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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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DSA racks up wins in Congress as Democratic party shifts on Israel
The Democratic Socialists of America is expected to grow its influence within the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, picking up at least five seats in the House, according to unofficial election results on Tuesday night. The gains mark major progress for the organization that is credited with the rise of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fierce critic of Israel.
Before Tuesday night, the organization had just two members in Congress: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Both are members of the Squad, the group of young, outspoken progressives formed in 2018 that challenged the party’s establishment and criticized U.S. support for Israel.
DSA members Chris Rabb, Donavan McKinney, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Melat Kiros were projected to win their House seats Tuesday night, preliminary election returns show.
A larger DSA caucus could give progressive Democrats greater leverage to pressure leadership into holding votes on Israel policy, an issue that has divided the party since Oct. 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza, with intensifying concern over the war with Iran. The DSA gained influence during a period when Democrats had little power, as the minority in both the House and Senate, to shape the foreign policy of the United States. Regaining control of the House, and potentially the Senate, those divisions will become much harder for party leaders to avoid.
All of the DSA members heading to Congress have described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide and support cutting off military aid to Israel — positions increasingly held by Democrats outside the DSA as well.
President Trump announced Tuesday that the U.S. will end nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of the year, while still allowing Israel to buy U.S. weapons. But the national DSA goes further, leading a campaign for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel and passing a 2025 resolution explicitly opposing Zionism.
The victories follow a string of DSA wins over longtime incumbents during the Democratic primaries, buoyed by the victory of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor last June. Two of the DSA candidates that Mamdani endorsed, Avila Chevalier and Valdez, cruised to victory in their heavily blue New York City districts.
Avila Chevalier is a former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist who has repeatedly defended her attendance at a pro-Palestinian rally on Oct. 8, 2023.
Rabb in Philadelphia; McKinney in Detroit, Michigan; and Kiros in Boulder also won comfortably in their heavily blue districts.
Kiros drew condemnation from some Colorado Jews after declining to call the 2025 firebombing of a walk for Gaza hostages in Boulder antisemitic, instead calling it a “political attack” targeting Zionism. The attacker was heard yelling “Free Palestine” as he threw Molotov cocktails, injuring 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died from her injuries.
In California, DSA candidates faced tighter races in the general election, facing off against Democratic incumbents. The nail-biter races were the result of California’s unique primary process, where the top two candidates advance to the general election regardless of party. Several key California races were still too early to call, including two House races featuring DSA candidates and the Los Angeles mayoral election featuring DSA candidate Nithya Raman.
Two other DSA mayoral candidates won Tuesday night, David Morales in Providence, Rhode Island, and Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C.
But the DSA did not win everywhere. In Florida, Republican incumbent Ashley Moody defeated DSA member Angie Nixon Tuesday night, early results show.
Had Nixon won, she would have become the first DSA member in the U.S. Senate. (While Sen. Bernie Sanders has long identified as a democratic socialist, he is not an official DSA member.)
But Moody was widely expected to win the race, leading Nixon by an average of 6 percentage points in polls.
The post DSA racks up wins in Congress as Democratic party shifts on Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term.
Esther Panitch spent Tuesday evening the way she spends every election night since holding office: on her couch at home in an Atlanta suburb, watching The Campaign, the 2012 comedy in which Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play rival candidates for Congress who will stoop to anything to win.
It looks likely that the Georgia Democrat will have a third term in the state Georgia House of Representatives, where Panitch has been the only Jewish member since 2023. With 72% of precincts reporting, she is leading 67%-33% over her Republican challenger, Keith Gettmann. She may be joined in the state legislature by some additional Jewish members after Tuesday night’s vote.
Panitch is a pro-Israel Democrat in a party where support for Israel is increasingly contested. She has built her time in office on issues around antisemitism and Holocaust education, and she has criticized her own senator, Jon Ossoff, in public over Israel. Ossoff endorsed her this fall anyway.
Panitch has been warning for years that her party is drifting away from Israel, and she said she’s grateful Georgia’s Democratic leaders haven’t gone along. This summer she felt the pull at home. A local Democratic youth group told her to “mind her own business” after she asked a county party to move a fundraiser from Rosh Hashanah to another date. The Jewish Council of the Democratic Party of Georgia, where she’s first vice chair, condemned the group, and Panitch says the state and county parties did too.
She also survived a primary challenge from her left this spring. Aaron Baker, a fellow Jewish Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, called her a “DINO,” or Democrat in name only. Panitch won by a 13% margin.
Her complaint about Ossoff goes back to 2024, when he voted for resolutions to block some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, and Panitch criticized him publicly at the time. But she still voted for him in the midterms. “I’m not going to bite my nose to spite my face,” she said.
Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, is a “non-starter,” she said. Collins has faced scrutiny over a son-in-law who posted antisemitic videos and a former staffer who posted Nazi imagery. He has said he doesn’t share those views. Ossoff was reelected Tuesday.
Laws she’s passed
Much of Panitch’s record in office has been a response to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Georgia already had a hate crime law, she said, but it didn’t define antisemitism. She co-sponsored the bill that did — adopting a widely used, though controversial, definition — which the governor signed into law. She had been arguing for it before Oct. 7, but her colleagues, she said, “really couldn’t understand that until they saw it on Oct. 8.”
This past session, she co-sponsored a first-in-the-nation measure requiring public schools to disclose foreign funding, which she said grew out of research showing Qatar had funded Fulton County Public Schools and Georgia State University. She also backed a requirement that the state monitor complaints of antisemitism and other discrimination, from public schools through colleges. Previously, she said, parents had complained about incidents, but whether anything happened depended on the principal. A separate bill she led, creating one-stop family justice centers for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, passed unanimously and was signed into law.
The monitoring requirement puts her in the middle of the debate over where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. Asked whether she considers anti-Zionism antisemitism, Panitch said, “Not all of it. But there’s enough crossover that any of it should be examined.” Her line is a legal one. “They can hate Israel and Jews all they want,” she said. The issue is “if they commit a crime because of it.”
A tree for every critic
She’s also been targeted. On the morning the antisemitism bill was signed into law in January 2024, she discovered a threatening postcard in her mailbox containing antisemitic slurs, including a reference to “gassing the Jews.” A local rabbi who had backed the bill received a similar postcard. The man who sent the cards, Ariel Collazo Ramos, was convicted last fall and sentenced in February to five years in prison, the maximum. Panitch testified at his trial and sentencing.
“Jews have a right to participate in civic life in the United States, just as any other American,” she said, “and I’m not going to allow anybody to stop that.”
She has a lighter response to online critics. In 2024, she was at the University of Georgia for Israel Week, walking a student in a yarmulke to another building so he wouldn’t be alone, when protesters followed and chanted at her. “Esther, Esther, you can’t hide,” she recalled. “We charge you with genocide.”
Her response: Donate a Jewish National Fund tree in Israel in the name of the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and post the receipt online. She has since sent trees in the names of individual trolls and other pro-Palestinian activists. “Okay, you get a tree! You get a tree!” she recalled in her best Oprah Winfrey impersonation. The harassment, she said, “really stopped bothering me after that.”
Her Jewish roots
Panitch grew up in a Jewish household in Miami, where she went to a JCC day camp and later spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah in Massachusetts. She’s a lifelong member of Hadassah, the third generation of her family in the organization. Her daughter is the fourth. She met her husband on a 1997 trip to Israel organized by the Jewish Federation of Miami, and they married the next year. Their three children went through Camp Judaea in North Carolina.
This summer she toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka with a group of teachers on a trip to concentration camps in Poland. They also visited Kielce, a city where survivors who had returned after the war were attacked by a mob in 1946 after a rumor that a Christian boy had been kidnapped. Dozens of Jews were killed.
What stunned her was how deep the roots went. “Jews had been there for 1,000 years before the war,” she said, “and were turned on in the blink of an eye. They were always othered, so I’m not going to allow that to happen in my country.”
She wants to bring that message home. Panitch is a legislative liaison for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and plans to push mandatory Holocaust education in her next term, especially given foreign money she believes has been used to create anti-Israel sentiment.
“I want to be able to show students what happens when mobs go after Jews, which is what is starting to happen now,” she said. “Everybody needs to know their history, Jews and non-Jews, and the ugly parts too, because we have to figure out how not to repeat them.”
Criticize Israel as much as you want, she said, but when it’s singled out for criticism “that they wouldn’t hold any other place to,” it can cross into antisemitism. “The result of antisemitism, unchecked, turns into atrocities.”
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Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon
(JTA) — Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, a supporter of Israel, is projected to beat Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist of America member, in a special election on Tuesday that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
With 96% of the vote counted, Moody won by a 2.7 percentage points. according to Associated Press.
The incumbent, Moody, was formerly the state attorney general, and was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Ron DeSantis in January 2025 after Marco Rubio vacated the seat to become secretary of state.
She was endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and President Donald Trump. She is a staunch supporter of Israel who has said she wants the U.S. to be “the most pro-Israel country in the world.” She also said that she “worked to make Florida the most pro-Israel state in the nation” as attorney general.
She has been critical of pro-Palestinian campus protests, and introduced a bill last year that would “claw back federal funds” when universities “violate students’ civil rights.” Too many “woke schools prioritize support for Hamas over their duty to protect the civil rights of ALL students,” she added.
Moody supported Trump and Rubio’s move to deport green card holders for their activism last year. “It is time for Hamas agitators to go,” she wrote.
Nixon is a progressive state legislator, with a campaign focused on universal healthcare and free childcare. She became a DSA member this year, but was not endorsed by the left-wing political organization. She did draw endorsements from a number of major progressive figures and campaigned alongside Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama.
She accuses Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and opposes sending military aid or American weapons to Israel “at this moment.” In November 2023, she introduced a statewide bill advocating for “de-escalation and cease-fire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine,” which was defeated 104-2 in the Florida House. She has condemned Hamas and the “violent terrorist attacks” that it committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Nixon’s Israel stance raised questions over whether it would affect her performance among the state’s substantial Jewish minority. Some Jewish Democrats and independents in the state said they were hung up on her Israel views, while others said they are counting on the Democrats flipping the Senate and that Nixon has toned down her harsher talk about Israel.
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