Ukrainian Jewry after a Year of War

Feb. 24 2023

To mark the first anniversary of Russia’s dramatic expansion of its nine-year war against Ukraine, Dovid Margolin observes the conflict’s effects on the latter country’s Jews through a series of searing vignettes:

Once a quiet industrial port city marked by smokestacks and seagulls, Mariupol was turned into a place of death and horror. Just ask Yevgeny (Avraham) Chernousov. Chernousov left Mariupol towards the end of Passover, on April 21, 2022, after two months of apocalyptic war. “I remember turning to my wife and telling her this was the first time in years that I wouldn’t have matzah and wine on Passover,” he says from the relative safety of Kiev.

Over those two months in Mariupol, Chernousov helped hastily bury more than one of the myriad dead, including his father-in-law, who’d been killed by a projectile. “It was all pieces,” he says matter-of-factly. “When we got there the neighbors were collecting him by the colors of the suit he’d been wearing.” Later, they were able to rebury him near his mother-in-law in an actual cemetery, an outcome thousands of Mariupolites were denied.

Read more at Chabad.org

More about: Ukrainian Jews, War in Ukraine

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023