JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in a live speech from Kyiv on Thursday. Wearing his signature olive-green military-issue T-shirt, Zelenskyy, who has been hailed as a contemporary Jewish hero and scrappy, modern-day Maccabee, appealed to Ukraine and Israel’s shared history, values and future. He noted that his office…
Tears Over Russia: A Search for Family and the Legacy of Ukraine’s Pogroms By Lisa Brahin Pegasus Books, 310 pages, $28.95 Ukrainian history is steeped in violence and tragedy. Long before the recent Russian invasion, Ukraine was part of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called “the Bloodlands” — the swath of Central and…
(JTA) — The main organization representing British Jews has suspended its ties with the European Jewish Congress over unspecified “misconduct” allegations against the Congress’ treasurer, Yaakov Dov Bleich, a chief rabbi of Ukraine. The Board of Deputies of British Jews announced the move on Twitter May 31 without naming Bleich. In the tweet, the group…
(JTA) — Jake Tapper thinks this year might have been the first time he celebrated Passover without friends and family. The Jewish CNN anchor had his reasons: he was reporting on the ground in war-torn Ukraine. Tapper opened up about the experience on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Tuesday night. During his two-week…
(JTA) — As the head of a large European rabbinical group, Pinchas Goldschmidt regularly travels in and out of Moscow, where he has worked since 1993 as the city’s chief rabbi. But when he left most recently, two weeks after Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, he did so without a firm plan to return. And now…
Rachel Strugatsky made aliyah as a teenager but was pulled back to her native Ukraine — twice. Now 46, and with Russian shells falling uncomfortably close to her home in Kyiv, she could leave for Israel again— this time with her three children. But she won’t. Hers, she said, is the only family in her…
When I was in the fourth grade, I came home from school one afternoon to find my babushka’s warm cheese blintzes waiting for me on the kitchen table, but my babushka was nowhere in sight. Instead, my grandma, Hannah, had gone to see our neighbor Avi, a former special-ops officer in the Israeli Defense Forces,…
(JTA) — Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy brought up the Holocaust to snap back at former Jewish U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who argued this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Ukraine should give up its hope to reclaim territory that Russia annexed in 2014 in the interest of stopping…
