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With a dark winter looming in Ukraine, Jewish groups send generators and other support
(JTA) — Since Feb. 24, when Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Jewish groups from around the world have flooded the country with support, from food to medical care to evacuations.
Now, as temperatures fall and Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid ramp up, those groups are directing their efforts toward making sure that Ukrainian Jews can remain warm and safe in the coming months.
A Ukraine response group organized by the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose rabbis are the Jewish leaders in many Ukrainian cities, is raising funds to buy hundreds of generators to equip each its sites and the homes of needy Jews with backup power. Since the war’s start, Chabad houses and synagogues have become places of refuge and distribution sites for aid.
“Everyone knows our address,” Rabbi Shaul Horowitz, who leads Chabad in Vinnytsia, told Chabad.org, the movement’s news site. “Now we need the generators.”
Meanwhile, Jewish Federations of North America on Thursday announced another $7 million infusion for the Ukraine effort, adding to the $78 million that the group and its member federations have donated already. The new funding will pay for both supplies to manage the dangerous winter ahead and to help Russian Jews move to Israel, as tens of thousands have already done this year. (Russian pressure on the group that facilitates emigration to Israel has complicated the efforts of those who are eligible for Israeli citizenship to leave.)
Through the JDC, a group that aids Jews in peril worldwide, the donation will go to buy blankets, clothing, portable heaters and stoves, shelf-stable foods and other emergency items that will go to roughly 22,000 Ukrainian Jews and the organizations that serve them.
“The winter forecast in Ukraine is extremely concerning, with the potential for an even graver humanitarian crisis, and our latest allocation reflects our attention to the evolving needs on the ground and our ongoing commitment to provide relief where it is most needed,” JFNA’s president and CEO, Eric Fingerhut, said in a statement.
The moves come as Ukraine’s electrical supply is under extreme pressure, with blackouts increasingly frequent because of Russian shelling that has targeted the civilian power infrastructure. The country has even crafted a plan to evacuate all the residents of Kyiv, in the event that the capital city, Ukraine’s biggest, loses all power. Even if it does not, much of Ukraine is planning for a winter when power, heat and hot water cannot be counted upon.
Already, cities are subject to intermittent power losses and restrictions on use. Chaya Wolff, who with her husband directs Chabad of Odessa, told Chabad.org that their city had just experienced a four-hour loss of power. The group plans to buy 49 commercial generators as well as hundreds of smaller generators meant for home use.
“No lights, no computers, no smart boards — we don’t have any street lamps in the city at night,” Wolff told the site. “We need four commercial generators urgently. And there are only two available for purchase locally, at tens of thousands of dollars each.”
The JDC has supported Ukrainian Jews during the bleak winter months for years. This year, the group says, it will be doubling its aid amid what CEO Ariel Zwang said was a “drastic uptick in needs.” With the support of not only Jewish federations but also the Claims Conference, which supports Holocaust survivors, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews and its own individual donors, the group recently delivered firewood, coal, warm clothing and bedding to Jews, many of them elderly, living in the Dnipro region.
“As a new stage in the Ukraine crisis has begun, we have moved from a program of winter relief to winter survival,” Zwang said in a statement. “Our staff and volunteers have not stopped our life-saving services within Ukraine, along with those for refugees in Europe, and will continue to ensure that Jews and Jewish communities have the supplies they need to survive the coming months.”
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Georgetown Newspaper Editorial Board Accuses Israel of ‘Genocide,’ Calls for Divestment
Georgetown University students on March 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo: Andrew Thomas via Reuters Connect
A Georgetown University-affiliated student newspaper last week issued an editorial which argued that the school has been “complicit in Israel’s genocide,” describing the world’s lone Jewish state as an illegitimate entity that should be isolated.
“There is no doubt in the mind of The Georgetown Voice‘s Editorial Board that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza,” proclaimed The Georgetown Voice, an alternative, far-left publication founded in 1969. “There is no critical mass or breaking point at which elites — including the administrative elite at Georgetown — will suddenly reform their conscience.”
The editorial board condemned what it falsely labeled as Israel’s “decades-long settler colonial project and apartheid system” and appeared to blame the entirety of the Gaza conflict on Israel while absolving Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that started the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis, of wrongdoing.
“We must ask ourselves why every person in Gaza or the West Bank does not elicit the same righteous anger (and frenzied whitewashing or bigotry and divisiveness) that erupted after the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the paper charged, referring to the American conservative activist who was assassinated in September. “While some — certainly not all — members of Congress have half-heartedly called for a ‘pause’ in the violence at some point, the vast majority of them were simultaneously voting to arm Israel.”
The editorial continued, “The morally bankrupt acts of our representatives made Americans complicit in this genocide. That should enrage and galvanize something in all of us. Sadly, at Georgetown, that’s not what we see.”
Capping off its philippic, the Voice broadsided the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — accusing the civil rights organization of “anti-Palestinian advocacy” and drifting “rightward … under the leadership of current CEO Jonathan Greenblatt” — and calling for Georgetown’s divestment from Israel on the grounds that Israel is an “apartheid regime” in the same mold as Afrikaner-dominated South Africa until the 1990s.
“If the school gives any weight to the values it claims to represent, it will reconsider its rejection of the divestment referendum from last spring and move to cut all ties with Israeli and Israel-supportive institutions immediately,” the Voice concluded, hinting at the expulsion from campus of Jewish groups such as Hillel and Chabad. “We do not say this lightly; taking action is challenging; however, in the face of such atrocities, there are no excuses for inaction.”
The Voice is not the first student newspaper to promote anti-Zionism while curating facts, sources, and quotes to confect a negative image of Israel.
In 2022, The Harvard Crimson, the official newspaper of Harvard University, endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international stage as a step toward its eventual elimination.
“BDS remains a blunt approach, one with the potential to backfire or prompt collateral damage in the form of economic hurt. But the weight of this moment — of Israel’s human rights and international law violates and of Palestine’s cry for freedom — demands this step,” it said. “As a board, we are proud to finally lend our support to both Palestinian liberation and BDS — we call on everyone to do the same.”
At Georgetown, anti-Zionism may be fostered by foreign influence in the form of exorbitant donations.
According to a report published in June by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) — titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” — Georgetown University has received over $1 billion in funding from the Qatari government over the last two decades. The 132-page document revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
The ISGAP report called on policymakers to take action now and prevent the university’s becoming any closer to a country whose ideals may threaten US interests and ideals.
“It is time to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. As we saw, pro-Hamas antisemitism in the US has moved from rhetoric to outright terrorism on the streets of Washington,” Small said, referring to the antisemitic shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in May. “Just three miles from the site of the murders outside the Jewish Museum, Georgetown has been the center of a 50-year indoctrination campaign aimed at infiltrating the highest echelons of US society with murderous antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Hamas in a Suit’: Melanie Phillips Says the US Must Stop Treating Qatar as an Honest Broker
British author and journalist Melanie Phillips speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2024. Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium via Reuters Connect
The war against terrorism will never end “until the West stops pretending Qatar is neutral,” according to British author and journalist Melanie Phillips.
The prominent commentator told The Algemeiner that Doha’s patronage of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its influence on Western media and universities are among the many reasons not to trust the Middle Eastern monarchy.
“Qatar is Hamas,” Phillips said in a conversation on the “J100” podcast with host David M. Cohen, the CEO of The Algemeiner. “It sponsors Hamas, it shelters Hamas, it protects Hamas’s leadership.”
Speaking from Jerusalem, Phillips called Qatar’s role “the great unspoken scandal” of modern diplomacy, describing how the regime has bankrolled Hamas while posing as a mediator in negotiations with Israel over the Gaza war.
“You can end this war tonight,” she said, “by doing what should have been done long ago: throw Qatar overboard.”
Negotiations have hit several hurdles in recent weeks to halt the advancement of last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire, including the refusal of the terrorist group to disarm in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s pace plan for Gaza.
Despite Qatar’s support for Hamas and far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, the US has designated the country as a major non-NATO ally and committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
For Phillips, the danger runs deeper than money or politics. “It’s Hamas in a suit,” she said. “A power that wears respectability while advancing terror by other means.”
Since 2012, Doha has housed Hamas’s political bureau and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, often with Western approval. Simultaneously, it has built vast soft-power influence, financing Al Jazeera, sponsoring academic programs on Middle Eastern studies, and endowing think tanks and universities across the West.
That dual role, Phillips argued, has distorted the world’s moral compass. “You cannot be both patron and peacemaker,” she said. “That is moral incoherence masquerading as strategy.”
She connected Qatar’s reach to what she called the “eighth front” of Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist network including Hamas — the cognitive front, where perception and truth are under siege. By funding educational and media institutions that frame Israel as the aggressor, Phillips said, Doha helps export the same ideological rot that excuses terrorism.
“You cannot build coexistence on a curriculum of hatred,” she warned. “And you cannot defend civilization if you reward the people funding its destruction.”
Cohen noted that Washington’s posture toward Doha remains contradictory. “You can’t confront a sponsor of terror,” he said, “while treating it like an ally at the same time.”
Phillips concluded that lasting peace requires more than military victory — it demands confronting the global enablers that dignify extremism. “If the West continues to pretend Qatar is neutral,” she said, “then Hamas will never truly be defeated.”
The full conversation — “The Eighth Front Is the Mind” — is available now on “J100” via Apple Podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.
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Australia Lists Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as State Sponsor of Terrorism
Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Australia has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday, following an intelligence assessment that it had orchestrated attacks against Australia‘s Jewish Community.
Australia in August accused Iran of directing two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne and gave Tehran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country, its first such expulsion since World War II.