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Jewish orphans evacuated from Odessa to Berlin at Ukraine war’s start are headed home again

ODESSA, Ukraine (JTA) – A year after Rabbi Mendy Wolff spirited 120 children and staff away from the Mishpacha Orphanage in this war-torn country to the safety of Berlin, he is preparing to bring them home.

That’s not because the war is over — far from it. One year after Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, fighting grinds on and much of Ukraine has been plunged into austerity conditions.

Instead, the children of Mishpacha are headed back to Odessa because of the high cost of keeping them fed, housed and educated in Germany. Chaya Wolff, Mendy’s mother and the wife of Odessa’s chief rabbi, Avraham Wolff, said the price tag was 750,000 euros — close to $800,000 — a month. They’ll join other Ukrainians who have returned to their homeland as it became clear that the war would not end quickly.

“We could have bought seven buildings for the [Jewish] community in Odessa with that money,” she said from Odessa, where she stayed along with her husband after the Russian invasion to care for remaining Jews in the city, where the Wolff family operates Chabad of Odessa. “But now the money is finished and it’s time to bring our children home.”

Mendy Wolff said that when he first headed to Berlin several days after Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, he expected to return home in a matter of days. He had become the orphanage’s director overnight, when his parents tasked him with getting the children out of Ukraine. He and his wife, Mushky, had instructed their charges to pack two of each item of clothing.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier talks with refugee children from the Jewish community in Odessa at a Chabad center in Berlin two days after their arrival as refugees, March 7, 2022. (Clemens Bilan – Pool/Getty Images)

“As I was packing, I remember spotting my Megillat Esther on the shelf and thinking I won’t be needing that because Purim is two weeks from now and we’ll be back by then,” Wolff told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, referring to the biblical book traditionally read on Purim.

The journey to Berlin took 53 hours and traversed five international borders, but Wolff and his wife tried to make the atmosphere as fun as possible for the children.

“We sang songs all the way and even though most of the children knew what was happening, we made it feel like summer camp — only in the winter,” Wolff said.

Getting the children out of Ukraine meant pulling strings of all kinds, since most did not have passports or even original birth certificates. Most of the children in the orphanage have parents who are unable to care for them; Wolff got the parents’ permission to take the children out of the country, a challenging task in the chaos after the invasion. “That is why we didn’t escape on the first day of the war,” he told JTA from Berlin at the time.

For 40 children for whom no living relatives could be found, Rabbi Avraham Wolff and his wife, Chaya, signed on as legal guardians. The Chabad emissaries in Berlin managed to secure VIP status for the young refugees to bring them across EU borders as personal guests of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who greeted them on their arrival in the German capital.

The Wolff family operates Chabad of Odessa. Rabbi Avraham and Chaya Wolff are sitting. Rabbi Mendy Wolff, who has overseen the children relocated from the group’s orphange to Berlin, is at the center in the back row. (Courtesy Chabad Odessa)

The children and orphanage staff were joined by other Odessians: university students, single mothers and their own offspring. Their flight and warm welcome in Berlin captured international headlines.

“Everyone knew there was an orphanage coming,” Mendy Wolff told JTA in Berlin shortly after the group’s arrival. “It was an unbelievable hug. It made us feel good in our hearts.”

But even then, the high cost of caring for the children in Berlin was weighing on the volunteers who leapt to help them. “We’ve received an outpouring of support from the community and beyond, lots of clothes and other supplies, but what we really need now are financial donations — only the food for all the children costs about 5,000 euros every day,” one told the Associated Press at the time.

Over the course of the next 11 months, the Hotel Müggelsee, on the banks of Berlin’s largest lake of the same name, would become home to some 300 Jewish refugees. In that time, the group celebrated not just Purim but a full year of Jewish holidays, as well as the gamut of Jewish lifecycle events, from bar mitzvahs to births and brisses. The group recently celebrated the first birthday of the youngest child to make the trek from Odessa, Tuvia, who was just 5 weeks old when he arrived in Berlin.

Jewish children from Odessa in war-torn Ukraine celebrate Purim 2022 with members of the Chabad Berlin Jewish community, March 17, 2022. (Omer Messinger/Getty Images)

For Wolff, the hardest part was grappling with the unknown. “It was very similar to what people experienced at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. You don’t know who it will infect or how many people will die or how long you’ll need to live like this.”

Like many others, Wolff was certain that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s army would crush Ukraine in a matter of days. “With each passing day we saw that the Ukrainians were far more resilient than we had given them credit for and that the Russians weren’t as much as superheroes as we thought.”

The irony that Germany, and not Israel, became the host country for Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe is not lost on the Wolffs. While Mendy is reluctant to express political opinions of any kind, his mother, Chaya, is more forthright, saying that Israel had refused them entry.

Mark Dovev, the regional director of Nativ, the Israeli government office that facilitates immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, later told JTA that taking in a minor from another country is “tantamount to kidnapping.” Brushing off Dovev’s objections, Chaya Wolff said, “Just as Germany turned a blind eye, Israel could have also taken them in temporarily as refugees.”

The children and staff of Mishpacha Orphanage in Odessa pose outside the Hotel Mugglesee in Berlin, their home for nearly a year since fleeing war in Ukraine. (Courtesy Chabad Odessa)

Since German law bans homeschooling, the children were required to enroll in a local school as well as to learn German. German authorities allowed the student body to largely adhere to the Ukrainian curriculum, however, and they were taught by a handful of the women refugees who happened to be teachers. The hotel, which functioned as a dormitory, doubled as a branch of the local Chabad school — replete with classrooms and a schoolyard.

But keeping the refugees in Berlin came at a steep price, footed by various donors such as the International Fellowship for Christians and Jews as well as private donations. An online fundraiser netted $685,500 in small gifts from more than 5,000 donors — a significant tally, but far short of its $1 million goal. So it was mostly out of economic considerations, then, that the Wolffs decided to close up shop in Berlin and bring the refugees home later this month.

While some Ukrainians who fled the country say they have no intention of returning while the war rages, the Wolffs and their charges are hardly the first Ukrainians to make their way back home. Many of them have cited the high cost of life abroad, along with separation from family and guilt about abandoning their country, for coming back to a warzone. So many Ukrainians were returning last fall that the country’s leaders urged them to wait until this spring to return, lest they tax fragile infrastructure.

Ukrainians queue at the railway station in Przemysl, Poland, to depart for Ukraine, amid a reversal in migration patterns as the Ukraine war ground on, Dec. 20, 2022. (Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

According to Mendy Wolff, his group would be staying in Berlin were it not for budgetary concerns. Still, he said, there were many positive aspects about the decision to return home.

“Psychologically, it’s not easy being here. You’re not living like a human. It’s like living on borrowed time and in a refugee camp, albeit a luxury refugee camp,” he said. “I’m very excited to be in my own bed and my own blankets.”

For both mother and son, the responsibility of bringing the refugees back to a country that is still very much at war weighs heavily. Odessa is faring better than many other southern Ukrainian cities like Mykolaiv and Kherson to the east, which have suffered daily shelling. Still, air raid sirens sound multiple times a day and there is no electricity for 20+ hours. But as long as residents have access to bomb shelters and generators — including the kind made from car batteries that Avraham Wolff recently held a fundraiser to buy — Chaya Wolff describes it as “livable.”

“It’s not an easy decision and we hope it’s the right one,” Chaya Wolff said. “At the end of it all, we’re ‘believers, the children of believers,’” she added, quoting the Talmud.

Toby Axelrod contributed reporting from Berlin.


The post Jewish orphans evacuated from Odessa to Berlin at Ukraine war’s start are headed home again appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026

This year brought sweeping change in national politics, in the U.S.-Israel relationship and in New York, the city with the largest Jewish population.

At the Forward, we closely tracked the transition to President Trump’s second term and profiled his cabinet selections and controversial nominees and appointees who trafficked in antisemitism or had ties to white nationalists and expressed admiration for Nazis. We covered the president’s crackdown on the pro-Palestinian campus protests that defined 2024 and the weaponization of antisemitism that led to multimillion dollar settlements with Ivy League universities, including Columbia and Cornell.

We provided exclusive, on-the-ground reporting on the battle for the Jewish vote in the competitive New York City mayoral race. We conducted the first Jewish-media interview with Zohran Mamdani as his campaign began gaining traction, even while he was still polling a distant second in the Democratic primary. We also had inside access to the outgoing Eric Adams administration and its effort to counter rising antisemitism, and had the only local reporter accompanying Adams on his farewell trip to Israel.

Here are the seven political stories we’ll be watching most closely in 2026 that will shape American politics and the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad.

Zohran Mamdani’s New York City 

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on Dec. 11. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Mamdani will be sworn into office at midnight on Jan. 1, 2026 as the city’s first Muslim mayor. The swearing-in will be followed by an inauguration ceremony that day at a yet-undisclosed location.

He will immediately face a series of tests on the promises and priorities that carried him through the historic campaign at a moment when the city’s Jewish community remains divided over his stance on Israel. Mamdani’s mixed response to the protest outside the Park East Synagogue, which featured anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans last month, is likely to come under fresh scrutiny as his term begins. Mamdani has remained mum on whether he’d support new legislation that would create a buffer zone outside houses of worship to protect congregants from targeted protests.

Mamdani will also have to decide whether to rescind a recent executive order by Adams barring city agencies from participating in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts. He will also determine the fate of the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism, which has pursued a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. And he will need to decide whether to continue the New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.

He will file top City Hall and government positions, including the potential appointments of his senior Jewish advisers.

Last month, Mamdani announced he’ll reappoint Jessica Tisch, the Jewish NYC police commissioner, as head of the police department he promised to reform.

The battle for the Jewish vote in the governor’s race

Gov. Kathy Hochul at the Court of Appeals in Albany on April 5, 2022. Photo by Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul

Mamdani’s first months in office and his legislative agenda will also shape the New York governor’s race.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, running for reelection for another full term, endorsed Mamdani in the general election after remaining neutral during the primary. She has signaled reservations about several key Mamdani priorities, like universal free buses, which will need the state’s approval, and has also distanced herself from Mamdani on Israel.

Hochul’s embrace of Mamdani could bolster her standing in the Democratic primary, where she faces a left-wing challenge from her lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, who is married to a Jewish woman.

But it could also complicate her outreach to Jewish voters in the general election. Bruce Blakeman, the first Jewish executive of Nassau County on Long Island, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, an upstate congresswoman who has made the fight against antisemitism on college campuses central to her congressional brand, are competing in a GOP primary to challenge Hochul. In 2022, former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within five percentage points of winning the governor’s race, powered by strong Jewish support.

Who will win Jerry Nadler’s seat?

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) during Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s joint meeting of Congress on July 19, 2023. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

After serving 17 terms in Congress, Rep. Jerry Nadler, co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, is set to retire to pave the way for generational change, a race that will be closely watched locally and across the nation.

The Manhattan district has one of the largest Jewish electorates in the nation. Jews in the 12th Congressional District account for about 30% of the vote in the Democratic primary. Nadler has, in recent years, campaigned on the need to preserve New York City’s Jewish representation in Congress.

The Jewish candidates vying for the seat include Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg, and Cameron Kasky. Assemblymember Alex Bores, whose wife, Darya Moldavskaya, is Jewish, and Councilmember Erik Bottcher are also considered viable candidates. Lasher, a protege of Nadler, has the longtime Jewish congressman’s support. Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy,  has made funding for security measures at synagogues and Jewish institutions a central pillar of his campaign.

Other New York congressional races 

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) on Dec. 13. Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Congressional Integrity Project

There are a few other House races in New York where pro-Israel incumbents are facing challenges from the left. Those primary contests are a crucial test of whether support for Israel and an alliance with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has become a political liability.

Rep. Dan Goldman, the Jewish congressman representing the north of Brooklyn and the Lower Manhattan district since 2023, is being challenged in the primary by Brad Lander, the outgoing city comptroller and former mayoral candidate, who has the backing of Mamdani and other progressive firebrands. For his campaign, Lander hired Morris Katz, a Jewish strategist and ad maker who was behind Mamdani’s successful working-class appeal and inspiring TV commercials. Katz produced Lander’s Mr. Rogers-themed launch video.

Lander, who is also Jewish, has become more vocal about Palestinian rights in recent years. He supported Ben & Jerry’s decision to end sales in the occupied West Bank in 2021 and has regularly attended a weekly rally against the Israeli government’s handling of the war in Gaza. Recently, he acknowledged that he divested from Israel Bonds in 2023, ending the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities. In his candidacy announcement, Lander slammed Goldman’s support for the war in Gaza and accused him of “doing AIPAC’s bidding,” though the incumbent had early on called for humanitarian pauses and criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership.

Rep. Ritchie Torres, a three-term pro-Israel progressive from the Bronx, is facing three primary challengers, a crowded field that could ultimately make it easier for him to win reelection. Michael Blake, a former state legislator who ran for mayor in the Democratic primary and later endorsed Mamdani, is making attacks on AIPAC central to his campaign, and Dalourny Nemorin, an organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America’s local chapter, is testing the momentum behind newcomer and socialist candidates. Assemblywoman Amanda Septimo, who joined an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2016 and visited Israel again following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, also announced her candidacy. Septimo is considered a member of Mamdani’s inner circle.

Rep. Michael Lawler, a Republican who has been a strong pro-Israel voice since his election in 2022, is expected to face the winner of an eight-person Democratic primary in a tough election cycle for Republicans. Lawler has the support of the growing Hasidic population in Rockland County. The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson, who is Jewish, and Army veteran Cait Conley.

Michigan Senate race a test for Democrats’ positions on Israel

Abdul El-Sayed on July 23, 2019. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Michigan Senate race is shaping up to be one of the clearest tests of the Democratic coalition and of how the party navigates Israel.

The leading candidates in the Democratic primary are Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian-American who is seeking to channel the energy of the 2024 Uncommitted movement and build on Mamdani’s surprise success in New York, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel Democrat who defeated progressive Jewish Rep. Andy Levin in 2022 with significant help from AIPAC.

The outcome of the contest will offer an early read on whether the left’s anti-establishment momentum can break through in a battleground state, and how much pro-Israel groups retain their influence in Democratic primaries.

The Jewish governors running for reelection 

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on Aug. 26. Photo by Joe Lamberti/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are widely expected to win reelection. Their margins, messages and national profile will position both as major figures in the early mix for the 2028 presidential race. Each is navigating the same balancing act that will challenge Democrats with national ambitions: trying to appeal to a base that is growing more critical of Israel while still keeping the trust of Jewish voters and pro-Israel allies.

Shapiro, who was viewed as a potential first Jewish president in 2024, remains on the narrow path he has carved out for himself. He highlights his Jewish identity, support for Israel and bipartisan appeal in all of his public appearances.

Pritzker, who governs a state with one of the largest Palestinian-American populations in the country, has become one of the most prominent voices of resistance to President Donald Trump. He has repeatedly invoked Nazi Germany in criticizing the administration’s policies and endorsed a Senate push to block U.S. arms sales to Israel to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israeli elections

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem on December 7, 2025.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem on December 7. Photo by Ariel Schalit/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to be in the headlines in America. He is expected to spend New Year’s Eve in the United States after yet another meeting with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort — the sixth meeting this year — underscoring the unusually close alignment between the two leaders.

Netanyahu is better known to Americans than most world leaders. He is now Israel’s longest-tenured prime minister, having served for more than 18 years as the country’s leader. He grew up in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, attended college and graduate school in Boston, served as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in the mid-1980s, and has delivered four speeches to a joint session of Congress.

Following three tumultuous years, Israeli voters are poised to head back to the ballot box sometime in 2026  — depending on how long the coalition government holds onto power amid legislative challenges — for what will effectively be another referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership. A January 2024 poll found that only 15% of Israelis, including 36% of those who had previously voted for his Likud Party, wanted to see Netanyahu stay on as prime minister following the failure to protect Israel on Oct. 7.

But the landscape has shifted dramatically since then.

All living hostages have been freed, and the remains of all those held by Hamas — but for one — have been returned. Hamas and Hezbollah leaders have been killed, and Iran’s nuclear program was set back after the 12-day war earlier this year, and the conflict in Gaza ended on terms jointly shaped by Washington and Jerusalem. Netanyahu, receiving the political backing from Trump, has also requested a pre-conviction pardon from Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Meanwhile, the opposition remains fractured among several would-be successors, complicating a unified challenge to Netanyahu’s rule.

A majority of American Jews hold an unfavorable view of Netanyahu and senior pro-Israel Democrats have called for a leadership change in Israel.

Netanyahu is also expected to visit New York City, at the latest next September when he comes to address the annual United Nations General Assembly, which will test Mamdani’s pledge to order his arrest if he visits Manhattan.

The post The 7 political stories Jews will be watching in 2026 appeared first on The Forward.

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How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas

(JTA) — Call me a softie, but I love a traditional Christmas Eve. If you don’t find me eating Chinese food and watching a movie, I might be catching Gotham Comedy Club’s “A Very Jewish Christmas!” show or comedian Joel Chasnoff’s “Christmas for the Jews.” Or I may just stay home, light a fire and listen to “Oy to the World: A Klezmer Christmas” by The Klezmonauts.

If none of that is your idea of traditional, you might want to get a copy of  Jordan Chad’s new book, “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition.”

A multidisciplinary researcher affiliated with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Jewish Studies, Chad offers up the “untold story” of how Yiddish-speaking Jews “celebrated” Christmas  — not as the birth of the baby Jesus, heaven forbid. On what they called “Nitl-nacht,” or just plain “Nitl,” Jews cut loose with games and drink and a vacation from Torah studies in ways that ran parallel with what their Christian neighbors were up to.

And if that sounds like a provocation, Chad agrees.

“When I use the term ‘Jews celebrated Christmas,’ what’s really important to understand is that Christmas wasn’t interpreted as a Christian holiday by the Jews,” he said.

The idea of Jews enjoying Christmas Eve also runs counter to the stories Jews told after they left their Yiddish roots behind and encountered the New World. There, memories were shaped and distorted, and nitl was remembered as a night of fear and superstition. The lore holds that Jews stayed inside, locked their doors, avoided Torah study and huddled against the threat of antisemitic violence.

But Chad, 31, a translator with a background in theoretical physics (which makes him a Yiddishist physicist, which is very fun to say), suspected there was more to the story of Jews and Christmas. That hunch led him deep into Yiddish memoirs and folklore.

What he found startled him. Again and again, memoirists writing about 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe wrote of their favorite “holiday”: nitl, commonly understood as a contraction of a Yiddish term meaning “not learning.”

Chad says that the version of Christmas as a season of foreboding is less remembrance than reinvention. Contemporary Yiddish accounts suggest that the holiday was more benign and even playful.

The key, he argues, is that for Jews and Christians alike, Dec. 24 was not so much a specifically Christian observance as a midwinter festival layered with supernatural anxiety, drinking, feasting and folk rituals. Easter was the central Christian holiday — and the actual season when Christians attacked Jews. By contrast, Christmas fell in the darkest season of the year and was marked with topsy-turvy behavior rife with pagan hand-me-downs, including the Christmas tree. Celebrants would suspend ordinary routines, play cards, tell ghost stories and stay awake to ward off malevolent spirits.

“Christians were doing this, and so were Jews,” Chad said. “It was common European folk culture.”

Only later, in part as a reaction to the revelry and their own encounter with the New World, did church leaders put the Christ back in Christmas, emphasizing the birth of Jesus. “In Europe, nobody was going to forget about Christianity,” Chad explained. “But in the New World, Jesus’s birth really needed to be the part of Christmas that Christians promoted.”

Once Christmas became more explicitly Christian, Jews distanced themselves. In the process, they retrofitted their own memories.

The ominous folklore about Christmas that was also part of Jewish tradition — for example, that Jesus might visit Jewish homes on Christmas eve to poison their drink with blood — was newly emphasized by Jews, turning a night of fun into a warning about assimilation. Stories about the dangers of Christmas — even when exaggerated — helped reinforce a sense of Jewish distinctiveness in a Christian-majority culture.

“Jewish immigrants weren’t going to tell their children, ‘When we were kids, we had a blast on Christmas Eve,’” Chad said. Instead, they leaned on reinterpretations that cast nitl as a defensive measure — a night too dangerous to study Torah, a holiday marked only by negation.

Chad consistently argues that Yiddish-speaking Jews were not cut off from the wider Christian culture, even if they had different religious structures, calendars and social and material status.

“I’d call it common European folk culture,” he said. “There were enormous differences between Jews and Christians — but when it came to fear of midwinter demons, the love of drinking, or the topsy-turvy atmosphere of Christmas Eve, the folklore overlaps are undeniable.”

Chad also draws a direct line between the “Yiddish” Christmas and the various ways Jews to continue to mark the Yuletide season. In many Hasidic communities, nitl is still a night when Torah study is suspended. If these Orthodox Jews aren’t playing cards or chess, they might be catching up on chores. Meanwhile, those Jewish events on Christmas Eve have become a growth industry, from singles-only “Matzo Balls” to Jewish cabarets to Christmas classics sung in Yiddish.

And then there’s Chinese food and a movie. Chad suggests that only in the late 20th century did Jews begin to reclaim Christmas as a kind of unofficial holiday of their own. By the 1980s, eating at Chinese restaurants — traditionally among the few places open — became a way to distinguish the day without crossing into Christian ritual. (As Darlene Love sang on “Saturday Night Live”: “They can finally see ‘King Kong’ without waiting in line / They can eat in Chinatown and drink their sweet-ass wine.”) What once was avoidance evolved into a playful counter-tradition, a way to be present in the surrounding culture without being absorbed by it.

If the book has a deeper message, it is that Jews have always negotiated Christmas, just in different registers. Sometimes the day has been used to draw lines; sometimes to soften them. It is all part of the ongoing Jewish effort to live distinctly within a world shaped by someone else’s holiday.

What emerges in “Christmas in the Yiddish Tradition” is not a sentimental argument for reviving a lost holiday, nor a polemic against drawing firm boundaries between Us and Them. It’s a reminder that Jewish life in Eastern Europe was far richer, weirder and more porous than memory often allows.

“I hope people understand that Jews didn’t think they were celebrating a Christian holiday,” Chad said. “They were celebrating a midwinter holiday they considered their own.”

He paused, then added with a laugh: “And they had a pretty good time doing it.”

The post How Eastern Europe’s Jews celebrated a merry ‘nitl’ Christmas appeared first on The Forward.

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Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach

A Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach turned deadly on Sunday with reports of at least 10 dead, including a Chabad rabbi, amid rising antisemitism in Australia.

One suspect was killed at the scene and the other was arrested, in what local police are calling a “terror incident.”

“This is an attack on the Jewish community that deeply that pains us,” said Robert Gregory, the chief executive of the Australian Jewish Association.

Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who worked with Chabad of Bondi, was killed in the shooting, Chabad’s media director told The New York Times.

“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”

Earlier this month, a group of Jewish leaders from Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States met in Sydney to coordinate responses to rising antisemitism there and internationally.

In recent months, two synagogues have been attacked in Melbourne.

The post Hanukkah shooting leaves at least 10 dead at Australia’s most popular beach appeared first on The Forward.

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