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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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South Korean President’s Holocaust Remarks Spark Outcry From Israel, Controversy at Home
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung speaks during his new year press conference at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. Photo: Ahn Young-joon/Pool via REUTERS
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has sparked a diplomatic row with Israel and criticism at home after comparing Israeli military actions against Palestinians to the Holocaust in a post on social media platform X.
The controversy began on Friday after Lee said “wartime killings” by the Israel Defense Forces were “no different from the Jewish massacre” by the Nazis in World War Two, and reposted footage with a caption that said it showed Israeli troops had tortured and thrown a Palestinian from the roof of a building.
Israel‘s Foreign Ministry said in a post on X on Saturday that Lee “for some strange reason, chose to dig up a story from 2024.” It said the incident occurred during an IDF operation against what it called “terrorists” and had been thoroughly investigated.
The ministry accused Lee, who had said that he needed to verify the footage, of the “trivialization of the massacre of Jews on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel,” saying his remarks were “unacceptable and warrant strong condemnation.”
Israel marks Yom HaShoah on Monday remembering the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
The Israeli military said in 2024 it was investigating the incident in the videos and described the actions as serious and not in keeping with its values.
Friday’s comments are a rare instance of Lee discussing international politics on social media and come as his government navigates a surge in energy prices following US and Israeli strikes against Iran. Tehran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic and South Korea is one of the world’s largest importers of oil and gas.
Lee did not mention the Iran war in his posts but said that South Koreans were today feeling “immense pain and national hardship.”
The president later on Saturday said it was “disappointing” that Israel criticized his comments and that it was natural to feel sorry if someone was suffering.
South Korea’s foreign ministry later said it was regrettable Israel “misunderstood” Lee’s remarks, which were about universal human rights.
Lee’s comments also proved controversial at home.
South Korea’s conservative party hit out at Lee for failing to speak more prudently and said he was showing double standards for his silence on human rights abuses in North Korea, while Lee’s Democratic Party praised him for speaking out on the universal value of human dignity.
The mainstream Joongang Ilbo newspaper said on Monday Lee would be well advised to recognize the weight of a president’s remarks and the risk of misunderstanding from unfiltered comments on social media, especially in sensitive global disputes.
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US Begins Blockade of Iran’s Ports, Tehran Threatens Retaliation
A billboard with a graphic design about the Strait of Hormuz on a building in Tehran, Iran, April 13, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The US military began a blockade of ships leaving Iran’s ports on Monday, President Donald Trump said, and Tehran threatened to retaliate against its Gulf neighbors’ ports after weekend talks in Islamabad on ending the war broke down.
A US official said there was continued engagement with Iran, and forward motion on trying to get to an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also said efforts were still under way to resolve the conflict.
But oil prices climbed back over $100 per barrel, with no sign of a swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to ease the biggest ever disruption in supplies and broader concerns over the durability of a two-week ceasefire agreement reached last week.
Trump said Iran had been in touch on Monday and wanted to make a deal but that he would not sanction any agreement allowing Tehran to have a nuclear weapon.
“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let a country blackmail or extort the world.”
Since the United States and Israel began the war on Feb. 28, Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to all vessels except its own, saying passage would be permitted only under Iranian control and subject to a fee.
Trump has said Washington would block Iranian vessels and any ships that paid such tolls and that any Iranian “fast-attack” ships that went near the blockade would be eliminated.
Brigadier General Reza Talaei-Nik, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defense, warned that foreign military efforts to police the strait would escalate the crisis and instability in global energy security.
NATO allies including Britain and France said they would not be drawn into the conflict by taking part in the blockade, stressing instead the need to reopen the waterway, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil normally passes.
CEASEFIRE UNDER STRAIN
The ceasefire that halted six weeks of US and Israeli airstrikes looked in jeopardy, with only a week left to run. Washington said Tehran rejected its demands at weekend talks in Islamabad, the highest-level discussions between the two nations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The US military’s Central Command said the blockade would be “enforced impartially against vessels of all nations” entering or leaving Iranian ports in the Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
“The blockade will not impede neutral transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz to or from non-Iranian destinations,” Central Command said in a note to seafarers seen by Reuters on Monday.
Two Iranian-linked tankers, the Aurora and New Future, left the strait laden with oil products on Monday before the deadline, according to LSEG data.
An Iranian military spokesperson called any US restrictions on international shipping “piracy,” warning that if Iranian ports were threatened, no port in the Gulf or Gulf of Oman would be secure. Any military vessels approaching the strait would violate the ceasefire, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Trump said Iran’s navy had been “completely obliterated” during the war, adding that only a small number of “fast-attack ships” remained.
“Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea. It is quick and brutal,” Trump, much of whose communications are on social media, wrote on his Truth Social site.
He was apparently referring to the US strikes carried out against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes, which began in September, killed more than 160 people.
LEBANON FACES ATTACKS
Trump has also lashed out at US-born Pope Leo, who has spoken out against the war, denouncing him as “terrible” in a rare direct attack by a US president on a pontiff.
With rising energy prices causing political blowback, Trump paused the US-Israeli bombing campaign last week after threatening to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” unless it reopened the strait.
Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon and on Monday Israeli troops launched an attack it said was intended to seize a key south Lebanon town from Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Israel and the US have said the campaign against Hezbollah was not part of the ceasefire, while Iran has insisted it is.
Iran has brought new demands, including recognition of its control of the waterway, lifting of sanctions, and the withdrawal of forces from US military bases across the Middle East.
Trump has declared victory, despite so far not fully achieving the objectives he set out at the start of the war: to eliminate Iran’s ability to strike its neighbors, end its nuclear program, and make it easier for Iranians to topple their government.
Benchmark oil prices, which had eased last week after the ceasefire was announced, traded around 6% higher on Monday, off the day’s peaks but still above $100 a barrel.
Traders say the main benchmarks – used to set prices for trillions of dollars’ worth of commodities worldwide – actually understate the severity of a disruption with no precedent in modern times.
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For Another Year, BU’s Conference on Jewish Left Only Platforms Anti-Zionism
Peter Beinart, a prominent anti-Israel writer, being interviewed in January 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Academic conferences should foster inquiry, test ideas, and widen intellectual horizons. The third annual “Jewish Conference on the Left” held at Boston University (BU) last month was certainly presented in those terms. However, as time went on, it became clear that something else was afoot: Anti-Zionism framed as academic exploration, and a social structure encouraging the marginalization of Jewish students who fail to conform to their narrow and bigoted politics.
The gathering took place on BU’s main campus, reinforcing the perception that the conference’s ideology sits comfortably within the university’s academic culture.
The conference, which I attended, was dominated by anti-Zionist speakers, such as Peter Beinart, Fadi Quran, Dove Kent, and Arielle Angel. Beinart advocates for the dissolution of a Jewish-majority state, insisting Jews revert to once again existing as a vulnerable minority everywhere. Quran associates with the BDS movement. Kent’s org “Diaspora Alliance” rejects the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism definition. Angel is an ardent anti-Zionist. These are not neutral voices. They are activists representing an ideology that is effectively hostile to the idea of Jewish civil rights in our ancestral homeland. Several statements during the conference illustrated this bait and switch from policy debate to brazen indoctrination.
Numerous statements were made attacking Zionism and any Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist. Neither the crowd, nor any other panelists, bothered to push back. Their only response was applause. It felt more like a political rally than a serious discussion on scholarship.
Unsurprisingly, there were no pro-Zionist leftist perspectives, not even modest discussions about classic topics like two-state coexistence. There were no voices articulating how Jewish self-determination might co-exist with Palestinian statehood. There was only delegitimization, double standards, and dehumanization of Zionists and Israel masked by reasonable-sounding language and boilerplate euphemisms.
The organization fair held at BU only hosted radical left groups including Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow. Tables included various infographics urging the IHRA definition be banned from schools, BDS graphics, comparisons between ICE and Nazi Germany, banning the ADL from schools, among others.
Clearly there was no room for dissenting views on the podium, and I observed the same mentality among its audience. At one point, I was berated by a stranger: “Shame on you for not clapping, you can’t even show respect for Fadi Quran.”
While I did not overtly present myself as a Zionist, I also did not mask my beliefs. Throughout my many conversations, I was repeatedly quizzed about my personal and professional background, as if my fellow attendees were actively looking for a reason to dismiss my position. Suspicion was immediate and hovered over every conversation whenever I questioned the status quo.
This is how ideological capture operates. It does not require formal censorship, all it needs is a couple of slogans and some bullies.
When a conference is promoted under the language of scholarly exploration to students and presents itself as an all-encompassing gathering of “Jewish left values,” the university’s association becomes part of the message.
For students who identify as both Progressive and Zionist, events like these reinforce the idea that there is no place for them. Many already navigate campus environments in which Zionism is treated as morally suspect. Student government resolutions single out Israel. Activist rhetoric regularly distorts Zionism into a kind of racism or colonialism. Institutional repetition normalizes and enables these intellectual boundary-breakers.
If Boston University intends to uphold its mission toward promoting intellectual diversity, it should clarify the distinction between providing space and conferring academic legitimacy. If organizers are truly acting in good faith, they should at least try to ensure that their conferences reflect the actual diversity within that tradition, or otherwise rebrand.
After three consecutive years of hosting this conference, the issue is no longer whether individual speakers have the right to present their views. They do. The question is whether a major university should repeatedly platform a singular ideological current while presenting it as representative of a broader intellectual tradition.
Melody Kaye is a Boston-based Campus Advisor for CAMERA.