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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.
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How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors
(JTA) — VILNIUS, Lithuania — At a family reunion in California in 2013, Felicita Trueblood discovered a portal to the past: a binder full of letters from her great-grandfather, a rabbi in Ukraine, from before World War II.
As exciting as the discovery was, the letters were illegible to her — until now, thanks to an artificial intelligence tool developed by Sergii Gurbych, a researcher in Lithuania who hungered for information about his own Jewish past. They unveiled a world of grief but also brought Trueblood solace, uncovering the truth about her great-grandfather’s death.
The letters, about 50 pages in total, had sat untouched for decades in her cousin’s house in Palm Springs. They were penned in Yiddish by Pavel Malisoff, Trueblood’s great-grandfather in Konotop, Ukraine — then in the Soviet Union — to his son, Trueblood’s great-uncle Solomon, who immigrated to the United States and changed his last name to Malis.
Between 1927 and 1934, the letters bridged two worlds — on one side, a father in Ukraine witnessing a community on the brink of destruction, and on the other, a son journeying from New York to California under the weight of the Great Depression. Malis died in 1985. For nearly a century, no one else read those pages.
At the 2013 reunion, none of the living family members could decipher their ancestor’s Yiddish letters, written in Hebrew script. Trueblood, who is now 75, felt compelled to take charge of the treasure trove. She grew up in San Diego with few traces of her Jewish past. Her mother, Malisoff’s granddaughter, became a Christian Scientist before marrying her father, a non-Jewish descendant of colonial Americans. Trueblood wanted to know who her great-grandfather was and the life he inhabited, long cut off from her family memory.
“I was raised outside the Jewish community, with no day-to-day connection,” Trueblood told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But I was always fascinated.”
Trueblood soon ran into obstacles. She found only a handful of translators who could help decipher the handwritten letters, and the cost of hiring them to work through the whole stack was prohibitively high.
But 13 years after inheriting the letters, she saw a Facebook post about VILNISH, a new project in Lithuania that aims to turn handwritten and historical printed texts in Yiddish and Hebrew into digital texts that can be easily searched and translated.
Gurbych, a researcher at Vilnius University’s Center for the Study of East European Jewish History, built the AI model behind VILNISH, which launched late last year. Born in Ukraine, Gurbych studied Hebrew and Yiddish on top of electrical engineering. At Vilnius University, he focuses on developing digital approaches to analyzing archival Jewish texts.
Gurbych’s particular interest is texts written between World War I and World War II, when Jewish cultural and intellectual life flourished in Vilnius. In 1925, Vilnius became the first headquarters of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or YIVO, which continues to preserve the Yiddish language and Eastern European Jewish heritage in New York City.
Gurbych turned to a plethora of diaries, memoirs and other documents that were written by Jews in the interwar period and stored in the National Library of Lithuania. They provided the perfect material to teach a language model to recognize handwritten texts from the period. As he trains VILNISH on more and more handwriting types, it becomes a more universal tool.
Soon after Gurbych publicized the service, he began to hear from people like Trueblood, who sought to read letters left behind by their relatives.
Their urge to connect with the past was familiar to Gurbych. His own grandfather was a Jew born in 1915 in the Polish city of Łódź. During the Holocaust, he escaped the Łódź Ghetto days before its liquidation by the Nazis, when most of the 67,000 Jews who lived there were killed. Gurbych’s grandfather settled in present-day Ukraine in the Soviet Union.
Gurbych is drawn to pieces of writing that evoke the atmosphere, the tastes and smells of life for Jews in Poland before their communities were destroyed.
“I want to know more about the world where my grandfather lived,” said Gurbych. “He died in 2001, and I just feel that I didn’t speak with him about this time enough. He was a person who lived in the Soviet Union, so he was just closed, and didn’t very much like to talk about his Jewish background and about life in interwar Poland.”
Trueblood contacted Gurbych in May. Within a month, he sent her translations of all her great-grandfather’s letters. She was stunned by the vivid images of Malisoff’s life in Konotop, marked by poverty and separation. All of his 11 children were forced to relocate across the Soviet Union or immigrated to Canada and the United States.
Konotop was racked by famine during Stalin’s rapid forced collectivization of agriculture. Malisoff described “people walking half naked, hungry, with only a few coins in their pockets, without a piece of bread, without proper clothing, silently, without work and without money.” The “spiritual condition” was destroyed, he wrote, as the Sabbath, the holidays, kosher food, circumcisions and religious teaching disappeared — “as though they had never existed.”
It wasn’t just an AI language model that supplied her these windows to the past, said Trueblood. Gurbych had the knowledge of Jewish history and religious tradition to explain the terms used by her great-grandfather, a rabbi, and to point her toward the stories and texts that he referenced.
“What I got back was just beautiful, because he understands the context, the history, the biblical references,” she said.
She also made a discovery that shifted her understanding of how her great-grandfather died. Trueblood and her other living relatives knew that Malisoff had been tortured by Stalin’s regime for receiving small packages of money from family members in California. They always believed that was how he died.
But after the letters from Malisoff stopped abruptly in 1934, other letters from his wife and children revealed the truth: Malisoff had died not from torture, but from a heart attack at 74. A letter from one of his children in the Soviet Union gave Trueblood the unexpected gift of her great-grandfather’s dignified death and memorial service.
“Our old father of blessed memory has passed away, but his good and beautiful name has not died,” the letter said. “It lives on, and will continue to live for many years. The town paid him the highest honors. The entire town, old and young alike, accompanied him on his final journey, and he was given the place of highest honor in accordance with his good deeds.”
Gurbych hopes that VILNISH will retrieve such memories for many more people like Trueblood, while also helping academic researchers who face huge sets of archival documents in Yiddish and Hebrew that few people can read.
The tool also has the potential to support the descendants of Jews who were persecuted during the Holocaust as they prepare materials to confirm their eligibility for repatriation or citizenship, such as synagogue records, internal rolls of Jewish communities and other historical documents.
Trueblood was struck by how many others have yet to access threads to their past, as stacks of paper like hers sit untouched in attics and libraries.
“These letters are all over the world,” she said. “There are thousands of them out there that haven’t been translated.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post How a new tool in Lithuania helps people read letters from their Jewish ancestors appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’
(JTA) — President Donald Trump heckled the leaders of Iran at the first-ever Republican midterm convention on Wednesday, while promoting the idea of renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself.
“The war will be over very shortly after the election,” Trump said in a 100-minute address. “They’re hanging out for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their nuclear bomb. But we’re not going to let that happen.”
The president expressed confidence that Iran is “going to be quitting or dropping out” of the war “right after Election Day, because they want a deal desperately.”
“We’re winning it,” Trump said, referring to the war in Iran. “We control the Hormuz Strait.”
The U.S. and Israel started the war in February 2026. Since then, Trump has repeatedly predicted victory or an imminent end to the conflict. But six months later, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted amid competing U.S. and Iranian efforts to control the vital waterway.
On Wednesday, Iran said it attacked 10 ships near the strait after the U.S. sank five Iranian oil tankers, in the largest exchange of attacks on shipping by the two sides since the war began.
“I should get something out of this — the Trump Strait,” the president continued, repeating an idea he had proposed about a week ago. “I’ll have an announcement. We’ll call it the Trump Strait, and I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that.”
Declaring that they’re probably not “too happy about anything,” Trump said that Iran “is falling apart” and described the country as “the bully of the Middle East.”
“They’re not the bully anymore,” the president continued. “We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump: ‘The war will be over very shortly after the election’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger
(JTA) — The pro-Israel mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, lost his reelection campaign Wednesday to a progressive pro-Palestinian challenger in the latest demonstration of how Israel politics are seeping into local U.S. elections.
Incumbent Brett Smiley, who converted to Judaism in 2024 while in office, was bested by state Sen. David Morales in the Democratic primary in this deep blue city. Morales, a democratic socialist, carried endorsements from leading progressives, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna. With 99% of ballots counted, Morales had garnered 52.5% of the vote to Smiley’s 47.5%.
During the campaign, pro-Smiley flyers were defaced with Hitler mustaches and devil horns, acts which his opponent condemned.
The city’s Democratic primary also serves as a preview for a significant general election vote on divestment. In November, Providence will become the largest American city to cast a vote on a measure that, despite not naming Israel directly, could stop the city from investing in companies linked to Israel.
Morales supports the binding divestment vote, while Smiley and local Jewish and pro-Israel groups have opposed it. The mayor called the ordinance “both unenforceable and likely in violation of existing state law” in a statement to Jewish Insider.
During the campaign, Morales criticized Smiley for participating in a mayoral summit run by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in which Smiley serves in a leadership capacity. Morales accused the group of suppressing pro-Palestinian speech and not being transparent about its funders.
The Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative, which promotes business ties between the state and Israel, opposes both the ballot initiative and Morales. Avi Nevel, the group’s founder, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency prior to the primary that Morales was “fueled by pro-Palestinians and Israeli haters.”
It was a night of overthrowing incumbents in the state, as Rhode Island’s sitting governor also lost his primary to an intra-party challenger. That race, however, did not pivot on Israel: Gov. Daniel McKee’s popularity in the state has sunk following a scandal involving the closure of a major bridge.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pro-Israel Providence Mayor Brett Smiley loses to DSA pro-Palestinian challenger appeared first on The Forward.
