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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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Canada Sees Record Surge in Antisemitic Incidents for Second Consecutive Year, New Report Finds
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Antisemitic incidents in Canada surged to a record high in 2025 for the second consecutive year, with 6,800 acts of anti-Jewish hate reported nationwide, underscoring a persistently hostile climate for Jews and Israelis across the country, according to newly released data.
On Monday, the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada released its annual report on antisemitism documenting a 9.3 percent increase in hate crimes last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this latest figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
B’nai Brith Canada CEO Simon Wolle described the findings as a “national crisis,” warning that antisemitism has become increasingly normalized within Canadian society and calling on authorities to confront this rising hatred with stronger, sustained action.
“Our review of the past year’s antisemitic incidents must be understood as a wake-up call,” Wolle said in a statement. “Hate and extremism are a threat to Canadian democracy and civil society, not only to the Jewish community.”
According to the latest data, the report found that antisemitism has “metastasized” across all aspects of Canadian life, with the vast majority — 92 percent — of recorded incidents occurring in digital spaces, including 6,248 cases of online harassment.
Among the recorded cases, there were also 10 incidents of violence, 299 cases of vandalism, and 243 incidents of real-world harassment.
Online platforms have also seen a rise in Holocaust denial, with artificial intelligence being used to fabricate and distort historical narratives.
While geopolitical tensions in the Middle East have contributed to the surge, the report warns that antisemitism has moved beyond the “radical fringes,” pointing to troubling trends on university campuses and in public schools, where Jewish students and faculty increasingly report feeling vulnerable.
The trend appears to be continuing into 2026, with several high-profile attacks — including gunfire directed at three synagogues in Toronto last month, alongside vandalism targeting businesses and physical assaults — signaling an ongoing escalation of violence.
Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, said many who describe themselves as “anti-Zionists” are in fact reviving long-standing tropes used to dehumanize Jewish people, warning that such narratives are increasingly being normalized in mainstream discourse.
“The fact of the matter is that when it becomes acceptable, and even popular, to demonize Zionists, Jewish communities suffer,” Robertson said in a statement.
This latest report came after Canada’s Senate last week released a separate assessment offering a comprehensive roadmap to counter rising Jew-hatred, calling for expanded law enforcement resources to investigate hate crimes, strengthened Holocaust education, and the implementation of digital literacy programs for youth.
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Smith College to Hold Talks With Students for Justice in Palestine Following Unauthorized Encampment
The “People’s University” encampment, established by Students for Justice in Palestine, on the campus of Smith College in April 2024. Photo: Screenshot
Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts has granted Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) a meeting with high-level officials in exchange for the group’s ending an unauthorized encampment established on campus to protest the board of trustees’ decision to reject a proposal inspired by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
On April 18, SJP commandeered the Chapin Lawn and renamed it “The People’s University.” Armed with a litany of demands calling for “restructuring” Smith’s governance of its endowment, transferring power over the institution from administrators to faculty and students, and a “required course on race” informed by the divisive critical race theory discipline, the students initially vowed to dwell in the encampment indefinitely.
Over seven days, SJP hosted a series of anti-Israel themed events on “Palestinian resistance,” “Indigenous resistance,” and “organizing.” On other days, the group filled time with “listening sessions” and even provided dinner, suggesting that the encampment received financial support sufficient to feed dozens of college students. However, the mounting presence of public safety officers around the encampment site and little indication that the demonstration held the drawing power of encampments of previous academic years prompted SJP to consider settling for less than it wanted.
Additionally, the college had notified the group of being in violation of campus policies on peaceful assembly and threatened SJP with disciplinary sanctions, which the group described as “fear tactics.” Tamra Bates, director of student engagement, personally told the students they would be punished as “individuals” and, the group added, public safety officers addressed “at least one student” by their “full name.” After three days, paranoia took hold of the organizers, and they issued a prohibition on photography “at any time … especially of people’s faces.”
SJP ultimately agreed to enter negotiations with the college over email, a process which concluded with Smith College agreeing to hold a meeting with the group and college trustees “before the end of the semester.” The students decamped on Saturday.
Smith College has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s inquiry regarding the substance of the deal.
As previously reported, Smith College became one of the latest higher education institutions to see a class between anti-Zionists and administrators over institutional ties to Israel as college trustees neared a vote on what SJP titled the “ethical investment” proposal. Brimming with falsehoods, the document accused Israel of the crime of “femi-genocide,” which SJP described as “sexual and reproductive violence” and mass murder perpetrated against Palestinian women and girls. The enterprise continues a pattern of depicting Israel, the most progressive country in the Middle East, as a foe of left-wing causes and an enemy of liberalism.
Additionally, the proposal called on Smith to withdraw investments in armaments manufacturers while arguing that divestment from Israel is a prelude to divesting from fossil fuels, a subtle but common tactic in which far-left groups place Jews and Zionists at the center of an array of alleged conflicts and social maladies.
“Militarism and the use of explosive weaponry has a devastating impact on our climate: military carbon emissions from the ongoing occupation and genocide of Palestinians exceeds that of several countries combined,” the proposal said. “We face interconnected human rights crises at home and abroad that jeopardize our immigrant and international students, faculty, staff, and community members. Broader patterns of forced displacement are inseparable from climate change, and are fueled by a longer history of neoliberalization, securitization, and colonization.”
Citing fiduciary concerns, virtually all colleges asked to adopt BDS have rejected it.
In March 2025, Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine did so when its Board of Trustees voted to accept the counsel of a committee that recommended maintaining investment practices which safeguard the institution’s financial health and educational mission. In a report authored by the college’s Ad Hoc Committee on Investments and Responsibility, it said, “Interventions in the management of the endowment that are rooted in moral or political considerations should be exceedingly rare and restricted to those cases where there is near-universal consensus among Bowdoin’s community of stakeholders.”
Boston University rejected divestment the previous month, with its president, Melissa Gilliam, saying, “The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East.”
Adopting divestment proposals dictated by anti-Zionist groups is a recipe for squandering tens of billions of dollars in endowment returns, according to a report published in September 2024 by the JLens investment network, an arm of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report said BDS would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion in growth, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Groups Blast Mamdani for Vetoing Bill to Limit Protests Near Schools
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, as a major winter storm spreads across a large swath of the United States, in Brooklyn, New York City, US, Jan. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Bing Guan
Major Jewish organizations are sharply criticizing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after he vetoed a bill aimed at limiting protests near schools, condemning the mayor for what they argue is a failure to protect Jewish students at a time of rising antisemitism.
The legislation, which passed the City Council with bipartisan support, would have created buffer zones around educational institutions to prevent obstruction, intimidation, and disruption during demonstrations. Supporters said the measure was a direct response to recent protests outside Jewish schools and community spaces that have left students feeling unsafe.
In statements following the veto, several Jewish advocacy groups said the mayor’s decision sends the wrong message amid a surge in antisemitic incidents across the city. They warned that without additional safeguards, Jewish students could remain vulnerable to harassment and disruption near their schools.
A group of leading Jewish organizations subsequently released a statement condemning the veto, saying they were “deeply disappointed” with the decision.
“This legislation represented a crucial step toward ensuring that every school and community institution can be better protected,” read the statement from UJA-Federation of New York, ADL New York/New Jersey, AJC New York, Conference of Presidents, JCRC-NY, New York Board of Rabbis, Orthodox Union, The Rabbinical Assembly, StandWithUs, Teach NYS, and the Union for Reform Judaism.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin condemned Mamdani’s veto.
“Ensuring students can enter and exit their schools without fear of harassment or intimidation should not be controversial,” Menin said.
New York City Councilmember Eric Dinowitz similarly criticized Mamdani, saying in a statement that the mayor had undercut his campaign promise to ensure the safety of Jewish New Yorkers.
“The mayor promised to keep New Yorkers safe and increase police transparency,” Dinowitz said. “By vetoing this bill, he is breaking yet another campaign promise.”
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a far-left and fringe anti-Zionist group, released a statement framing Mamdani’s veto as a victory for free speech rights.
The group wrote that Mamdani “further demonstrated his commitment to protecting New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights, and his refusal to endorse what is quite simply bad policy.”
“The ‘buffer zone’ bills are not about keeping New Yorkers safe. They are about silencing our voices,” the organization continued. “That they do so under the auspices of combating antisemitism doesn’t just add insult to injury; it actively endangers Jews. At best, these bills change little. At worst, they divide and silence New Yorkers and contribute to the broader political climate targeting protestors.”
Mamdani defended his decision, arguing that the bill’s language was overly broad and could infringe on constitutionally protected protest rights. He said the definition of educational institutions could extend beyond K-12 schools to include universities, museums, and other public-facing institutions, potentially restricting a wide range of demonstrations unrelated to antisemitism.
“As the bill is written, everywhere from universities to museums to teaching hospitals could face restrictions,” Mamdani said. “This could impact workers protesting ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement], or college students demanding their school divest from fossil fuels, or demonstrating in support of Palestinian rights.”
The mayor also pointed to existing laws that already prohibit harassment, threats, and obstruction, suggesting the proposed measure was unnecessary and legally vulnerable.
Still, critics say those protections are insufficient in the current climate. They argue that recent demonstrations, particularly those tied to tensions over the Israel-Hamas war, have at times crossed into intimidation, and that clearer boundaries are needed to ensure student safety.
The backlash has put Mamdani at odds with some Democratic lawmakers and community leaders who had supported the bill. While he allowed a separate measure strengthening protections around houses of worship to become law, opponents say excluding schools from similar safeguards leaves a critical gap.
Skeptics also claim that the veto undercuts Mamdani’s previous vow to protect the local Jewish community amid a surge in antisemitic hate crimes in the Big Apple.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
Leading members of the Jewish community in New York have expressed alarm about Mamdani’s victory, fearing what may come in a city already experiencing a surge in antisemitic hate crimes.
The City Council could attempt to override the veto, though it would need to secure additional votes to reach a two-thirds majority.
The dispute highlights a broader national debate over how to respond to rising antisemitism while preserving First Amendment protections, as protests tied to global conflicts continue to unfold across the United States. For many Jewish leaders, however, the issue in New York is immediate and personal, and they say the mayor’s decision falls short of the moment.