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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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US Legal Adviser Says Iran War Justified by Tehran’s ‘Aggression’ Over Decades
US President Donald Trump points as he delivers a speech during the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) annual fundraising dinner in Washington, DC, US, March 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
The US State Department’s top lawyer has argued that President Donald Trump’s war with Iran was launched in self-defense and to defend US ally Israel, arguing the bombing campaign was not the start of a new war but the continuation of an ongoing conflict.
State Department Legal Adviser Reed Rubinstein made the arguments in a statement released days before a May 1 deadline for the Trump administration to obtain approval for the war from Congress under the 1973 War Powers Act or move to end it.
The US and Israel began air strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, killing Iran‘s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the country’s leadership in the initial attacks. Trump said at the time the strikes, which happened just days after inconclusive talks between US and Iranian negotiators, were aimed at destroying Iranian missiles and annihilating its navy and preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Trump also urged Iranians to overthrow their government.
Many legal experts say the attacks were unjustified under the United Nations Charter, which states that member states must refrain from using force or the threat of force against other states except when force is authorized by the UN Security Council or used in self-defense.
The U.S. was “engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense,” Rubinstein said, citing what he called “Iran‘s malign aggression over decades” since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, including attacks by Iranian proxies on US forces and Israel, Iranian missile strikes against Israel in 2024, and Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“In truth, the United States is acting well within the recognized contours of international law relating to the use of force and self-defense,” he added.
Iran has long denied accusations by Western powers that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
The statement, entitled “Operation Epic Fury and International Law,” was posted on the State Department’s website on Tuesday but, unlike most of the department’s statements, it was not sent to the media or published on official social media channels.
Iran responded to the US and Israeli attacks by launching missiles and drones against US targets, its Middle East neighbors, and shipping, snarling the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway. The war, which has sparked an energy shock and concerns about wider economic fallout, has been paused since an April 8 ceasefire.
Opinion polls show the war is unpopular with Americans, who have seen the prices of fuel, food, and other products jump during the past eight weeks. Reuters/Ipsos poll results released on Friday showed a clear majority of Americans blame Trump for surging gasoline prices, which are weighing on his Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Rubinstein concluded the campaign that began in late February was “part of an armed conflict with Iran that has been ongoing for years” and said it was unnecessary to assess whether an Iranian attack on the US or an ally was imminent.
“The US has acted well within its international law obligations with respect to its use of force since operations began in late February. Iran, by contrast, has acted as any reasonable observer would have expected – lashing out against its neighbors, targeting Israeli civilians, murdering its own people, unlawfully closing the Strait of Hormuz, and wreaking havoc throughout the region,” Rubinstein said.
Congressional aides said Rubinstein’s statement was issued by the Trump administration likely to get ahead of a May 1 deadline to ask Congress to authorize the war. The War Powers Act says the US president must end any ongoing conflict after 60 days until he obtains that authorization to continue. A president can obtain a 30-day extension if he certifies in writing, to Congress, that the continuing use of armed force is necessary.
Democrats, who are in the minority in both chambers of Congress, have tried repeatedly since the war began to pass resolutions ending the conflict until Trump obtains congressional approval, but almost all Republicans have voted to block them.
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Pentagon Email Floats Suspending Spain From NATO, Other Steps Over Iran Rift, Source Says
Spanish soldiers take part in Exercise Dynamic Mariner 25 military drill training, which involves naval forces from several NATO members, at Retin beach, in the Atlantic Ocean, in Barbate, Spain, March 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jon Nazca
An internal Pentagon email outlines options for the United States to punish NATO allies it believes failed to support US operations in the war with Iran, including suspending Spain from the alliance and reviewing the US position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a US official told Reuters.
The policy options are detailed in a note prepared by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon‘s top policy adviser, who expressed frustration at some allies’ perceived reluctance or refusal to grant the United States access, basing, and overflight rights – known as ABO – for the Iran war, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the email.
Colby wrote that ABO is “just the absolute baseline for NATO,” according to the official, who added that the options were circulating at high levels in the Pentagon.
One option in the email envisions suspending “difficult” countries from important or prestigious positions at NATO, the official said.
President Donald Trump has harshly criticized NATO allies for not sending their navies to help open the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed to global shipping following the start of the air war on Feb. 28.
He has also declared he is considering withdrawing from the alliance.
“Wouldn’t you if you were me?” Trump asked Reuters in an April 1 interview, in response to a question about whether the US pulling out of NATO was a possibility.
But the email does not suggest that the United States do so, the official said. It also does not propose closing bases in Europe.
The official declined to say whether the options included a widely expected US drawdown of some forces from Europe, however.
Asked for comment on the email, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson responded: “As President Trump has said, despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us.”
“The War Department will ensure that the president has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part. We have no further comment on any internal deliberations to that effect,” Wilson said.
Asked whether it is possible to suspend a NATO ally, a NATO official said that “NATO’s founding treaty does not foresee any provision for suspension of NATO membership.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SEES EUROPEAN ‘SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT’
The US-Israeli war with Iran has raised serious questions about the future of the 76-year-old bloc and provoked unprecedented concern that the US might not come to the aid of European allies should they be attacked, analysts and diplomats say.
Britain, France, and others say that joining the US naval blockade would amount to entering the war, but that they would be willing to help keep the strait open once there was a lasting ceasefire or the conflict ended.
But Trump administration officials have stressed that NATO cannot be a one-way street.
They have expressed frustration with Spain, where the Socialist leadership said it would not allow its bases or airspace to be used to attack Iran. The United States has two important military bases in Spain: Naval Station Rota and Morón Air Base.
The policy options outlined in the email would be intended to send a strong signal to NATO allies with the goal of “decreasing the sense of entitlement on the part of the Europeans,” the official said, summarizing the email.
The option to suspend Spain from the alliance would have a limited effect on US military operations but a significant symbolic impact, the email argues.
The official did not disclose how the United States might pursue suspending Spain from the alliance.
“We do not work off emails. We work off official documents and government positions, in this case of the United States,” Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez said when asked about the report ahead of a meeting of European Union leaders in Cyprus to discuss topics including NATO‘s mutual assistance clause.
POSITION ON FALKLAND ISLANDS COULD BE RECONSIDERED
The memo also includes an option to consider reassessing US diplomatic support for longstanding European “imperial possessions,” such as the Falkland Islands near Argentina.
The State Department’s website states that the islands are administered by the United Kingdom but are still claimed by Argentina, whose libertarian President Javier Milei is a Trump ally.
Milei was upbeat about the prospects.
“We are doing everything humanly possible so that the Argentine Malvinas, the islands, the entire territory return to the hands of Argentina,” Milei said in a radio interview he posted on his X account on Friday.
“We’re making progress like never before.”
Britain and Argentina fought a brief war in 1982 over the islands after Argentina made a failed bid to take them. Some 650 Argentine soldiers and 255 British troops died before Argentina surrendered.
A spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the sovereignty of the islands rests with Britain.
“Sovereignty rests with the UK and the islands’ right to self-determination is paramount. It’s been our consistent position and will remain the case,” the spokesperson told reporters on Friday.
Trump has repeatedly insulted Starmer, calling him cowardly because of his unwillingness to join the US war with Iran, saying he was “No Winston Churchill” and describing Britain’s aircraft carriers as “toys.”
Britain initially did not grant a request from the US to allow its aircraft to attack Iran from two British bases, but later agreed to allow defensive missions aimed at protecting residents of the region, including British citizens, amid Iranian retaliation.
Addressing reporters at the Pentagon earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said “a lot has been laid bare” by the war with Iran, noting that Iran‘s longer-range missiles cannot hit the United States but can reach Europe.
“We get questions, or roadblocks, or hesitations … You don’t have much of an alliance if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them,” Hegseth said.
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Iran’s Foreign Minister Heading to Islamabad, Raising Optimism for US Peace Talks
Army soldiers patrol a road as Pakistan prepares to host US and Iran for the second round of peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Waseem Khan
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was expected in the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Friday to discuss proposals for restarting peace talks with the United States, but Pakistani sources said he was not due to meet US negotiators there.
Islamabad was the venue for talks between the US and Iran on ending their war that collapsed earlier this week.
Araqchi wrote on X that he was visiting Pakistan, Oman, and Russia to coordinate with partners on bilateral matters and consult on regional developments, adding that Iran’s neighbors remained Tehran’s priority.
The tour will include consultations on the latest efforts to end the war, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson later told state media.
Two Pakistani government sources aware of the discussions said Araqchi’s visit would be a brief one to discuss Iran’s proposals for talks with the US, which mediator Pakistan would then convey to Washington.
US President Donald Trump plans to send special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Islamabad soon for talks with Araqchi, a US official told Reuters, although it was not clear when that meeting would take place. Fox News reported the pair would leave the US on Saturday morning.
Speaking earlier, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a briefing that Iran had a chance to make a “good deal” with the United States.
“Iran knows that they still have an open window to choose wisely … at the negotiating table. All they have to do is abandon a nuclear weapon in meaningful and verifiable ways,” he said.
Reports on Araqchi’s trip in Iranian state media and the Pakistani sources made no mention of Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, who was the head of its delegation at the only talks held so far, earlier this month.
Pakistani sources had said earlier that a US logistics and security team was already in place in Islamabad for potential talks.
The last round of peace talks had been expected on Tuesday but never took place, with Iran saying it was not yet ready to commit to attending and a US delegation led by Vice President JD Vance never leaving Washington.
Trump unilaterally extended a two-week ceasefire on Tuesday at the 11th hour to allow more time to reconvene the negotiators.
Oil prices were volatile as traders weighed potential disruption from the worst oil shock in history with the prospect for further talks.
Brent crude futures were up 53 cents, or 0.5%, at $105.60, and US West Texas Intermediate futures were down 56 cents, or around 0.6%, to $95.29.
HEZBOLLAH DISMISSES LEBANON CEASEFIRE EXTENSION
On Thursday, Israel and Lebanon extended a separate ceasefire for three weeks at a meeting at the White House brokered by Trump.
The war in Lebanon, which Israel invaded last month to root out Iran’s Hezbollah allies after the terrorist group fired across the border, has run in parallel with the wider Iran war, and Tehran says a ceasefire there is a precondition for talks.
There was little sign of an end to the fighting in the south of the country, however, as Lebanese authorities reported two people killed by an Israeli strike and Hezbollah downed an Israeli drone.
While the ceasefire that came into force on April 16 has led to a significant reduction in hostilities, Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade blows in southern Lebanon, where Israel has kept soldiers in a self-declared “buffer zone.”
Responding to the extension, Hezbollah lawmaker Ali Fayyad said, “it is essential to point out that the ceasefire is meaningless in light of Israel’s insistence on hostile acts, including assassinations, shelling, and gunfire” and its demolition of villages and towns in the south.
Israel’s military said it had killed six armed Hezbollah members in southern Lebanon on Friday.
STRAIT OF HORMUZ BLOCKADE
Trump said on Thursday he was in no rush to reach an agreement with Iran and wanted it to be “everlasting,” while asserting that the US had an upper hand in a standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important energy shipping route.
The United States has yet to find a way to open the strait, where Iran has blocked nearly all ships apart from its own since the start of the war eight weeks ago. Iran showed off its control this week by seizing two huge cargo vessels there.
Trump imposed a separate blockade of Iranian shipping last week, with US forces boarding several Iranian ships in international waters. Iran says it will not reopen the strait until Trump lifts his blockade.
“Our blockade is growing and going global,” Hegseth told reporters on Friday.
“No one sails from the Strait of Hormuz to anywhere in the world without the permission of the United States Navy,” he said.
Only five ships crossed the strait in the last 24 hours, shipping data showed on Friday, compared to around 130 a day before the war. Those included one Iranian oil products tanker, but none of the vast crude-carrying supertankers that normally feed global energy markets.
Container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd also said one of its ships had crossed, without giving details.
Though Trump has said that US forces have destroyed Iran’s naval threat, the use of a swarm of small, fast boats to seize the container ships has underscored Tehran’s evolving tactics in the strait as it counters US interception of Iran-linked oil tankers and other vessels.