Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Israeli president adds final letter to wartime Torah for Ukrainian Jews initiated by Zelenskyy

The Torah was initiated by the chief rabbi of Kyiv in 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (JTA) — More than two years after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote its first letter, his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog has inked the final letters of Torah scroll dedicated to peace in both of their countries.

The Torah was initiated in Ukraine shortly after Russia’s 2022 invasion and completed this week in Israel, now engaged in its own war in Gaza. Along the way, letters were written by Jews serving in the Ukrainian army, members of the Jewish community in Kyiv, families of Israeli fallen soldiers and relatives of Israelis kidnapped in Gaza, among others.

The writing of the Torah, which will be brought back to Ukraine in the coming months and placed in one of the synagogues in the country’s capital, was an initiative of the Kyiv chief rabbi, Yonatan Markowitz.

“Both Jewish presidents wrote a letter in the Sefer Torah, dedicated for the sake of peace and achdut (unity) in Am Yisrael, which will be placed in Kyiv’s Great Synagogue JCC, Beit Menachem,” the Chabad rabbi said in a statement referring to Zelenskyy and Herzog, who are the world’s only Jewish heads of state.

The first letter of the Sefer Torah was written by Zelenskyy “in his office in the presidential bunker in Kyiv,” and Herzog wrote the final letter in a ceremony held at his official residence in Jerusalem, according to Markowitz.

“The integration of forces between the Jews of Israel and the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes a powerful force multiplier for the survival and continuity of the Jewish people,” Herzog said during the event. “There is nothing more moving than being part of writing a Sefer Torah that symbolizes this special unity, especially now.”

The ceremony was attended by relatives of Zina Beylin, a 60-year-old Israeli woman of Ukrainian origin who was murdered on Oct. 7 in Sderot together with a dozen other senior citizens while on a bus trip she had organized to the Dead Sea. Images of their bodies were some of the first to show the carnage from that bloody day.

Also present at the Israeli president’s residence, Markowitz spoke of “the story of Jewish heroism and resilience” shared by “the Jews of Israel and Ukraine” and thanked Jews from Israel and around the world for their assistance to Ukrainian Jews.

“When we began writing the Sefer Torah, we did not think we would reach a situation where our brothers, the people of Israel in the Holy Land, would also be under the threat of a cruel war,” Markowitz said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.