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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A hypnotic new album inspired by a unique Yiddish recording
Folklore scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett doesn’t remember interviewing and recording the Yiddish folksinger Rose Cohen in 1968 in Toronto. But this recording may turn out to be one of the most significant ones that made it into the storied archives at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
In it, Cohen sings ten songs from her childhood in the Kyiv region of Ukraine, in Yiddish, Hebrew, Ukrainian and Russian. A handful of these songs have never been found anywhere else.
Cohen, who came to Toronto after World War II, was from a dynasty of what she called khazonishe, or singing rabbis, and learned many of these songs listening to them singing in her home.
This recording became the inspiration for a new album, The Rose Cohen Experience, released last month on Borscht Beat Records. Her songs are performed here by Cantor Sarah Myerson and Ilya Shneyveys, a married couple of talented multi-instrumentalists. The duo, called Electric Rose, took nine of the ten songs Kirshenblatt-Gimblett recorded and created their own elaborate, imaginative versions of them.
In the recording, Myerson — who serves as spiritual leader and cantor at Roosevelt Island Jewish Congregation in New York City — sang them as she and Shneyveys played an array of instruments over loops, creating a surreal, hypnotic sound. Shneyveys was no stranger to this, having once been part of the Yiddish “psychedelic” rock group Forshpil.
One of the songs, Berosh Hashone (On Rosh Hashone) begins with a segment from the solemn High Holidays prayer Unetaneh Tokef, about how our destiny is determined by God, depending on what deeds we’ve done. But then there are other Yiddish verses about an unhappy woman asking her children if she should divorce their father. “We don’t have that as a Yiddish song elsewhere in the repertoire,” Myerson said in an interview. “We don’t know of that song existing in other languages either.”
The album is structured, at least at first, as an imagined narrative of Cohen’s own life. “Ikh heyb mikh on tsu dermonen” (I’m beginning to remember) possesses a driving rhythm and a powerful recollection of an immigrant in North America dreaming of going back to his wife in Europe. Even though it’s a folk song, it’s possibly autobiographical when she sings it, as Cohen’s father immigrated to Toronto before the rest of his family. Myerson and Shneyveys aimed to draw out the autobiographical aspect of this song by playing selections of the Cohen interview where she recalls where she is from and how old she is.
The song transitions to Bay mashin (At the machine), a folk song about a woman slaving over a sewing machine, looking forward to getting married after having assembled her dowry. In an interesting twist, Myerson actually uses the sound of a sewing machine throughout the track, both in recorded and live performances. It’s a small hand-crank sewing machine from the early 20th century, “possibly developed for child labor,” Myerson said.
Myerson contributed a special track, Kale Tfile (Bride’s prayer), to supplement the nine Cohen songs. Kale Tfile is taken from an excerpt of a tkhine (a Yiddish-language women’s prayer) that a woman would recite on the night before the wedding. She found the prayer in an 1897 prayerbook known as the Siddur Korban Minchah.
Myerson said she decided to include this text after trying to imagine how Cohen may have felt singing Bay mashin, where the ending indicates that the female narrator is about to marry. The words are plaintive (“O God, please hear my youthful prayer, receive my hot tears that I now spill before You”), raising the possibility that she is unhappy about the match. Myerson’s performance delivers the song in that spirit, utilizing a vocoder, a keyboard that allows her to harmonize with herself.
From here, the album drops its autobiographical train of thought and moves into a more experiential mode. Mayim Rabim (mighty waters), also known as Psalm 93 — a psalm recited during the Shabbat evening prayer service — is remarkable because, as Myerson said, “we just don’t have many recordings of women of her generation singing liturgy.” Here, we see how Electric Rose made use of ambient recordings; in this case — ocean waves from Miami Beach.
You can catch Electric Rose on their upcoming tours throughout the East Coast, California and Germany.
The post A hypnotic new album inspired by a unique Yiddish recording appeared first on The Forward.
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China Warns Against Foreign ‘Interference’ in Iran as Trump Mulls Response to Regime Crackdown
A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
China on Monday expressed hope that the Iranian regime would “overcome” the current anti-government protests sweeping the country, warning against foreign “interference” as US President Donald Trump considered how to respond to Iran’s deadly crackdown on nationwide protests.
“China hopes the Iranian government and people will overcome the current difficulties and uphold stability in the country,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters during a press conference.
“China always opposes interference in other countries’ internal affairs, advocates that all countries’ sovereignty and security should be fully protected by international law, and opposes the use or threat of force in international relations,” she continued. “We call on parties to act in ways conducive to peace and stability in the Middle East.”
The comments came as Iran continued to face fierce demonstrations, which began on Dec. 28 over economic hardships but escalated into large-scale protests calling for the downfall of the country’s Islamist regime.
If the regime in Tehran was seriously weakened or potentially collapsed, it would present a problem for a strategic partner of Beijing.
China, a key diplomatic and economic backer of Tehran, has moved to deepen ties with the regime in recent years, signing a 25-year cooperation agreement, holding joint naval drills, and continuing to purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions.
China is the largest importer of Iranian oil, with nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude and condensate exports going to Beijing. Traders and analysts have said that Chinese reliance on Iranian oil will likely increase and replace Venezuelan oil after US forces captured Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro earlier this month.
Iran’s growing ties with China come at a time when Tehran faces mounting economic sanctions from Western powers, while Beijing itself is also under US sanctions.
According to some media reports, China may be even helping Iran rebuild its decimated air defenses following the 12-day war with Israel in June.
The extent of China’s partnership with Iran may be tested as the latter comes under increased international scrutiny over its violent crackdown on anti-regime protests.
US-based rights group HRANA said by late Monday it had verified the deaths of 646 people, including 505 protesters, 113 military and security personnel, and seven bystanders. The group added that it was investigating 579 more reported deaths and that, since the demonstrations began,10,721 people have been arrested.
Other reports gave indicated the number of protesters killed by the regime numbers well into the thousands, but with the regime imposing an internet blackout since Thursday, verification has been difficult.
Trump has said he will intervene against the regime if security forces continue killing protesters. Adding to threats of military action, Trump late on Monday announced that any country doing business with Iran will face a new tariff of 25 percent on its exports to the U.S.
“This order is final and conclusive,” he said in a social media post.
According to reports, Trump was to meet with senior advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for Iran, including military strikes, using cyber weapons, widening sanctions, and providing online help to anti-government sources.
Iran has warned that any military action would be met with force in response.
“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories [Israel] as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf told a crowd in Tehran’s Enqelab Square on Monday, adding that Iranians were fighting a four-front war: “economic war, psychological warfare, military war against the US and Israel, and today a war against terrorism.”
However, the White House stressed that Trump hopes to find a diplomatic resolution.
“Diplomacy is always the first option for the president,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday.
“What you’re hearing publicly from the Iranian regime is quite different from the messages the administration is receiving privately, and I think the president has an interest in exploring those messages,” she said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told Al Jazeera that he and US envoy Steve Witkoff have been in contact.
Trump said on Sunday the US could meet Iranian officials and he was in contact with Iran’s opposition.
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Arson Suspect Targeted Mississippi Synagogue for ‘Jewish Ties,’ Laughed During Confession: FBI
Smoldered remains of the Beth Israel Congregation’s library. Photo: Screenshot.
The suspect believed to have intentionally ignited a catastrophic fire which decimated the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi has told US federal investigators he targeted the institution over its “Jewish ties,” according to an affidavit the FBI has submitted to federal court.
Stephen Pittman, the FBI said in portions of the affidavit made public on Monday, “was identified as a person of interest and ultimately confessed to lighting a fire inside the building.” The document added that Pittman, arrested on Sunday, purchased the accelerant, gasoline, with which he ignited the blaze from a gas station.
Pittman, 19, allegedly started the conflagration in Beth Israel’s library during the early morning hours on Saturday, setting off a blaze which coursed through the entire building and intensified to the extent that its flames, according to one local account, “were coming out of the synagogue’s windows.” As he carried out the act, he notified his father of it via text message, saying “I did my research,” the
According to the court filing, Pittman also told his father that he was aware of the incident being filmed by Beth Israel’s security cameras, describing them as “the best.”
“Pittman laughed as he told his father what he did and said he finally got them,” read the affidavit from Nicholas Amiano, an FBI agent in the Jackson division.
In the end, Pittman allegedly destroyed a number of Torah scrolls and caused damage so great that the building must, for now, be abandoned while authorities conclude their investigation of the incident and Beth Israel, founded in 1860, weighs a reconstruction which could takes years to complete.
The institution was once targeted by the Ku Klux Klan over its rabbi’s support for civil rights for African Americans. With the latest destruction, some 150 families will be left without the only Jewish house of worship in the city.
“As Jackson’s only synagogue, Beth Israel is a beloved institution, and it is the fellowship of our neighbors and extended community that will see us through,” Beth Israel president Zach Shemper said in a statement. “We are a resilient people. With support from our community, we will rebuild.”
Jackson Mayor John Horhn, a Democrat also issued a statement, saying, “Acts of antisemitism, racism, and religious hatred are attacks on Jackson as a whole and will be treated as acts of terror against residents’ safety and freedom to worship. Targeting people because of their faith, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation is morally wrong, un-American, and completely incompatible with the values of this city.”
He added, “Jackson stands with Beth Israel and the Jewish community, and we’ll do everything we can to support them and hold accountable anyone who tried to spread fear and hate here.”
Reactions to the suspected hate crime poured in from major Jewish civil rights organizations across the country, with Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt saying, “An attack on any synagogue is an attack on all Jews.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) called the fire a “hateful act” that “is only the most recent symptom of the dangerous rising antisemitism facing Jewish communities across the country and around the world.”
For several consecutive years, antisemitism in the US has surged to break “all previous annual records,” according to a series of reports issued by the ADL since it began recording data on antisemitic incidents.
The ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024 — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, providing statistical proof of what has been described as an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly fifty years since the organization began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The Algemeiner parsed the ADL’s data, finding dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
The FBI disclosed similar numbers, showing that even as hate crimes across the US decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups have noted that this rise in antisemitic hate crimes, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
“This latest deplorable crime against a Jewish institution reminds us that the same hatred that motivated the KKK to attack Beth Israel in 1967 is alive today,” the Florida Holocaust Museum said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Monday. “Antisemitism are still trying to intimidate Jews, drive them out of public life, and make houses of worship targets of violence instead of place of safety and community.”
It added, “With your help we can resist this evil. The more society understands about the nature of antisemitism, including the Holocaust, the better prepared it will be to identify and reject anti-Jewish bigotry. May Beth Israel’s Holocaust Torah, which survived the fire, inspire us all to stand up for each other and create a more just and accepting world.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.