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The US wants citizens to help Ukrainian refugees settle here. Jewish New Yorkers are stepping up.
(New York Jewish Week) — A year ago, Diana and Vitalii Nakonechnyi never expected that they and their two young kids would be living in Riverdale, a leafy neighborhood in the Bronx. Then again, they also never expected a war would force them to evacuate their hometown of Kharkiv, Ukraine.
“We heard it was a possibility, but we never would have expected this to happen in our lives,” Diana told the New York Jewish Week via a translator. “And we never thought we’d ever live in as big of a city as New York.”
The Nakonechnyis, a family unit of five — including Vitalii’s mother — are among the nearly 100,000 refugees who have fled Ukraine for the United States since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
They first went to Poland, then stayed in Germany through the summer. There, they heard via Telegram, a global messaging service, that HIAS and other refugee resettlement agencies like it were helping bring people to the United States. HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, was created in 1881 to aid Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe. In recent years, however, HIAS has pivoted to resettling non-Jewish refugees, as well as mobilizing the American Jewish community around advocating for immigrants and asylum-seekers.
As it turns out, the Nakonechnyi family were not resettled directly by HIAS or another refugee resettlement organization — a process that can often take years due to bureaucratic red tape. Instead, they were among a growing cohort of arrivals who were greeted at the airport, set up in new homes and introduced to life in the United States by trained “Welcome Circles,” a private sponsorship group, enlisted by HIAS, that consists of everyday Americans who volunteer to help resettle a refugee family. Within the span of just a few weeks, with the assistance of local community members, the Nakonechnyi family settled in the Bronx at the end of September 2022.
“Nobody really believed that there would be some help on the other side, that everything would be taken care of with housing and airline tickets,” Diana said. “Little by little, we are adjusting.”
The Northwest Bronx Coalition — the Welcome Circle of around 10 individuals that has helped welcome the Nakonechnyis in Riverdale — is largely made up of members from local congregations: Riverdale Temple, Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and Congregation Tehillah. It’s the latest iteration of how Jews, once refugees themselves, are now using their expertise and experience to resettle others.
“Ukraine is so pivotal in so many of our own histories and our own refugee stories, said Holly Rosen Fink, the president of the Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration who, working with HIAS, helps organize and mobilize Welcome Circles. “Nine times out of 10, when you ask [Jewish] people in Westchester where their families are from, it’s usually that part of the world. So it stirred a lot of people’s hearts.”
Welcome Circles like the Northwest Bronx Coalition are made up of five to eight community members who have committed themselves to accommodating and resettling a refugee family for the first six months of their time in the United States. These volunteers handle everything a resettlement agency would: helping secure housing and employment, organizing medical appointments and bills, and smoothing over any other logistics required in the transition to a new country. The groups commit to raising $2,275 for each person they are going to help resettle.
Leading the Northwest Bronx group is Irina Kimmelfeld, who came to the United States when she was 13 as an emigre from the Soviet Union in 1988. “I did feel that I was in more of a unique situation to help because I have the language and some degree of commonality of experience right from that same region,” Kimmelfeld told the New York Jewish Week. “But it really came from feeling so helpless about the war and needing to be able to do something.”
Kimmelfeld, an accountant, has been translating for the Nakonechnyis, helping them find and furnish an apartment, guiding them through public transportation, finding a house of worship (the family is Ukrainian Baptist) and showing them around the city. She’s also helped with social and medical services for Diana, who is eight months pregnant, and her son Filipp, who has special needs.
For Rosen Fink, resettling non-Jewish refugees is undoubtedly a Jewish issue. “After visiting a [refugee] camp during the Syrian refugee crisis, I just became determined to not let that happen again to anybody, not just Jewish people,” she said. “So, for me, it’s a very ingrained issue.”
Rosen Fink operates as a liaison between HIAS and New York Jewish communities, encouraging members to join these Welcome Circles in honor of their Jewish values. “We’ve been going into the community, finding the people that want to step up and giving them the tools and the resources and funding to connect with HIAS and start hosting a family,” Rosen Fink said. “We inspire people to do this work because we see this through a Jewish lens because of our history and values.”
Until recently, Welcome Circles such as the Northwest Bronx Coalition were considered part of an emergency government response towards the Afghan and Ukrainian refugee crises, and not an official resettlement policy in the United States. But as of Jan. 19, the Biden Administration announced the implementation of the “Welcome Corps,” a federally backed private sponsorship program in which refugee resettlement agencies will be able to train American citizens to help resettle refugees on a long-term basis with route to citizenship — a departure from the emergency response programs which only offered short-term, humanitarian parole.
The Welcome Corps, which the New York Times called “most significant reorientation of the U.S. refugee program since its inception more than four decades ago,” will allow an increased number of refugees to resettle in the United States for less of a cost to the government.
As such, programs like HIAS’s Welcome Circles will become an even more common way to resettle more refugees more quickly. In the last 18 months, HIAS has helped establish 80 Welcome Circles in 17 states. In New York City and Westchester, 15 of HIAS’s Welcome Circles have assisted in the resettlement of more than 50 refugees.
“It’s an exciting program that’s is opening up the opportunity for many more volunteers on the ground to get involved with supporting refugee resettlement in areas where they might not have resettlement agencies, or where resettlement agencies do not have the capacity to bring in the people themselves,” said Isabel Burton, the senior director of community engagement initiatives at HIAS.
For now, the Nakonechnyis are still getting used to the city, which is a lot bigger than their hometown (Kharkiv’s population is approximately 1.4 million). They’re not sure yet if New York will be their permanent home — the idea of planning for the future, Diana said, feels like it has been taken away from them.
“You do feel helpless — and this is something you can do,” Kimmelfeld said. “You can’t help everybody but you can make a difference for one family.”
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In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL and investing more in Jewish identity
(JTA) — In a speech that described antisemites as an “axis of the perfidious, the despotic, the hypocritical, the cynical, the deranged and the incurably stupid,” Bret Stephens asserted that supporters of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish defense groups should largely abandon their current strategy for combating antisemitism and instead redirect their resources toward strengthening Jewish life itself.
Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist and founder of the Jewish thought journal Sapir, said antisemitism is largely impervious to appeals to tolerance, reminders of Jewish and Israeli accomplishments, or mandatory Holocaust education.
Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership, arguing that the infrastructure already exists but lacks sufficient scale and coordination.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” Stephens said, delivering the annual “State of World Jewry” address at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on Sunday. “We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere.”
In an on-stage conversation after the talk, Stephens told Rabbi David Ingber, the Y’s senior director for Jewish life, that if it were up to him, he would “dismantle” the ADL, the leading Jewish group fighting antisemitism.
“That’s not how Jewish money should be spent,” Stephens told Ingber, acknowledging that the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was in the audience. “That’s not helping raise a generation of young Jews who are conscious of their Jewishness as something other than the fact that they saw ‘Schindler’s List’ and they visited the Holocaust Museum. That cannot be the locus of Jewish identity. If we’re going to survive, victimization cannot be at the heart of our identity.”
Reached the next day, Greenblatt said he considered Stephens a friend and described his thoughts on Jewish identity as “powerful and provocative,” but found Stephens’ critique of efforts to combat antisemitism “misguided.”
Greenblatt said the ADL’s functions include collecting data on hate crimes, training synagogues and other Jewish institutions in security and a Center on Extremism that gathers intelligence that has been used to “intercept and prevent plots from unfolding that literally could take the lives of people in our community.”
Greenblatt said he agreed on the value of investing in Jewish education and centering identity. “I profoundly agree that the best defense against antisemitism is a good offense, and yet you cannot deny the necessity of defense, that you will not have a strong Jewish community if you don’t have a safe Jewish community,” he told JTA. “You cannot have what Bret called a thriving Jewish people if they’re constantly under threat. So I just don’t agree that it’s a binary choice.”
Stephens’ remarks about the ADL come at a time when the organization has been under fire from the left and right. While many on the left object to its Israel advocacy and accuse it of cozying up to the Trump administration, right-wing critiques have included accusations that it has supported “woke” policies and that its advocacy has been ineffective in countering antisemitism on the far left and far right.
Asked about these critiques, Greenblatt said that the ADL, as one of the oldest anti-hate organizations in the country, has become a convenient target for partisans, inside and outside the Jewish community, who are frustrated by the persistence of bigotry and eager to discredit their ideological opposites. “I think this blame game is bad for America, and I think it’s lethal for our Jewish community,” he said.
The State of World Jewry speech has been a tradition at the influential New York cultural center since 1980, and has been given by, among others, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.
For the third year in a row it has been delivered by a prominent center-right pundit. Like Stephens, author and podcaster Dan Senor (2025) and journalist Bari Weiss (2024) suggested that the strongest response to a community reeling from antisemitism in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks is for Jews to turn inward and invest in their own institutions rather than seeking inclusion or protection within broader coalitions.
Elsewhere, writers on the Jewish left, including Eric Alterman in the Forward and The New Republic and Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, have focused on what they see as a gap between a conservative Jewish establishment and a liberal Jewish majority troubled by the extent of the war in Gaza. While condemning the Hamas attacks and antisemitism on the left and right, they argue that anti-Zionism is not necessarily antisemitism, and Jewish groups should prioritize liberal, democratic values over unconditional defense of Israel.
“I don’t think that we made an ideological choice,” Ingber told JTA, when asked about the recent lineup of speakers. “It’s where the center of gravity is at this moment. Voices like [Stephens’ and] Bari’s and Dan’s are seriously engaging with the complexity of this situation, and in some ways mirror a little bit of what’s happening more broadly in Israel” and beyond.
“I don’t think it means that we endorse their worldview, but it means that the Jewish community is benefitting from their platform,” he continued.
Stephens, who told Ingber that he was a “gadfly” on the typically liberal opinion pages of the New York Times, laid out four arguments in his talk: that the fight against antisemitism is largely ineffective; that antisemitism functions as a perverse compliment rooted in resentment; that Jews should stop trying to disprove hatred through achievement or moral suasion; and that Jewish survival depends on building independent institutions rather than seeking acceptance from broader society.
Stephens questioned whether decades of investment in education, advocacy and monitoring — the core strategies of organizations such as the ADL and campus advocacy groups — have produced measurable results, even as antisemitic beliefs and incidents have increased.
“Does anyone think the fight against antisemitism is working?” he asked.
As evidence, Stephens pointed to polling data showing that “one in five millennials and Gen Zs believe the Jews caused the Holocaust,” as well as the persistence of antisemitic rhetoric in media, politics and academia during a period when Jewish institutions are, he said, more engaged and better funded than ever.
In this, Stephens joined a number of observers who have been questioning the cost and effectiveness of efforts to combat antisemitism, which have surged in recent years.
“The mistake we make is this: We think that antisemitism stems fundamentally from missing or inaccurate information. We think that if people only had greater knowledge of the history of Jewish persecution, a fuller grasp of the facts of the Israeli-Arab conflict, a finer understanding of all the ways antisemitism manifests itself, a deeper appreciation of the Jewish contribution to America’s success and to human flourishing worldwide, that the hatred of us might dissipate or never start in the first place,” he said. “That thesis is wrong.”
Stephens framed antisemitism as a response to Jewish distinctiveness, which acts as a counterculture in authoritarian or conformist societies, and resentment, especially when Jewish communities flourish.
“They do not hate us because of our faults and failures,” Stephens said. “They hate us because of our virtues and successes.”
Stephens criticized what he described as a persistent Jewish impulse to seek validation through their contributions to the wider society — citing Jewish participation in progressive movements and Israeli peace initiatives as examples that failed to reduce hostility.
“Constantly seeking to prove ourselves worthy in order to win the world’s love is a fool’s errand,” he said.
That argument led to Stephens’ fourth and final point: that Jews should invest in building and expanding their own institutions rather than seeking inclusion or protection within broader coalitions.
Quoting composer Philip Glass, Stephens said, “If there’s no room at the table, build your own table.”
“We have superb Jewish day schools, but we need many more of them,” he said. “We have astounding and vibrant cultural institutions… We have extraordinary Jewish philanthropies, but they need to become a primary locus of Jewish giving.”
Just as Senor did in his 2025 talk at the Y, Stephens framed the current moment — marked by rising antisemitism and social alienation — as an opportunity for Jewish renewal and not merely a period of crisis. Referring to “Oct. 8 Jews,” a term he popularized after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Stephens said he had come to rethink his own definition of traumatized Jews in more positive terms.
“What I should have said was that the ‘Oct. 8 Jew’ was the one who woke up trying to remember who he or she truly is,” he said.
Stephens’ conversation with Ingber was twice interrupted by hecklers, who were promptly escorted out by security. Before the talk, a group of demonstrators outside the venue waved Palestinian flags and chanted, “Free, free Palestine.” Ingber said demonstrators taunted him and others who attended the talk as they exited the building.
The post In 92NY talk, Bret Stephens urges ‘dismantling’ ADL and investing more in Jewish identity appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Primary School in Paris Vandalized Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks
Nearly 200,000 people took to the streets of Paris to protest rising antisemitism. Photo: Reuters/Claire Serie
A Jewish primary school in eastern Paris was vandalized over the weekend, with windows smashed and security equipment damaged, prompting a criminal investigation and renewed outrage among local Jewish leaders as targeted antisemitic attacks continue to escalate.
On Sunday night, a group of unknown individuals attacked the Beth Loubavitch–Beth Hannah primary school in Paris’s 20th arrondissement (district/borough), located on Passage des Saint-Simoniens, French media reported.
According to local authorities, the perpetrators did not enter the school building, but they did manage to smash windows, damage security equipment, and deface the school’s plaque and Jewish symbols.
The Paris public prosecutor’s office has now opened an investigation into the outrage, treating it as “aggravated damage” committed by a group with religious motives.
Éric Pliez, mayor of Paris’s 20th arrondissement, strongly condemned this latest antisemitic attack, promising swift action to ensure the safety of the local Jewish community.
“These acts are unacceptable and run counter to our values,” Pliez said in a statement. “The safety of our students is our highest priority. Alongside the municipal team, I reaffirm my unwavering opposition to all forms of antisemitism.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo also denounced the incident, reaffirming her full solidarity with the local Jewish community.
“I reiterate that these acts of antisemitic hatred, which I condemn with the utmost firmness, have no place in our city or in our Republic,” Hidalgo said in a statement.
Meanwhile, southeast of Paris, French authorities in Lyon are preparing for the trial of a 55-year-old man accused of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022, with the court set to determine whether antisemitism was a motivating factor.
Starting Monday, defendant Rachid Kheniche is facing trial after being charged with aggravated murder on religious grounds, even as he denies an antisemitic motive.
In May 2022, Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
According to the police investigation, Kheniche and his neighbor were having a discussion when the conflict escalated.
At the time, he told investigators that he had tried to strangle Hadjadj but did not realize what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
However, after two psychiatric evaluations, Kheniche was deemed criminally responsible.
Ten days after the murder, the Lyon prosecutor’s office launched a broader investigation to determine whether the act had an antisemitic motive.
With this new trial, only the alleged antisemitic motive is being contested, while the murder itself has already been established.
The National Bureau of Vigilance against Antisemitism and the Jewish Observatory of France have filed a civil suit, with the International League Against Racism and the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France also participating in the case.
“The anti-Jewish nature of the act is fully established, both materially and morally,” Franck Serfati, legal counsel for the groups involved in the suit, said in a statement.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, France has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the French Interior Ministry, the first six months of 2025 saw more than 640 antisemitic incidents, a 27.5 percent decline from the same period in 2024, but a 112.5 percent increase compared to the first half of 2023, before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
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Top US Lawmaker Accuses Illinois Mayor of Not Protecting Jewish Students at Northwestern From Pro-Hamas Encampment
US Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol, Washington, DC, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The chairman of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce is demanding answers from the mayor of Evanston, Illinois, accusing him of failing to protect Jewish students during a pro-Hamas, anti-Israel encampment at Northwestern University that, lawmakers say. devolved into widespread antisemitic harassment and violence.
In a sharply worded letter dated Jan. 28, US Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said Daniel Biss, a Democrat, refused to authorize Evanston police to assist when Northwestern requested help clearing the encampment in April 2024, despite reports of assaults, intimidation, and explicitly antisemitic incidents. Walberg wrote that the decision left the university unable to enforce the law safely, citing committee documents indicating Northwestern lacked sufficient police resources to carry out arrests without city support.
According to the letter, Jewish students reported being spat on, verbally harassed, and told to “go back to Germany” and “get gassed,” while others said they were called “dirty Jew” and “Zionist pig” as they attempted to move across campus. One student wearing a kippah reported being targeted, while another described being assaulted as an encampment member recorded the incident.
Walberg described the environment as a “hotbed of antisemitic harassment and hostility,” rejecting public characterizations of the encampment as peaceful.
Northwestern’s campus, located in Evanston, became a hub of anti-Israel activism following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. The school was ravaged by a series of antisemitic incidents tied to campus protests. Most notably, pro-Hamas activists illegally occupied the Deering Meadow section of campus in May 2024, demanding the university boycott all Israeli entities.
During the tense standoff in the spring 2024, Jewish students reported being physically assaulted and harassed while attempting to navigate campus, including incidents in which students wearing visible Jewish symbols such as a kippah were targeted.
Amid the post-Oct. 7 campus protests, the Education and Workforce Committee has been investigating several schools for what lawmakers described as insufficient responses to a surge in antisemitism. Last week, Walberg released documents along with his letter showing what he described as Biss’s failure to protect Northwestern’s Jewish students during the encampment.
Biss called Walberg’s letter a “dishonest political attack” during a news conference at City Hall on Thursday morning.
“But we are here today because that attack is an effort to go at the right to peacefully protest. This is an effort to use the very real danger of antisemitism to advance a political agenda,” Biss said. “I will say that personally, as a Jewish person, as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, I find it deeply, deeply offensive.”
Biss also defended his decision not to intervene in the campus unrest.
“After meticulously assessing the situation through the lens of public safety and the right to peaceful protest, we came to that conclusion,” Biss said. “We believed at the time it was the right decision. I believe today it was the right decision.”
The mayor added that the police department warned at the time that sending city officers to the encampment “might further inflame the situation.”
In May 2024, university president Michael Schill testified in front of the US Congress amid mounting skepticism over efforts to clamp down on campus antisemitism. His administration ultimately ended the encampment by reaching what became known as the “Deering Meadow Agreement” with the pro-Hamas protesters. Terms of the deal included establishing a scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contacting potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, creating a segregated dormitory hall to be occupied exclusively by students of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim descent, and forming a new advisory committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.
Biss touted the deal during his press conference last week, noting it ended the encampment peacefully.
However, the agreement was abolished in November 2025 as part of a deal that the university reached with the Trump administration, which months earlier in April had impounded at least $790 in frozen federal funds over accusations of antisemitism and other discriminatory behavior. Northwestern agrred to pay $75 million and implement measures to protect students from antisemitism in exchange for a resumption of federal funding.
However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization that has been scrutinized by US authorities over Hamas — filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine (GW4P) group to cancel Northwestern’s new antisemitism prevention course, which was implemented as part of the deal. The lawsuit was dropped last month.
In last week’s letter, Walberg alleged that political considerations influenced Biss’s decision not to intervene with police force. Walberg cited testimony from a Northwestern trustee who claimed Biss publicly framed his refusal to provide police support as a way to bolster his progressive credentials, even as the university struggled to maintain order. Internal communications referenced in the letter suggest Northwestern officials feared the city’s position left Jewish students vulnerable during a period of escalating campus unrest nationwide.
Walberg also criticized Biss for recently condemning the federal government’s agreement with Northwestern to restore funding, calling the mayor’s opposition inconsistent with his stated concern about discrimination.
The committee is requesting a formal briefing from Biss on law enforcement coordination and antisemitism in Evanston-area campuses, signaling potential legislative action. Walberg emphasized that Congress has broad constitutional authority to oversee education-related civil rights enforcement, including Title VI protections against religious and ethnic discrimination.
Biss has sought to bolster his reputation with the left flank of the Democratic Party as he runs for Congress himself in Illinois’ 9th District. The mayor has vowed to no longer accept funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, and has adopted a platform critical of the Jewish state.
In a campaign news release on Thursday, Biss wrote that Walberg’s letter was a “baseless attack fueled by” AIPAC.
“It’s no coincidence that Rep. Walberg’s letter arrived just eight days before the beginning of early voting in the March primary election,” Biss wrote. “They’re playing cheap political games in service to AIPAC’s right-wing agenda. It is shameful.”
AIPAC’s mission is to foster bipartisan support in Congress for the US-Israel alliance.
Spectators suggest that Biss, who is facing a bruising primary battle with 26-year-old anti-Israel social media personality Kat Abughazaleh, has sought to curry favor with local progressive activists by pushing a harder line against the Jewish state.