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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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Trump Says US May Strike Iran Again but That Tehran Wants Deal
People walk past a mural depicting the late leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States may need to strike Iran again and that he had been an hour away from ordering an attack before postponing it.
Trump made the comments a day after saying he had paused a planned resumption of hostilities following a new proposal by Tehran to end the US-Israeli war.
“I was an hour away from making the decision to go today,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
Iran‘s leaders are begging for a deal, he said, adding that a new US attack would happen in coming days if no agreement was reached.
The United States has been struggling to end the war it began with Israel nearly three months ago. Trump has previously said that a deal with Tehran was close, and similarly threatened heavy strikes on Iran if it did not reach an accord.
The US president is under intense political pressure at home to reach an accord that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz – a key route for global supplies of oil and other commodities. Gas prices remain high and Trump‘s approval rating has plummeted as congressional elections loom in November.
Oil prices settled lower on Tuesday after Vice President JD Vance said Washington and Tehran had made a lot of progress in talks and neither side wanted to see a resumption of the military campaign. “We’re in a pretty good spot here,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at a White House briefing, Vance acknowledged difficulties in negotiating with a fractured Iranian leadership. “It’s not sometimes totally clear what the negotiating position of the team is,” he said, so the US is trying to make its own red lines clear.
He also said one objective of Trump‘s policy is to prevent a nuclear arms race from spreading in the region.
IRAN PROMISES RESPONSE TO ANY NEW ATTACK
In Tehran, Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, said on X that pausing an attack was due to Trump‘s realization that any move against Iran would mean “facing a decisive military response.”
Iranian state media said Tehran‘s latest peace proposal involves ending hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon, the exit of US forces from areas close to Iran, and reparations for destruction caused by the US-Israeli attacks.
Tehran also sought the lifting of sanctions, release of frozen funds, and an end to the US marine blockade, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi as cited by IRNA news agency.
The terms as described in the Iranian reports appeared little changed from Iran‘s previous offer, which Trump rejected last week as “garbage.”
BOTH SIDES ‘CHANGING GOALPOSTS,’ SAYS PAKISTANI SOURCE
Reuters could not determine whether military preparations had been made for strikes that would mark a renewal of the war Trump started in late February.
Trump said on Monday that Washington would be satisfied if it could reach an agreement that prevented Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the Iranian proposal with Washington.
The sides “keep changing their goalposts,” the Pakistani source said, adding, “We don’t have much time.”
CEASEFIRE MOSTLY HOLDING
The US-Israeli bombing killed thousands of people in Iran before it was suspended in a ceasefire in early April. Israel has killed thousands more and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes in Lebanon, which it invaded in pursuit of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group.
Iranian strikes on Israel and neighboring Gulf states have killed dozens of people.
The Iran ceasefire has mostly held, although drones have lately been launched from Iraq towards Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, apparently by Iran and its allies.
The US seized an Iran-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean overnight, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing three US officials. The tanker, known as the Skywave, was sanctioned by the US in March for its role in transporting Iranian oil, the report said.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they launched the war to curb Iran‘s support for regional militias, dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its missile capabilities, and create conditions for Iranians to topple their rulers.
But the war has yet to deprive Iran of its stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium or its ability to threaten neighbors with missiles, drones, and proxy militias.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership, which had faced a mass uprising at the start of the year, withstood the superpower onslaught with no sign of organized opposition.
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Somaliland Says It Will Open an Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel to Reciprocate
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar meets with Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Somaliland, a self-declared republic in East Africa, will set up an embassy in Jerusalem soon, its ambassador said on Tuesday, after Israel became the first country to formally recognize it as an independent and sovereign state.
In turn, Israel is expected to set up an embassy in Somaliland‘s capital Hargeisa, Ambassador Mohamed Hagi said in a post on X.
Somaliland, which has claimed independence for decades but remains largely unrecognized, is situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the south and east. It has sought to break off from Somalia since 1991 and utilized its own passports, currency, military, and law enforcement.
Unlike most states in its region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability.
Last month, Israel appointed Michael Lotem as its first ambassador to Somaliland, after the two governments formally established full diplomatic relations.
Lotem, who was serving as a non-resident economic ambassador to Africa at the time of his appointment, will now shift to work as a non-resident ambassador to Somaliland. He previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles, a position he concluded in August.
Israel recognized Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state in December, a move Somalia rejected and termed a “deliberate attack” on its sovereignty.
Over the years, Somalia has rallied international actors against any country recognizing Somaliland.
The former British protectorate hopes that recognition by Israel will encourage other nations to follow suit, increasing its diplomatic heft and access to international markets.
Israel‘s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem would be another significant step in strengthening relations with Somaliland. Once opened, the Somaliland embassy would be the eighth embassy in Jerusalem, he said.
Most countries maintain their embassies in Israel in Tel Aviv, although the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a small number of other countries have also established embassies there.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its capital. However, Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, where the holiest sites in Judaism are located, as the capital of a future state.
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Lebanese People Broadly Support Hezbollah’s Disarmament, Peace With Israel, New Poll Finds
Rescuers work at the site of an Israeli strike that took place yesterday, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, May 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Azakir
In a notable shift in Lebanese public sentiment, a new opinion survey finds growing support for disarming Hezbollah and increased openness to a peace agreement with Israel, even as deep sectarian divisions persist and as the regional landscape remains volatile and uncertain.
According to the poll conducted by the research firm Information International and published on Monday by Lebanese broadcaster Al-Jadeed, a significant share of respondents supports direct negotiations between Lebanese and Israeli officials and a potential peace agreement with the Jewish state, while expressing strong opposition to the continued influence of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Among the survey’s key findings, respondents were almost evenly split on responsibility for the current conflict, with 33.8 percent attributing blame to Hezbollah and 32.9 percent to Israel.
The newly released survey also found strong overall backing for disarming Hezbollah (58 percent in favor and 34 percent opposed), with support concentrated among Maronite, Orthodox, and Druze respondents, while opposition remained overwhelmingly high among Shiite participants.
By sectarian breakdown, support for curbing Hezbollah’s armed capabilities reached 89 percent among Orthodox Christians, 87 percent among Maronites, 77 percent among Druze, and 70 percent among Sunnis, whereas about 88 percent of Shiite respondents opposed the measure.
Most notably, the survey indicated relatively strong backing for a peace agreement with Israel among non-Shiite communities, with Druze respondents recording the highest support at 84 percent, followed by 77 percent of Maronites and 72 percent of Orthodox Christians, while 92 percent of Shiites opposed such an agreement. A striking 52 percent of Sunnis said they supported a peace deal.
With direct talks between Israeli and Lebanese officials resuming last week, the poll also showed varying levels of support for negotiations, including 78 percent among Maronites, 74 percent among Orthodox respondents, and 72 percent among Druze, compared with 93 percent opposition among Shiite participants.
Despite most Lebanese expressing support for negotiations and a potential peace deal to end the war, normalization with Israel remains unpopular, with only about 30 percent in favor and roughly 59 percent opposed.
By sectarian lines, support for normalization stood at 58 percent among Maronites, 49 percent among Orthodox Christians, and 79 percent among Druze, while opposition reached 94 percent among Shiites and 74 percent among Sunnis.
Last week, Israeli and Lebanese officials held a third round of talks in Washington aimed at advancing the negotiations, even as Hezbollah continued to reject disarmament and oppose any potential peace deal.
Inside Lebanon, fears are mounting that Hezbollah could trigger a new wave of political violence and destabilization as pressure intensifies to dismantle the Iran-backed terrorist group’s military grip.
Lebanese officials have reiterated that the decision to establish a state monopoly over weapons is final, though its implementation remains contingent on securing a broader security arrangement with Israel under US guarantees.
The Iranian proxy has accused Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam of betraying the “resistance” and collaborating with Israel amid ongoing direct bilateral negotiations, branding them “traitors” aligned with foreign interests.
The terrorist group has repeatedly defied international calls to disarm, even threatening protests and civil unrest if the government tries to enforce control over its weapons.
According to a new report from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), an Israel-based research institute, Hezbollah could once again resort to political assassinations in an effort to block moves perceived as existential threats to the organization and restore its power.
Hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel reignited on March 2, when the terrorist group opened fire in support of Iran two days after the start of the joint US-Israeli military campaign against the Iranian regime.
Since then, Israeli forces have established a “buffer zone” extending into southern Lebanese territory, which officials say is meant to shield northern residents from Hezbollah attacks amid thousands of rockets and drones fired throughout the war.
Even though a US-backed ceasefire has sharply reduced violence, negotiations and prospects for lasting peace remain fragile, with Israeli forces still launching strikes while positioned in southern Lebanon to maintain its buffer zone and dismantle Hezbollah military infrastructure.