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The first Passover haggadah in Ukrainian marks a community’s break with Russia
(JTA) — For Michal Stamova, the challenge of translating Passover’s core text into Ukrainian started with the title.
The haggadah — the book containing the Passover story — starts with an “h” sound in both Hebrew, its original language, and English. In Russian, the primary language of organized Jewish life in Ukraine until recently, there is no such sound, so the book has long been known there as an “agada.”
Ukrainian does have an “h” sound. But the character representing that sound conveys a different sound in Russian: a “G.” So for many Ukrainian Jews, the cover of Stamova’s translation will read as “Gagada.”
The journey of that single sound reflects the complexity of the task Stamova took on to aid Ukrainian Jews celebrating Passover a year into their country’s war with Russia. A musicologist from western Ukraine who fled to Israel shortly after Russia’s invasion, Stamova was recruited to create a Ukrainian-language haggadah, a powerful sign of the community’s rupture with its Russophone past.
Stamova knew she wanted to base her translation not off the preexisting Russian translation, but from the original Hebrew and Aramaic. That proved challenging because much of the text of the haggadah is lifted from other sources in Jewish canon, but Jewish translations of those texts to Ukrainian are only underway now for the first time.
“At first, it was very difficult to start, because we don’t have the sources in Ukrainian,” Stamova said. “We don’t have Torah in Ukrainian. We don’t have Tanakh in Ukrainian. It was very difficult to know what words to find.”
Stamova’s text, titled “For Our Freedom,” was released online earlier this month in advance of the Passover holiday that starts April 5. It is one of a growing number of efforts to translate Jewish texts into Ukrainian. Translators affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement have produced a book of psalms and are working on a daily prayer book, with their sights set on a full translation of the Torah. An effort is also underway now to translate a chapter of a newer text associated with Yom Hashoah, the Jewish Holocaust memorial day, in advance of its commemoration this year on April 18.
The absence of those texts until now, despite Ukraine’s significant Jewish population, reflects the particular linguistic history of Ukrainian Jews. Under the Russian empire, Jews living in what is now Ukraine in the 19th century tended to adopt Russian rather than Ukrainian, usually in addition to Yiddish, because Ukrainian was perceived as the language of the peasantry and conferred few benefits. That tilt became more pronounced after World War II and the Holocaust, when Yiddish declined as a Jewish vernacular and Russian became the main language of the Soviet Union. The history helps explain why, even as the number of Ukrainians speaking Russian at home fell sharply over the last decade, Jews remained largely Russian-speaking. (Russian and Ukrainian are related linguistically, though their speakers cannot understand each other.)
A sample page of text from the haggadah. (Courtesy of Project Kesher)
Over the past 30 years, the vast majority of printed material used by Ukrainian Jewish communities, including haggadahs for Passover, were created in Russian by groups such as Chabad, which is the main Jewish presence in both countries. But after Russia’s invasion, those materials became a liability at a time when being perceived as having ties to the enemy could be dangerous.
Indeed, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year prompted many Russian-speaking Ukrainians to switch languages as a marker of national solidarity — and sparked a push to translate Ukraine’s Jewish life into the Ukrainian language.
“Ukrainian Jews always spoke Russian. That really was the norm. With the advent of the escalation of the war, that has shifted, and Ukrainian Jews who are in the country are shifting as fast as they can over to Ukrainian,” said Karyn Gershon, the executive director of Project Kesher, the global Jewish feminist nonprofit that commissioned the new haggadah.
Gershon said the haggadah offers an opportunity to elevate a Ukrainian Jewish identity in other ways, such as by including tidbits about famous Jewish writers from the area that comprises modern Ukraine who in the past might have been characterized only as “Russian.”
“In most of the Jewish world, the things that make a haggadah unique are the special readings,” Gershon said. The new Ukrainian haggadah includes alongside the traditional text, she said, “prayers for the defenders of Ukraine, prayers for peace in Ukraine, but also [passages] reclaiming writers who were always categorized as Russian, but because they came from places like Kyiv, Odessa and Berdichev, are more accurately Ukrainian.”
For example, the haggadah includes passages from the 1925 book “Passover Nights,” by Hava Shapiro, a Kyiv-born Jew and journalist who authored one of the first Hebrew-language diaries known to have been written by a woman.
The additions offer an element of pride for some of the Ukrainian Jews who plan to use the new haggadah.
“It is bringing you to the roots of those Jews who were living here before the Holocaust,” said Lena Pysina, who lives in Cherkasy, southeast of Kyiv. “It’s about rebuilding the Jewish communities in Ukraine as ‘Ukrainian Jews.’”
Pysina said the switch to Ukrainian and the embrace of Ukrainian Jewish history in some ways echoed the themes of the Passover story, which describes the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt.
“It’s like an exodus for us. It is not comfortable, because we get used to what we get used to. But we have to be proactive, we have to find our identity,” she said. “It took us 70 years of Soviet times to … celebrate the Jewish holidays and Jewish traditions. And it took us 30 years to understand that we have to build Ukrainian Jewish communities, too.”
Those communities are very much in flux a year into the war, with millions of Ukrainians internally displaced or having relocated overseas. Stamova undertook the haggadah project from Israel, where she is one of an estimated 15,000 Ukrainians who arrived since February 2022.
Stamova grew up in western Ukraine, where the use of the Ukrainian language is more common than in the east. Like most other Ukrainian Jews, she still grew up speaking Russian at home, but her school, university and most of her life outside the home was conducted in Ukrainian. That made her a natural fit for the translation project, along with her background in Jewish liturgy, which she had studied at a Conservative yeshiva in Jerusalem.
Over the past 30 years, the vast majority of printed material used by Ukrainian Jewish communities, including haggadahs for Passover, were created in Russian. (Courtesy of Project Kesher)
The challenges went beyond phonetics. One frequent question was whether to use Russianisms that are widely known in Ukrainian and would be more easily understandable to a Jewish audience, or to use uniquely Ukrainian words.
The most difficult section of the text, she said, was Hallel, the penultimate step of the Passover seder. Hallel is a lengthy song of divine praise heavy with poetry and allegorical language — making for challenging translation work in any language.
Stamova said she sought to stick to the traditional understanding of the text while also making some adjustments for the contemporary seder attendee. For example, the section of the haggadah about the “four sons” with varying relationships to Judaism is rendered gender-neutral and changed to the “four children” in Stamova’s translation — an adjustment that has been made in other languages, too.
Most of all, Stamova said, she hopes the haggadah offers some solace to Ukrainian Jews whose entire lives have been turned upside down.
“The Jewish tradition of Pesach is that we every year have to remember that we escaped from Egypt, from slavery. It’s very therapeutic,” Stamova said, using the Hebrew word for Passover. “How is it like therapy? Yes, we every year remember this difficult story, but then we have a plan for the future, we say next year in Jerusalem. So we have to have a plan. We have to see the future.”
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When Hate Hides Behind Nuance, Babka and Protest Cannot Rise Half‑Baked
A Breads Bakery location in New York City. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
This weekend, a crowd wrapped around the corner of 63rd and Broadway in New York City, lining up for babka and bread at Breads Bakery. But this wasn’t the usual pre-Shabbat rush. It was a quiet show of solidarity with the Israeli-owned bakery, after union activists urged it to sever ties with Israel.
A line for pastries became a reminder that antisemitism doesn’t always announce itself with slurs or slogans. Sometimes it appears in smaller, more familiar spaces — through pressures and demands that seem benign on the surface.
When New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, revoked a series of executive orders aimed at combating antisemitism, the justification was familiar: overly broad, insufficiently nuanced, potentially chilling to free speech. For many Jews in this city — especially those who are visibly Jewish or openly supportive of Israel — this reversal did not feel like balance restored. It felt like protection withdrawn.
New York is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and Mamdani’s decision came at a moment when antisemitic threats are rising nationally and globally, when synagogues and schools require armed guards, and when fear is not theoretical but lived.
One word — nuance — has stayed with me.
Not long before the mayor’s announcement, a friend objected to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism: Too broad, too political, not nuanced enough. I had heard the argument before — but hearing it again, now, felt revealing.
Can we fight hate in the language of nuance?
For decades, we have treated language as a tool of moral repair. We revised terminology to be more inclusive, more precise, and more humane. We expanded our understanding of gender and identity. Language evolved to widen the circle of belonging.
Names matter. If language shapes how people are seen — and how they see themselves — then these changes matter.
But somewhere along the way, the project of inclusion began to drift.
Refining language stopped functioning as a starting point for justice and became a substitute for it. Linguistic correction began to stand in for moral and institutional accountability. We treated vocabulary changes as progress, even when the underlying structures remained unchanged.
We changed the words without changing the world.
As we focused on more delicate modifiers and culturally sensitive phrasing, we also became cautious in how we described injustice — so cautious that we often avoided confronting it at all. Language became a tool to minimize, camouflage, or justify inaction.
Nowhere is this clearer than in how we talk about antisemitism.
At a time when antisemitic incidents are rising, the insistence on narrower definitions and softer language feels less like rigor and more like retreat. Definitions tighten just as hostility becomes more explicit, more public, and more emboldened.
And the question lingers: Are we blurring the reality of antisemitism out of fear that naming it clearly will constrain legitimate criticism of Israel? Are we reinforcing old tropes equating Zionism with racism, legitimizing a wave of boycotts and, increasingly, outright acts of violence against Jews?
Would we ask other marginalized communities to soften the words used to describe the hatred aimed at them?
If we would not ask it of others, why do we ask it of Jews?
Outside of Breads Bakery, the protest didn’t sound like a protest. No bullhorns, no chants — just a line of New Yorkers waiting for pastries to push back against a union’s demand that the bakery cut ties with Israel. It turns out that you can fight antisemitism with babka.
But the gesture can be quiet only if the definition is not. We cannot fight what we don’t hear, and we cannot hear what we refuse to name. When antisemitism hides behind nuance, policy, or the polite language of activism, clarity stops being optional. Even a line for babka can become a battleground against hate — but only if the hate is named plainly. Buying bread may seem like a Beijing form of activism, but when the message it sends is clear, hate can no longer hide in the shadow of nuance.
Gillian Granoff is a New York–based writer focused on Jewish identity, the Israel–diaspora relationship, and the challenges of navigating antisemitism after October 7. Her work draws on personal experience and time spent in Israel, bringing cultural insight and emotional clarity to her essays. She holds a degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University and spent more than a decade as a senior reporter for Education Update, an award-winning New York education newspaper.
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Somali Regions Reject Mogadishu’s Move to Cut Ties With UAE
People hold the flag of Somaliland during the parade in Hargeisa, Somaliland, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri
Three self-governing regions in Somalia that have close relations with the United Arab Emirates have dismissed a decision this week by the central government to sever ties with the UAE, a long-term sponsor.
On Monday Somalia annulled all agreements with the UAE, including in the field of security, accusing the Gulf country, which has trained and funded Somalia’s army and invested in its ports, of undermining Somalia’s national sovereignty.
Somalia did not provide further explanation of its reasons for the move. Mogadishu is investigating allegations that the UAE whisked a separatist leader out of Yemen via Somalia. Separately, the UAE has been linked to Israel’s recognition last month of Somaliland, a breakaway region of northern Somalia, as an independent state.
The UAE‘s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Somalia’s decision. The UAE has longstanding interests in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea regions, where it has frequently vied with other wealthy Gulf states for influence.
Somaliland and two semi-autonomous states, Puntland in the north and Jubbaland in the south, said they would not recognize the decision by Mogadishu to cut ties with the UAE.
“Somalia’s daydreaming changes nothing … The UAE is here to stay, no matter what a weak administration in Mogadishu says,” Khadar Hussein Abdi, Minister of the Presidency of the Republic of Somaliland, said late on Monday.
The Jubbaland regional government said Mogadishu’s decision was “null and void” and existing “security and development agreements will continue to exist.”
Puntland said the decision would have no impact on relations between it and the UAE, including over the coastal city of Bosaso where a subsidiary of the UAE‘s DP World has a 30-year concession to run the port.
EXPANDING INFLUENCE
The UAE has long leveraged its wealth to expand its influence across the Horn of Africa, using a mix of economic, military and diplomatic clout to exert regional power.
For decades Somalia’s federal government has possessed only limited authority across the country, and has failed to defeat Islamist militants, despite years of international support, including African peacekeepers and US air strikes.
The UAE trained hundreds of Somali troops from 2014-2018, and still covers salaries and provides logistics for around 3,400 Somali military police and special forces troops in and around the capital, according to senior Somali sources.
It has also forged bonds directly with regional governments, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to ports and military infrastructure on the coast along global shipping routes.
Two Somali officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, told Reuters that in place of UAE military funding the country could turn to the UAE‘s wealthy Gulf rivals Qatar or Saudi Arabia for help.
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Syria’s Kurds Protest Aleppo Violence as Fears of Wider Conflict Grow
Syrian Kurds attend a protest in solidarity with the people in the neighborhood of Sheikh Maksoud and Ashrafiya, as the last Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters left the Syrian city of Aleppo on Sunday, state-run Ekhbariya TV said, following a ceasefire deal that allowed evacuations after days of deadly clashes, in Qamishli, Syria, Jan. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Orhan Qereman
Several thousand people marched under the rain in northeast Syria on Tuesday to protest the expulsion of Kurdish fighters from the city of Aleppo the previous week after days of deadly clashes.
The violence in Aleppo has deepened one of the main faultlines in Syria, where President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s promise to unify the country under one leadership after 14 years of war has faced resistance from Kurdish forces wary of his Islamist-led government.
Five days of fighting left at least 23 people dead, according to Syria’s health ministry, and saw more than 150,000 flee the two Kurdish-run pockets of the city. The last Kurdish fighters left Aleppo in the early hours of Jan. 11.
On Tuesday, several thousand Syrian Kurds protested in the northeastern city of Qamishli. They carried banners bearing the logos of Kurdish forces and faces of Kurdish fighters who died in the battles – some of whom had detonated explosive-laden belts as government forces closed in.
FEARS OF WIDER CONFLICT
Other posters featured the faces of Sharaa and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, crossed out with red “X”s and carrying the caption “Killers of the Kurdish people.”
Turkey accuses the Syrian Democratic Forces – the main Kurdish fighting force which runs a semi-autonomous zone in northeast Syria – of links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara considers a terrorist organization.
Many Kurds say last week’s bloodshed has deepened their skepticism about Sharaa’s promises to govern for all Syrians.
“If they truly love the Kurds, and if they sincerely say that the Kurds are an official and fundamental component of Syria, then the rights of the Kurdish people must be recognized in the constitution,” said Hassan Muhammad, head of the Council of Religions and Beliefs in Northeast Syria, who attended Tuesday’s protest.
Others worry that the bloodshed will worsen. Syria’s defense ministry on Tuesday declared eastern parts of Aleppo still under SDF control to be a “closed military zone,” and ordered all armed forces in the area to withdraw further east.
Idris al-Khalil, a Qamishli resident who protested on Tuesday, said the Aleppo violence reminded him of the sectarian killings last year of the Alawite minority on Syria’s coast and the Druze minority in the country’s south.
“Regarding the fears of a full-scale war – if they want a full-scale war, the people will suffer even more, and it will lead to division among the peoples of the region, preventing them from living together in peace,” Khalil said.