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Ukrainian Jewish life has always taken place in Russian. Now a race to translate is underway.
LVIV, Ukraine (JTA) – The rabbis sat around a breakfast table, discussing Russia’s war on the country where they work in a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian. They named their hometowns as Lugansk, Lvov and Dnepr, the Russian names for Ukrainian cities that have vaulted into international headlines since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
Although they were focused on Ukraine’s progress in the fighting, the rabbis uttered not a single word in Ukrainian. How could they? Like the vast majority of Jews in Ukraine, none of them speaks the country’s official language.
Russian has long been the first language for a wide swath of Ukrainians, including the majority of the country’s Jews. But after the Russian invasion, many Ukrainians decided they wanted to speak less Russian and more Ukrainian. Many Jews, similarly horrified by the sight of thousands of Russian soldiers pouring over Ukraine’s borders and wishing to demonstrate their Ukrainian bonafides, have made the same choice — even as it means disrupting a long linguistic tradition.
So when the rabbis’ successors meet for pancakes and sour cream, they will be far more likely to introduce themselves as the rabbis of Luhansk, Lviv and Dnipro, the Ukrainian names for their hometowns that have become the standard in English. They will also likely be able to hand their students and congregants Ukrainian-language versions of central Jewish texts that simply do not exist now.
“Many of my friends say that they are embarrassed to use Russian as a language. They say that we are Ukrainian Jews, and that Russia is a terrorist country fighting us and that we shouldn’t use their language,” said Rabbi Meir Stambler, from Dnipro. “Others say that [Russian president Vladimir] Putin doesn’t own the Russian language. It is an issue.”
He added, “This is something that people are discussing all the time.”
A decade ago, half of Ukrainians said they spoke Russian as their native language. That number has declined to 20%, fueled in part by resentment over Russia’s aggressions in Crimea, a contested region that it annexed by force in 2014. But Jews have remained predominantly Russian-speaking, even in parts of western Ukraine where Ukrainian has long been the dominant language. (Russian and Ukrainian are related linguistically, but their speakers cannot understand each other.)
Russia’s war on Ukraine has Ukrainian Jews playing catchup. Stambler, who heads the Federation of Jewish Communities, a body affiliated with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement that operates a network of 36 synagogues around Ukraine, offers a stark prediction: “Within 10 years, every Jew in Ukraine will speak Ukrainian.”
The dominance of Russian among Ukraine’s Jews, who numbered in the tens of thousands before the war, has deep roots.
“The historical trajectory of Jews in what is now Ukraine led them in the 19th century to adopt Russian rather than Ukrainian,” says historian Natan Meir, a professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University. “That was because Ukrainian was perceived as a peasant language that did not have any high culture associated with it, and because there were no economic advantages to adopting Ukrainian at the time.”
Now, the upside of switching to Ukrainian — demonstrating a national allegiance during a time of war — couldn’t be clearer.
“Jews feel quite integrated into Ukrainian society, but a shift, even if it is a gradual shift, to Ukrainian is going to make that more tangible than ever,” Meir said, calling the Russian invasion “absolutely game-changing” for Ukrainian Jews. “They will be perceived even more strongly than they have been as being wholly Ukrainian and part of the fabric of Ukrainian society.”
Most Ukrainian Jews, especially those educated since the collapse of the Soviet Union, can now speak some Ukrainian. But their ability often depends on where they grew up: Many Jews in traditionally Russophone cities such as Odesa, Dnipro or Kharkiv can struggle with the language, while their grandparents often cannot speak it at all.
Books in both Hebrew and Russian sit on a bookshelf at Medzhybizh. (Jacob Judah)
“Not more than 20% were Ukrainian-speaking at home,” says Stambler. “Take President [Volodymyr] Zelensky. He knew Ukrainian, but he didn’t speak it at home, and he had to polish it up when he became president.”
It will not be simple for the Jewish community to suddenly switch to Ukrainian, the most widely spoken European language without a standardized translation of the Torah.
Two years ago, a team of translators working in Israel, Austria and Hungary began working to produce Ukrainian-language Jewish texts. But before the Russian invasion, the effort had so far produced only a Ukrainian book of psalms, or tehillim.
In May, two months into the war, a decision was made to accelerate work on a daily prayer book. A Torah could follow.
“The chumash is difficult,” said Stambler, who oversees the half-dozen-strong team of translators from his base in Dnipro, using the Hebrew word for the printed form of the Torah. “We are working on it.”
While translating sacred texts can take years, other changes have come faster. The leaflets, brochures and calendars that are a fixture at any Jewish center in Ukraine were quickly swapped out Russian for Ukrainian, at least at the federation’s headquarters. Before February, these had often been produced and printed by Russian Jewish communities and shared with those in Ukraine, for simplicity’s sake.
“This differentiation from Russian Jewry is going to be huge,” said Meir, the historian. “Up until this point they have essentially formed one linguistic and cultural space that all Jews, whether they were in Ukraine, Russia or Belarus could move freely between.”
Now, the ties between those communities are both logistically complicated to maintain — trade routes have been ruptured — and also potentially a liability at a time when anyone in either Russia or Ukraine showing an affinity for the other country can face suspicion or penalties.
“This shift, if it actually happens, is going to be marking out a totally new cultural space for Ukrainian Jews and almost a declaration of independence,” Meir said “Or at least that is the aspiration, because there is so much of their heritage which is still based in the Russian language that it is going to be a long time before they can fully separate.”
That separation process, which began to take shape most clearly after 2014, has quickened. “We started doing things ourselves,” said Stambler. “We used to do about 20% in Ukrainian for the Jews in western towns like Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod, but we are making a much stronger push now.”
He estimates that some 75% of material being distributed to Ukrainian Jewish communities by the Federation of Jewish Communities was in Ukrainian by September, up from 20% to 35% in January.
Young rabbis who come from the United States or Israel to serve small Jewish communities across Ukraine now say that they have had to add Ukrainian alongside their Russian classes.
“I began with Russian,” said one of those rabbis who works in Vinnitsya, until he decided over the summer that he had to learn Ukrainian. “I realized that I had to learn Ukrainian because I needed it on the street. I needed it to speak with the government and with the media.”
Signs in a synagogue in Ukraine are written in both Ukrainian and Russian. (Jacob Judah)
Some Ukrainian Jews are voting with their voices.
“My whole life, I spoke only Russian,” said Olha Peresunko, who before the war lived in Mikolaiv in southern Ukraine. “But after the 24th of February I am speaking only Ukrainian.”
Peresunko was speaking outside a Lviv synagogue this fall, where she and other refugees were waiting for food parcels. She had fled Mikolaiv, which has sustained repeated assault by Russian troops, for Lviv with her mother and two children while her husband is on the frontlines.
Her children are finding it hard to adjust to the exclusive Ukrainian environment in Lviv, but she is confident that they will make the shift. “They will speak Ukrainian as their first language,” Peresunko said.
Exactly how much the shift to Ukrainian will change local Jewish communities is a matter of debate. Rabbi Shalom Gopin, who fled to Kyiv in 2014 from his home community in Luhansk, an overwhelmingly Russophone city seized by Russia-backed separatists at that time, said he, too, believes that Ukrainian will displace Russian as the lingua franca of Ukrainian Jewry.
A Ukrainian woman displays her Ukrainian-language Jewish calendar as a source of pride, September 2022. (Jacob Judah)
“They are starting to slowly speak Ukrainian,” he said. “It is no problem. There are lots of Jews in America who speak English. We live here, and we speak the languages of the places that we live. It is normal.”
But Gopin said the linguistic shift “means nothing” amid other issues facing Jews in Ukraine, where Russia’s war is threatening to undo 30 years of Jewish community building, largely though not exclusively led by Chabad, Gopin’s Orthodox movement.
“The problem for the Jews of Ukraine is not language,” he said. “It is about how much they are going to synagogue, or how many children are going to Jewish schools, not about what they are speaking.”
Natalia Kozachuk, 45, a Jewish businesswoman in Lviv, sees only upside to shedding Russian, her native language. She has started to speak to her children only in Ukrainian.
“It will be hugely positive if Jews speak more Ukrainian,” Kozachuk said. This is the only way that Jews can truly “learn more about the Ukrainian people,” she said, “about their history and the positive qualities and strengths of Ukraine.”
“Only good can come of it,” she added. “We will understand each other better.”
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German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims
(JTA) — A decision to bar the “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of the Nazis has touched a nerve in one small German town, and beyond.
At issue is a motion – passed Sept. 25 by the city council of Heidenau in the former East Germany – to stop installation of such memorials in local sidewalks, calling them disrespectful, and to use the town’s North Cemetery instead.
Set into the ground, the small, engraved brass “Stolpersteine,” or stumbling stones, are meant to make pedestrians stop and think about the fate of former residents. There are currently some 116,000 such stones laid in 1,860 municipalities across Europe, mostly in Germany, according to the project’s website.
A curious aspect of the Stolpersteine is that they are opposed by both Germany’s right wing, which view them as detracting from national pride, and by a vocal minority of Jews who feel they don’t do enough to uplift the memory of victims.
The effort to block the memorial stones in Heidenau was sponsored jointly by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The town’s current mayor, Conny Oertel, is independent.
The city council’s decision comes as the AfD gains support in German elections nationwide. The party’s support for banning the project in Heidenau has sparked concern about potential moves to suppress official public commemoration of the Holocaust.
The AfD is known for challenging Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance in general. Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the party in the neighboring state of Thuringia, once even called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” that detracted from German pride. In protest, an artist collective built a replica of the memorial outside his home.
On the other hand, some Jews, albeit a minority, object to the memorials because they say it’s disrespectful to place them where they can be walked on and covered with leaves or trash. The stones have also been targets of vandelism, they note.
But the Heidenau motion is not for the sake of victims; rather it’s a “transparent maneuver by the extremists of the AfD” to suppress Germany’s remembrance culture, said Charlotte Knobloch, who has successfully opposed the placement of Stolpersteine in her home city of Munich, in the state of Bavaria.
“Removing places of remembrance from the cityscape, as has now happened in Heidenau, is absolutely the wrong approach,” said Knobloch, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, who heads the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
In a statement issued to the press Friday, Knobloch added that she was “appalled” that the CDU “would lend itself to supporting” the move. “The democratic center should and must find its way back to itself here and find a better solution.”
The joint opposition to the project by the AfD, the mainstream CDU and a local activist group creates a dilemma for Stolpersteine opponents like Knobloch who also abhor the AfD.
Heidenau, in the state of Saxony, is not the first town to act against the project. The city of Munich in Bavaria voted as early as 2004 not to allow the installation of the stones in public spaces, siding with Knobloch. In the city of Pulheim, in North Rhine-Westphalia, the project was blocked in 2011, but eventually the municipality reversed course and allowed the first installations to take place in 2022.
Heidenau is home to 17,000 people. Though the wartime local Jewish population was small, there are five such stones in the town already. An application for 12 more had been submitted by the Alternative Cultural and Educational Center (Akubiz), including for Fritz Goldstein and his wife Martha, who were expelled to Poland in 1938 and survived the war.
Arguing against the stones, the Heidenau motion noted that many citizens, relatives of victims, and activists actually disapprove of this form of commemoration.
Negative reactions to the decision in Heidenau were swift, both from proponents and detractors of the memorial concept itself.
In an email statement, the New York-based March of the Living educational organization called on the town of Heidenau “to reverse its decision and on Germany’s leaders and citizens to oppose every effort to hide this history.”
The city council decision “raises a deeply troubling question: Are political interests being allowed to push the memory of Nazi victims out of public life?” the statement read in part.
Like Knobloch, Munich resident Gabriella Meros doesn’t like the stumbling stones. “They are simply not a dignified way to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust,” said Meros, daughter of a Holocaust survivor and chair of the association Respect and Remember Europe.
She promotes placement of plaques on buildings instead.
But the political move in Heidenau by the CDU and AfD is “outrageous, because they’re exploiting this argument for their own purposes.”
The real problem is, she said, that the AfD “wants to abolish remembrance” itself.
In its platform, the AfD says it aims to promote “positive, identity-establishing aspects of German history.” Critics say that in practice, this could mean reducing funding for educational trips to Holocaust sites and for the memorial sites themselves.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated in 1992 by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig, sets engraved memorials into sidewalks in front of buildings where deported victims of the Nazi dictatorship once lived.
Usually, family members from around the world nominate sites and pay a nominal fee for materials. For many, the stumbling stones are a substitute for a grave, for ancestors whose place of death is unknown.
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor wrote on X
that he was “ashamed” of Heidenau’s decision, noting that members of his own family who were forced to flee the Nazis were commemorated by the stones in Berlin.
“Every person has a name. A world. A story. It is precisely this memory that is being erased here. Whoever erases the victims from the past erases the past itself.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘NAZA’ documentary draws sold-out crowd – and protests – at US premiere
(JTA) — Even a powerful Nor’easter couldn’t stop the crowds from showing up at the North American premiere of the controversial Israeli documentary “NAZA” on Saturday afternoon.
The two weekend screenings scheduled at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Film Festival sold out in minutes. Dozens of people waited in a box office standby line that stretched around the corner despite the blustery conditions, while at least one local politician scored a ticket: Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District.
Meanwhile, two groups of Israeli-Americans showed up on Saturday with no intention of going inside the theater: one demonstrating in solidarity with the filmmakers, and a larger group across the street that denounced the film as they waved Israeli flags.
The documentary, which was produced by The Guardian and alleges that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza, has received early acclaim, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. It will be made available for free on The Guardian’s website later this fall.
John Kwiatkowski, senior manager of publicity and communications for Film at Lincoln Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “NAZA sold out almost immediately.”
But “NAZA,” whose name is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” has also roiled a number of Israeli officials and the country’s military. The Israel Defense Forces issued a public rebuttal after the film’s reception in Venice, with the IDF chief of staff calling the film a “deliberate distortion of reality.”
The Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, have faced intense backlash at home. Israel’s culture minister threatened to strip them of their citizenship and protesters accused the duo of treason in a demonstration outside Szor’s parents’ home.
Roni Tamari, who organized the rally supporting the filmmakers on Saturday, called the Israeli reaction “out of proportion.”
David Lawson, a Jewish Queens resident who had purchased a ticket for the Saturday premiere, told JTA that he’d appreciated Abraham and Szor’s previous film, “No Other Land,” which focused on settler violence in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta.
Minutes before the screening’s slated start time, Lawson said that he was “very excited” to see “NAZA,” not just for what it will say “about Israel, but also just about the alarming use of AI in warfare in general.”
Lawson said he likes “to hope that the tide is shifting on acceptance of Zionism in the United States,” and that support for “NAZA” was an example of that shift. He also said he was “expecting” to see protesters who disagreed with the film. “Pathetic,” another person in line chimed in, describing the demonstration.
They were referring to the protest organized by the Israeli-American Council, which drew dozens of critics of the film who believe it omits the context of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack in its depiction of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza. Speakers included IAC’s chief communities officer Noa Peri-Jensch and a pair of survivors of the Nova music festival that Hamas attacked.
A fleet of four black trucks circled the area with LED screens that displayed images of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack along with various messages. “Movies have editors. History does not,” one message read. The trucks were commissioned by the IAC.
“We mourn every innocent life lost in this war, Israeli or Palestinian,” Peri-Jensch said during the rally. “But compassion for Palestinian civilians does not require [us] to erase Oct. 7, ignore Hamas or accept one narrative without questioning it.”
Peri-Jensch was not calling for the film’s screenings to be canceled, she said in an interview, but rather for them to be paired “with context” at festivals, like panels featuring Oct. 7 survivors.
Asked about Israeli officials’ threats toward the filmmakers and the demonstrators calling them traitors, Peri-Jensch said she “cannot comment on what people in Israel do, I can only comment here,” adding that viewers “deserve to know the full scope.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed legislation last week that would strip the Israeli filmmakers of their citizenship, while the Israeli army has weighed taking legal action against them.
Protesters gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home multiple nights in a row last week calling on authorities to “expel the traitors.” One speaker called for Abraham and Szor to be executed while the crowd chanted, “Execute the traitors.” Participants in the right-wing protest included activists and campaign staff from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right party, according to Haaretz.
On Saturday, Nova massacre survivor Rom El-Hai himself referred to the filmmakers as “traitors,” and said that there have been “liars” like Abraham and Szor within the Jewish community since the Bible and during the Holocaust.
In an interview following his remarks, El-Hai said it isn’t his job to say how exactly Abraham and Szor should be dealt with in Israeli society, but that they “should be punished” and that they cannot “live their life in Israel like nothing happened.”
“People need to understand there is a price for what they’re doing,” he said.
Near the standby line running along the sidewalk of Broadway, about a dozen demonstrators who are involved with the group Israelis for Peace held signs reading, “We stand by the countless victims in Gaza and Rachel & Yuval for speaking truth to power.”
Tamari, one of the organizers, said she felt it was “actually very disrespectful” for images of wounded and killed Oct. 7 victims to be shown in public.
Moshe Kayam, an Israeli-American who demonstrated in solidarity with the “NAZA” filmmakers on Saturday, said IAC’s rally was “doing a disservice” because the Oct. 7 attacks were indeed “horrendous,” but “did not justify the mass killing” of civilians in Gaza.
“We want the truth to come out,” Kayam said of the film. “We want everyone to see what really happened there, and the damage that it caused to Gaza, to Israel’s image and to us as Israelis.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother
Roll the Calls: A Memoir
By Ari Emanuel
Knopf, 432 pages, $35
It must be exhausting to be super-agent Ari Emanuel: rising before dawn for a workout regimen, ingesting live worms to consume bacteria, and then placing hundreds of daily phone calls to clients and network honchos. It is, frankly, exhausting just to read about it, notwithstanding the clever, staccato narrative by (uncredited) ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.
The point of it all, Emanuel keeps insisting in Roll the Calls, is not the dollars.
“Money isn’t the thing that makes me get up at 4:00 a.m.,” he says. “I’m just not sure yet what that thing is.”
Perpetually on the precipice of bankruptcy, he takes bold entrepreneurial risks to survive in an industry wracked by labor discontent, cutthroat infighting and technological change.
The goal, if there is one, seems to be simply to win — to bend everyone around him to his will. And, for the most part, he does. From the mailroom, Emanuel has ascended to the summit: executive chair and CEO of TKO and executive chairman of WME Group, “two companies,” his biographical blurb says, “that sit at the center of sports, entertainment and culture.”
Emanuel is probably best known as the model for the abrasive Ari Gold, the talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show Entourage (2004-11). The show’s protagonist, Vincent Chase, is loosely based on one of Emanuel’s clients, the actor Mark Wahlberg. Emanuel says that he could never bear to watch the series, but notes that it helped turbocharge his career.
In his telling, the entertainment-industrial complex is a transactional, amoral, brutish and (though Emanuel doesn’t use this phrase) testosterone-fueled world, where the key players are nearly all men. It seems impossible to imagine any woman getting away with — let alone prospering from — the unhinged, profanity-laced approach that has become Emanuel’s trademark.
Even in this milieu, there are, in his view, particularly loathsome players. Among them is Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, whom Emanuel indicts for his slovenliness, bullying tactics and editorial interference. Even without a mention of the producer’s alleged track record of sexual harassment and assault, Emanuel’s assessment of Weinstein is withering. “Empty at his core,” Emanuel writes, “Harvey’s sole motivation is to thwart and mess with other people.”
Emanuel expresses contempt, too, for other bold-faced names, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chair of Walt Disney Studios and cofounder of the film studio DreamWorks, and Hollywood scribe Nikki Finke, with whom Emanuel had a codependent relationship. He takes on Donald Trump as a client, doesn’t vote for him for president, and drops him, without regret, when he wins and can no longer generate commissions. None of this necessarily makes Emanuel a reliable narrator.
The memoir begins with the word “rage,” which Emanuel observes is also the first word of Homer’s Iliad. The allusion sets Roll the Calls up to be similarly epic. But its angry protagonist is, at best, an antihero, and the stakes of his success surely are less than mythic.
What are the origins of Emanuel’s rage? He points to his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the bullying and humiliation that resulted. The Emanuel family ethos was unsparingly competitive. In life, he learned, “loser gets fed to lions,” so “keep your fists clenched and your head on a swivel.” And roughhousing with his older brothers, whom he jokingly calls “two violent psychopaths,” may have left Ari bruised and resentful.
Both Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and former Chicago mayor and prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel are known for their combative personalities. Ari suggests that the family is tight-knit and loving. But one of the book’s quietly shocking reveals is Rahm’s mockery of his brother’s dyslexia when they share a stage during Chicago Ideas Week.
Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. He cites a study showing “that angry negotiators had the edge.” In a bar, he calls out Michael Moore as an [expletive deleted] antisemite for views the director expressed about Israel; Moore denies the charge, they keep talking and Emanuel ends up with a new client.
“You’ve got to be a little psychotic in this town,” Emanuel argues. To succeed, “you need to show that you can color outside the lines, and that, once in a while, you might eat the [expletive deleted] crayon.” The memoir doesn’t delete the expletives.
Yet Emanuel understands the personal costs of his anger enough to have devoted years to psychotherapy aimed at moderating it. (The results seem mixed at best.) Emanuel also admits to a habit akin to stalking: calling potential clients, business partners and others constantly until they succumb to his sales pitch.
This incessant hounding landed him the mailroom gig at Creative Artists Agency, from which he quickly rose — until he departed, with allies, to start his own company. Similar persistence won him the business (and, later, friendship) of the famously curmudgeonly Larry David, who said, over lunch, that he would sign with Emanuel — if only the agent would stop calling.
After his first marriage (unsurprisingly) dissolved, Emanuel deployed his telephone tactics in courtship — not a method, one imagines, that would have worked for a lesser man. In Emanuel’s case, relentless pursuit led, after some drama and heartbreak, to his second marriage, to a much younger woman who had initially resisted his overtures.
None of this is to say that Roll the Calls isn’t worth a read, especially for anyone interested in an unabashedly jaundiced insider account of how Hollywood operates. The book is quick-paced, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and filled with acidic observations and gossip. It is also horrifying.
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