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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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Jewish Americans Shouldn’t Be Shocked by Scott Wiener’s Genocide Lie
California State Sen. Scott Wiener. Photo: Screenshot
At first glance, California State Sen. and Democratic candidate for US Congress Scott Wiener is representative of what many consider a genuine American Jewish success story: a Jewish boy from New Jersey whose childhood memories were shaped by parents who helped build a local Conservative synagogue.
Wiener possesses the boy-next-door charm and familiarity of a Jewish American who came of age in the 1980s and early 1990s, was academically gifted, and later graduated from Harvard Law School.
The budding lawmaker soon found his footing in politics and eventually rose to become a state senator in the nation’s most populous state.
The youthful-looking Wiener, who calls himself “one of the strongest LGBTQ civil rights champions in the nation,” also co-chairs the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
The one critical wrinkle to Wiener’s path to Jewish political prominence is that the 55-year-old politician recently promoted the disgusting blood libel that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
After enduring jeers from left-wing attendees at last week’s candidate debate featuring Wiener and two other Democrats vying to succeed retiring Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Wiener pivoted from his initial refusal to characterize Israel’s actions as genocide and made the decision, days later, to turn against the Jewish state in a 90-second cringe-inducing video unveiled Sunday on the social media platform X.
For those following evolving attitudes toward Israel within liberal Jewish spaces, where Zionism is increasingly disassociated from Judaism, Wiener’s comments condemning Israel are perhaps the least shocking development in the progressive Democrat’s political career.
Jewish communities across America have spent decades nurturing ideological identities that focused on cultivating loyal liberals rather than strong Jews.
Moreover, when support for Israel is passed down from one generation to the next, with little explanation of the moral, legal, and historical rights undergirding the Jewish people’s right for self-determination, Zionism is treated as another dispensable political movement.
It’s a phenomenon that leaves people like Wiener susceptible to the anti-Israel animus entrapping a rising cohort of Jewish Democrats. It’s why anti-Zionists like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be quick to denounce a swastika plastered at a Jewish school in Brooklyn but grant a pass to violent pro-Hamas mobs descending on New York City synagogues that aim to disrupt Israel-related events.
Absent a firm framework explaining why it is a Jewish imperative to advance a pro-Israel narrative, the strategy to widen the wedge between Zionism and one’s Jewish identity will yield more Jews like Wiener who cave to the whims of keffiyeh-wearing voters.
Wiener is not alone.
In New York, 25-year-old Jewish progressive Cameron Kasky was, until this week, running for Congress in the state’s 12th district and recently returned from a Palestinian-led trip to Israel.
In a nod to his deep hatred of the Jewish state, Kasky, who grew up in South Florida attending Hebrew School, lists “Stop Funding Genocide” as his first policy priority on his website.
It was only 10 years ago when such overt antisemitic positions would have earned a candidate a place on the political sidelines.
Since then, the landscape has changed dramatically. A Washington Post Jewish Americans poll conducted in September revealed that the distorted views espoused by Israel’s detractors in the diaspora align with a significant portion of American Jewry.
In the study, 61 percent of American Jews responded that they believe Israel is committing war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza, with nearly 40 percent accusing the Jewish state of “genocide.”
The troubling spike in anti-Israel attitudes among American Jews became more conspicuous over the last several years, as social justice movements surrounding climate change, the women’s march movement, and George Floyd gave Jews who harbor little interest in following the traditional tenets of Judaism an avenue through which to wield their cultural Judaism.
In an effort to keep sanctuaries full and congregants satisfied, non-orthodox institutions coalesced around cultural issues that accelerated a liberal and increasingly secularized world order.
Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, has repeatedly demanded that Jewish leaders meet the “historical demands of our time” and is among several leaders calling for a course correction within the Reform movement.
Still, since Wiener has now planted himself on the side of the Democrats’ anti-Israel faction, the Jewish organizations Wiener was so eager to frequent as a guest speaker in the past released a joint statement that was charitable in their repudiation of the candidate’s use of the term “genocide.”
The truth is that Wiener has long fashioned himself a progressive who rarely shies from admonishing Israel.
His regurgitation of the genocide lie reflects less of a shift and more of a sharpening of previous statements where he publicly charged Israel’s government with deliberately starving Palestin
Wiener also has a history of treating Hamas and Israel as “moral equivalents” and has gone on record saying that he will not accept donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Put simply, it was obvious long ago that Wiener would not emerge as the Democrats’ next John Fetterman, a US senator from Pennsylvania who, amid criticism from his own party, has remained a steadfast supporter of Israel.
The seeds of Wiener’s disgraceful break with the Jewish state were planted long ago.
Raised with a scant appreciation or understanding on the importance of a Jewish homeland, the state senator fell under a secularized umbrella of “universal human rights.”
Sadly, his views on Israel are symbolic of what constitutes the path to political success in today’s Jewish Democratic Party orbit.
Irit Tratt is a writer, an American and pro-Israel advocate. Follow her on X @Irit_Tratt.
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Iranian Regime’s Deadly Crackdown Quells Protests, Residents and Rights Group Say
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran‘s deadly crackdown appears to have broadly quelled protests for now, according to a rights group and residents, as state media reported more arrests on Friday in the shadow of repeated US threats to intervene if the killing continues.
The prospect of a US attack has retreated since Wednesday, when President Donald Trump said he’d been told killings in Iran were easing, but more US military assets were expected to arrive in the region, showing the continued tensions.
US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, conducted intense diplomacy with Washington this week to prevent a US strike, warning of repercussions for the wider region that would ultimately impact the United States, a Gulf official said.
Israel’s intelligence chief David Barnea was also in the US on Friday for talks on Iran, according to a source familiar with the matter, and an Israeli military official said the country’s forces were on “peak readiness.”
The White House said on Thursday that Trump and his team have warned Tehran there would be “grave consequences” if there was further bloodshed and added that the president was keeping “all of his options on the table.”
The protests erupted on Dec. 28 over economic hardship and swelled into widespread demonstrations calling for the end of clerical rule, which culminated in three days of mass violence at the end of last week.
According to opposition groups and an Iranian official, more than 2,000 people were killed in the worst domestic unrest since Iran‘s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Some media reports have said the death toll was as high as 12,000-20,000, with thousands of additional demonstrators arrested.
But several residents of Tehran reached by Reuters said the capital had now been comparatively quiet for four days. Drones were flying over the city, but there had been no sign of major protests on Thursday or Friday. Another resident in a northern city on the Caspian Sea said the streets there also appeared calm. The residents declined to be identified for their safety.
As an internet blackout eased this week, more accounts of the violence have trickled out.
One woman in Tehran told Reuters by phone that her daughter was killed a week ago after joining a demonstration near their home.
“She was 15 years old. She was not a terrorist, not a rioter. Basij forces followed her as she was trying to return home,” she said, referring to a branch of the security forces often used to quell unrest.
The US is expected to send additional offensive and defensive capabilities to the region, but the exact makeup of those forces and the timing of their arrival was still unclear, a US official said speaking on condition of anonymity.
The US military’s Central Command declined to comment, saying it does not discuss ship movements.
PAHLAVI CALLS FOR INCREASED PRESSURE
Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of Iran‘s last shah who has gained increasing prominence as an opposition figure, on Friday urged the international community to ramp up pressure on Tehran to help protesters overthrow clerical rule.
“The Iranian people are taking decisive action on the ground. It is now time for the international community to join them fully,” said Pahlavi, whose level of support inside Iran is hard to gauge.
Trump this week appeared to downplay the idea of US backing for Pahlavi, voicing uncertainty that the exiled royal heir who has courted support among Western countries could muster significant backing inside Iran. Pahlavi met US envoy Steve Witkoff last weekend, Axios reported.
Iranian-Kurdish rights group Hengaw said that there had been no protest gatherings since Sunday, but “the security environment remains highly restrictive.”
“Our independent sources confirm a heavy military and security presence in cities and towns where protests previously took place, as well as in several locations that did not experience major demonstrations,” Norway-based Hengaw said in comments to Reuters.
REPORTS OF SPORADIC UNREST
There were, however, still indications of unrest in some areas. Hengaw reported that a female nurse was killed by direct gunfire from government forces during protests in Karaj, west of Tehran. Reuters was not able to independently verify the report.
The state-affiliated Tasnim news outlet reported that rioters had set fire to a local education office in Falavarjan County, in central Isfahan Province, on Thursday.
An elderly resident of a town in Iran‘s northwestern region, where many Kurdish Iranians live and which has been the focus for many of the biggest flare-ups, said sporadic protests had continued, though not as intensely.
Describing violence earlier in the protests, she said: “I have not seen scenes like that before.”
Video circulating online, which Reuters was able to verify as having been recorded in a forensic medical center in Tehran, showed dozens of bodies lying on floors and stretchers, most in bags but some uncovered. Reuters could not verify the date of the video.
The state-owned Press TV cited Iran‘s police chief as saying calm had been restored across the country.
A death toll reported by US-based rights group HRANA has increased little since Wednesday, now at 2,677 people, including 2,478 protesters and 163 people identified as affiliated with the government.
Reuters has not been able to independently verify the HRANA death toll. An Iranian official told the news agency earlier this week that about 2,000 people had been killed.
The casualty numbers dwarf the death toll from previous bouts of unrest that have been suppressed by the state, including in 2009 and 2022.
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The Department of Labor told us to embrace ‘Americanism.’ What’s that?
“Embrace Americanism,” reads a graphic shared by the U.S. Department of Labor on X, featuring a photo of George Washington’s bust on Mt. Rushmore. “America is for Americans,” the accompanying post says.
What, exactly, is Americanism? Though it may sound like a made-up term that Donald Trump might sling in his speeches off the cuff, in fact it has been around for at least two centuries, since the early days of the U.S.
Yet its definition has never been clear. While the word connotes some ideology of adherence to American values, a unified culture or an idealized vision of the nation, the exact vision of what that set of values or culture is remains so vague that the term has been used by Theodore Roosevelt, the American Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan.
Early American figures, including John Adams, simply used Americanism to mean a belief in a new republic defined by Democratic ideals and freedom of religion, a commitment to the culture of America. But that culture had not yet been defined — was it white and Christian, or was it a diverse melting pot?
Since its first use, the term has been claimed most often by the KKK. A 1926 paper by Klan Imperial Emperor and Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, published in The North American Review, is titled “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism.” In it, Evans says that the KKK arose as an answer to an influx of “aliens and alien ideas” in the country — namely that of Jews, Catholics and Black people.
Evans does not define the Americanism he’s fighting for. But he’s clear about what it isn’t. He praises the Klan’s work fighting “radicalism, cosmopolitanism, and alienism of all kinds” — “rootless cosmopolitanism” being a pejorative regularly levied at Jews — and says that “racial instincts” are essential to preserving Americanism.
Those racial instincts are necessary, Evan writes, because anyone who is not an “old-stock American” of “Nordic blend” is fundamentally incapable of understanding or upholding Americanism. (The article largely avoids the term “white” to exclude groups like Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as Jews and Catholics, who today we might consider white.)
The 1920s were a time of great debate over Americanism, but the term has largely fallen out of use in the modern day. So is this the Americanism the Department of Labor is telling people to embrace one that excludes Jews, Black people, Asians, Catholics and anyone who isn’t a white Protestant — is it a dog whistle for the nativist, KKK ideology that defined the term when it was last popular? The DOL did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication, so we can’t know how the government came to adopt the word. But without specifying which Americanism they mean, it will be easy for white nationalists to see a post from the government using a term with a long racist history, and feel emboldened.
Still, maybe the values of Americanism they meant are something new entirely, synonymous with the Trump administration’s fight against trans people and DEI, or perhaps a simple declaration of patriotism.
Or maybe the DOL used Americanism in the sense that Earl Browder, president of the American Communist party in the 1900s, did when he attempted to reclaim the term and proclaimed that “Communism is 20th century Americanism.”
Probably not, though.
The post The Department of Labor told us to embrace ‘Americanism.’ What’s that? appeared first on The Forward.