent, every student, and every policymaker in this country,” Lawfare Project director Ziporah Reich said in response to the ruling. “The court recognized that foreign government funding is not peripheral but potentially central to understanding how civil rights laws are applied on campus.”
Last month, the US Department of Education released a new database that showed Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, flooding academia with $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts.
“America’s taxpayer funded colleges and universities have both a moral and legal obligation to be fully transparent with the US government and the American people about their foreign financial relationships,” US Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement announcing the new figures.
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New York City Health Staffer Under Fire Over Posts Calling for Elimination of All Israelis
Demonstrators attend an anti-Israel protest on the day of the two-year anniversary of the attack on Israel by Hamas, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
A veteran staffer of the New York City Health Department called for the eradication of all Israelis among a series of newly surfaced antisemitic social media posts, raising concerns about the safety of Jewish New Yorkers at a time of unease for the community with Mayor Zohran Mamdani in office.
The watchdog group Canary Mission on Sunday exposed screenshots of the since-deleted social media posts by Achmat Akkad, who according to his LinkedIn account is a “Mental Health First Aid Trainer” with the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and, since 2017, has reportedly worked there as a community coordinator.
Around a year ago Akkad posted, “1 Israeli left in this world would be one too many!”
Canary Mission also shared screenshots of a deleted Nov. 10, 2021, post in which Akkad stated, “Jews that don’t support apartheid are safe. Zionists aren’t!”
According to multiple reports, Mamdani has appointed Akkad as a “Community Engagement Training Specialist.”
The unearthing of Akkad’s posts follows recent criticism of the new “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group” formed in Mamdani’s administration.
A cohort of staffers within the city’s Health Department reportedly formed the group and declared its purpose is to explore how supposed “global oppression” operates and affects health equity and the wellbeing of certain communities in the city. In its initial meeting, which lasted one hour, a presenter explicitly cited the conflict in Gaza as “ongoing genocide” and framed it along with other forms of alleged oppression as relevant to health outcomes, the New York Post reported.
Critics, including City Council leaders, say the working group crossed a line by focusing on international politics and critiques of a foreign government instead of core public health responsibilities like managing diseases, especially on city time with taxpayer-funded time and resources.
Meanwhile, Mamdani has come under fire for a wave of administrative appointees with histories of antisemitic rhetoric, support for terrorist groups, or affiliations with organizations hostile to Israel and the Jewish community.
Akkad specifically has also accused Israel of sustaining itself “by sacrificing the blood of Black and brown people as an offering to white supremacy,” according to screenshots shared by Canary Mission, He also argued that Zionists were responsible for a range of global issues, including far-right political gains, the dismantling of domestic racial diversity initiatives, limitations on free speech, conflicts and turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, discrimination against Muslims, and expanded police powers.
Akkad was arrested at a 2024 demonstration orchestrated by the controversial, anti-Israel Within Our Lifetime (WOL) activist organization. Members of WOL have repeatedly and publicly called for the destruction of Israel and have expressed effusive praise for Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Akkad first joined city government in 2015 as a community associate with the Human Resources Administration/Department of Social Services during the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“If this is who gets elevated into city government, what does that say about the leadership elevating him? New Yorkers should be outraged,” Canary Mission wrote of Akkad.
In the first weeks of Mamdani’s mayorship, his office has fielded a barrage of complaints over the appointment of individuals with radical views. Catherine Almonte Da Costa, who had been named Mamdani’s director of appointments, was forced to step down after social media posts from around 2011–2012 resurfaced in which she used phrases echoing classic antisemitic tropes, including references to “money hungry Jews.”
Mamdani also faced backlash after he abruptly fired Moshe Davis from his position as executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. Davis said in comments to The Free Press that he suspects he was relieved of his duties for being “a proud Zionist.” Davis was replaced by progressive Jewish activist Phylisa Wisdom.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
New York City has been experiencing a surge in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities. According to newly released police data, anti-Jewish hate crimes skyrocketed by 182 percent in January during Mamdani’s first month in office compared to the same period last year.