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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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Rep. Jared Moskowitz becomes latest Jewish lawmaker to reveal antisemitic threats
(JTA) — The messages that Rep. Jared Moskowitz said he received at his office were filled with obscenities, calls to “kill Jews” and warnings that the Florida Democrat would be “going down.”
Moskowitz played the voicemails during an interview with CNN’s Sara Sidner on Friday as he described a sharp rise in antisemitic hostility against Jewish lawmakers since Oct. 7, a trend he said reflected a broader normalization of antisemitic rhetoric in American public life.
“We seem, Sara, to have passed a Rubicon now with these antisemitic threats,” Moskowitz said. “It used to be once in a while you’d see a swastika on a building, once in a while, you know, someone would say something online. Now it’s every day, all the time, on podcasts, online, in the media, in the halls of Congress, and they’re trying to get Jews.”
CNN played multiple messages that illustrated Moskowitz’s point, with Sidner warning viewers that what they would hear was “deeply disturbing.”
Moskowitz, who is Jewish, said the spate of threats had caused him to need a police officer stationed outside his home 24 hours a day, since a man was sentenced to prison for plotting to kill him in November 2024.
“The U.S. government needs to kill Jews, you kill these f–cking nasty Jews, kill every single f-cking Zionist scumbag,” a caller said in one of the voicemails. “Zionism is treason to ‘we the people’ in our U.S. Constitution. Kill Israel.”
Another caller left this message: “Hey you Zionist Jew f-cking pig. How about no more money for Israel? Funding Israel, stealing more of our money for Israel. F-ck Israel, let them f-cking burn to the ground. You’re going down too, sir.”
Moskowitz is far from the only Jewish lawmaker to report a rapidly increasing number of antisemitic threats and harassment in recent weeks. The shift comes as both parties grapple with internal tensions about how to handle antisemitism within their ranks, and as anger about Israel and the Iran war funnels more attention to U.S. Jews. It also comes amid rising political violence in the United States.
“It’s no longer a Republican and a Democrat [issue],” Rep. Max Miller, a Jewish Ohio Republican, told Axios this week. “Both ends of our parties are wackadoos who hate Jews.”
Miller received a message warning that “antisemitism is on the rise because you guys think you own the f-cking world,” according to Axios, which said the caller added, “You guys are going to be shot dead every f-cking day.”
Among the messages highlighted by a recent Axios report on the phenomenon was a letter sent to New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, in which one constituent wrote that “Hitler was spot-on, 100% right about the filth that you Jew-bastards, you kikes are.” In a voicemail left for Ohio Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman’s office, one caller said, “I don’t like Jewish people, and the congressman should just go die.”
The lawmakers say the phenomenon is new. “Across the board, we have never seen anything like this in my lifetime in public office,” Jewish California Rep. Brad Sherman told the New York Times last month. “It’s like you turned the volume up from two to 10.”
The volley of antisemitic threats has also spilled into the real world, with Miller reporting last year that a man had attempted to run him off the road while calling him a “dirty Jew.” Last year, a man set fire to the residence of Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro hours after his family hosted a Passover seder there.
“We need good people to not be quiet,” Moskowitz said when Sidner asked him what message should be sent in response to the rise in antisemitic rhetoric targeting lawmakers.
“There are people out there, they may disagree with U.S. policy, they may not like the leader of a country, but they shouldn’t be allowing antisemites into their movement,” Moskowitz said. “They should not be embracing this sort of behavior, because they’re trying to win some sort of political point. It should be obvious.”
Moskowitz’s comments echoed a growing debate over the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric within American politics on both the left and the right, with Jewish lawmakers and watchdog groups warning that language once relegated to the fringes has increasingly become mainstream.
Last week, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he would not campaign with Maureen Galindo, a Democratic congressional candidate in Texas who says she wants to open a “prison for American Zionists” among other incendiary remarks. Talarico said in a statement that “antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics.”
On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul’s son William apologized after he made repeated antisemitic comments directed at New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who is not Jewish, including calling Jews “anti-American.”
Moskowitz told CNN that, while people may criticize the Israeli government and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the voicemails left at his office illustrated “how quickly, you know, they go from Zionism to Jews, Israel to Jews.”
“Listen, if you don’t like Netanyahu, great, go out and criticize him all day long,” Moskowitz said. “But don’t let people into your tent that you know are threatening to kill my family or my kids.”
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Jewish groups denounce fatal shooting at San Diego mosque, say it proves need for security funding
(JTA) — Jewish groups are denouncing a fatal shooting at a mosque in San Diego in which three people, including a security guard, were killed. They are also saying the incident, which follows attacks on synagogues, underscores a need for more federal funding for security at houses of worship.
Police in San Diego said they are investigating the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego as a hate crime. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said two teenagers, ages 17 and 19, who appeared to have carried out the attack were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car nearby.
“We are heartbroken by today’s attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego. Islamophobia has no place in California or anywhere in this country,” Jesse Gabriel, chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to working with our colleagues to strengthen protections for houses of worship and combat hate-motivated violence.”
The attack, which occurred at about 12:30 p.m. local time, sent five area schools into lockdown, including a Hebrew charter school.
“We’re safe and we’re following the direction of the police,” a representative for Kavod Hebrew Charter School told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by phone on Monday afternoon. Kavod is a non-religious bilingual K-8 school that employs a number of Jewish and Israeli educators.
A synagogue that houses a school in an adjacent neighborhood also said it was briefly locked down in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The mosque attack comes two months after a man rammed an explosives-laden truck into one of the largest synagogues in the United States, Temple Israel in Michigan. There, the synagogue’s robust security training was credited with halting the attack. Children were inside the adjacent preschool at the time.
“The images coming from San Diego are all too familiar to us,” Temple Israel said in a message to its community that it posted to social media. It said that one of its rabbis, Jen Lader, was in Washington, D.C., to lobby for $1 billion in federal security funding for houses of worship.
Jewish Federations of North America said it had more than 400 local Jewish leaders in Washington to lobby for the security funding, which it said was necessary to protect religious communities from threats that are “real, urgent, and growing.” The $1 billion ask is a centerpiece of JFNA’s response to growing security concerns and would represent more than a doubling of federal spending on security needs for houses of worship.
“To anyone who feels this is excessive, what happened to Temple Israel two months ago, and now, the Islamic Center of San Diego, proves that it is not optional funding,” Temple Israel said. “Every dollar will be necessary to protect houses of worship all over the country.”
Imam Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego, which includes a mosque and the adjacent Al Rashid School, said teachers, students and school staff were safe.
“At this moment, all that I can say is sending our prayers and standing in solidarity with all the families in our community here, and also the other mosques and all the places of worship in our beautiful city,” Hassane said during a press conference Monday afternoon. “They should always be protected. It is extremely outrageous to target a place of worship. Our Islamic Center is a place of worship. People come to the Islamic Center to pray, to celebrate, to learn.”
Law enforcement across the country are tightening security measures in response to the attack in San Diego.
“While there is currently no known nexus to NYC or specific threats to NYC houses of worship, out of an abundance of caution, the NYPD is increasing deployments to mosques across the city,” the New York Police Department said in a statement.
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Mamdani’s first Jewish Heritage event reveals a narrowed circle
The Jewish American Heritage Month reception at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence on the Upper East Side, on Monday evening felt unlike any before it. It was not simply because the host, Zohran Mamdani, is New York City’s first Muslim mayor or because the Shavuot-themed menu was dairy. It was that the annual gathering came amid one of the most strained relationships between a mayor and much of New York’s Jewish establishment in recent memory.
Even the setting reflected the changed atmosphere. Previous receptions under former mayors had spilled into a large tent in the mansion’s garden overlooking the East River, with buffet tables lined with kosher food, bars stocked with liquor and wine, live music and packed crowds of rabbis, communal leaders, elected officials and supporters mingling late into the evening. The longstanding traditional events became demonstrations of the close alliance with mainstream Jewish organizations and pro-Israel activists, who formed a key part of their political base.
This year’s gathering was different. The event was moved indoors to Gracie Mansion’s smaller blue reception room. The crowd of 150 people was served by waiters quietly circulating through the room with small dairy dishes in honor of Shavuot: miniature cheesecakes, halved cheese blintzes, cheese bourekas served with a touch of charif on the side, potato knishes, chocolate mousse, salad cups and cheese-ball skewers. The drink selection was limited to Herzog wine from California and water.
There was no music at all — not even a cappella — despite the easing of traditional restrictions during the final days of the Omer before Shavuot.
Mamdani’s Jewish commissioners, deputy mayors and aides circulated through the room, greeting attendees. But absent were prominent Jewish figures in city government and politics, including Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Comptroller Mark Levine, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and most of the local elected officials. The only Jewish elected officials in attendance were Councilmembers Harvey Epstein and Lincoln Restler, and former comptroller and now congressional candidate Brad Lander.
The crowd itself reflected the Jewish coalition emerging around Mamdani’s mayoralty: anti-Zionist activists aligned with groups such as Jews For Racial & Economic Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace; liberal Jewish leaders affiliated with New York Jewish Agenda, who have sharply criticized Mamdani on Israel and antisemitism issues while continuing to engage with the administration, and those aligned with pro-peace organizations; and Hasidic leaders from the Satmar community in Williamsburg, who religiously oppose Zionism and have long shaped their relationship with municipal government around local priorities such as housing, education and nonprofit funding.
Mamdani was introduced by Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, who also serves as the unofficial director for Jewish affairs. Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, delivered the invocation, and Jake Levin, manager of the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, served as emcee.
The mayor offered some greetings, describing the preparations for Shavuot across the city, the teaching of Jewish values and his administration’s effort to combat rising antisemitism. “Jewish New Yorkers have worked to cultivate a city that is safe and open to all,” Mamdani said. “You should be accorded the same security and the same peace of mind.”
He then honored Ruth Messinger, the trailblazing Jewish political leader who in 1997 became the first and only woman to win the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor and went on to lead American Jewish World Service. Messinger backed Mamdani in the mayoral race last year. Guests were then privately ushered in to take photos with Mamdani.
Mamdani’s coalition
The reception came just days after Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and balanced response to pro-Palestinian protesters descending on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue hosted a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The Nakba video angered many Jewish New Yorkers who already viewed Mamdani’s sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism as dismissive of Jewish fears over rising antisemitism. Despite the backlash, there was little indication that Mamdani intends to moderate the political identity that brought him to power. Mamdani defended the video Monday morning when pressed about the civic purpose of using official city resources to mark Nakba Day, saying that acknowledging Palestinian suffering does not negate Jewish suffering or Israel’s history. He also declared that his “door is always open” to Jewish leaders despite the backlash.
But on Monday, a notable array of prominent Jewish leaders did not walk in — or were not invited.
Among those absent were leaders of the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Conference of Presidents, UJA Federation of New York, Board of Rabbis, Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, the Reform movement, Met Council, Orthodox Union, Agudath Israel of America and Chabad-Lubavitch. Devorah Halberstam and Yaacov Behrman, leaders affiliated with Lubavitch in Crown Heights who recently appeared with Mamdani, did attend.
Some Jewish communal leaders absent from the Gracie Mansion reception have embraced a strategy of total opposition to Mamdani, viewing engagement with him as legitimizing a mayor they see as hostile to Zionism. Other organizations that are dependent on city grants or ongoing access to the municipal government have continued engaging with City Hall even while publicly criticizing the mayor’s rhetoric on Israel and antisemitism.
But that has become increasingly harder for them. The UJA Federation of New York, which hosted Mamdani for a mayoral candidate forum last year, said its leadership did not attend because it was “being hosted by a mayor who denies a core pillar of our heritage — the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.”
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, who was among 19 Jewish leaders on Mamdani’s transition team, told the New York Post he declined an invitation to join.
The reception suggested that Mamdani is continuing to cultivate a smaller alternative Jewish coalition, separate from the traditional pro-Israel communal establishment and rooted more in progressive activism and pragmatic community relationships. Mamdani recently appointed Rabbi Miriam Grossman, a JVP activist, as his faith liaison. To his critics, however, the evening underscored how narrow that coalition remains within the broader Jewish community of New York City.
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