Even with a few hours of electricity per day and no bomb shelters in which to seek refuge, the Jewish community of Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, continued to celebrate Jewish holidays and educate about Jewish tradition amid the war with Russia.

JCC Global, a network of more than 1,000 Jewish community centers worldwide, supported Ukrainian communities during the first year and a half of the Ukraine-Russia war, which escalated starting in February 2022.

Many Jewish organizations — including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, The Jewish Agency for Israel and the Jewish Federations of North America — donated and volunteered on the ground in Ukraine.

“But then after Oct. 7 happened, the focus of the Jewish community shifted greatly to Israel, very understandably,” said Zina Segal, the Pozez JCC of Northern Virginia’s senior director of community impact and engagement. “There was way less attention to Ukraine in general.”

Segal hosted a virtual event in May with the JCC to discuss “Our Roots in Ukraine: Jewish Life in the War Zone” in the hope of educating the northern Virginian community about Ukrainian Jewish life amid conflict. In late June, she hosted “Our Roots in Israel: Partnership, War and Jewish Peoplehood” to showcase the “vibrant Jewish and communal life” in Beit Shemesh, Israel.

These events are part of an ongoing 1 ½-year partnership between the Pozez JCC, Khmelnytskyi and Beit Shemesh, partner communities assigned by JCC Global. The “Our Roots” series aims to build global Jewish community and connectedness — Segal flew to Budapest in December 2024, when the program launched, to meet fellow Jewish leaders from these communities.

Segal said she believes it’s important for the community to see what Jewish life looks like in different parts of the world.

“One of the values of Pozez JCC is Jewish peoplehood, and we are one peoplehood,” Segal told Washington Jewish Week. “We need to know what is going on, not only in Israel, but across the globe.”

The Jewish community in Ukraine was “huge,” with a large elderly population, Segal said. When Jewish organizations returned to the former Soviet Union to help rebuild the local Jewish communities, community leaders saw a “huge amount of elders” who needed assistance amid crumbling state infrastructure.

“Medical systems, social agencies, it all wasn’t happening, so in many places, the first organizations that were founded was Hesed,” Segal said. “It’s a chain of organizations whose main aim was to help [the] elderly,” many of whom had been left behind in Ukraine as the younger folks emigrated to Israel, Europe and the United States.

Hesed was created with the hope the country’s infrastructure and Jewish communities would pick up the pieces and eventually wouldn’t need outside resources, Segal said.

“This scenario happened in big cities, but not the smaller cities,” she added.

Khmelnytskyi, a mid-sized Ukrainian city, still “very much” relies on Hesed Becht, its community center, which provides social services to Jewish seniors there and has created hundreds of job opportunities for Ukrainians.

Designated a “safe area” during much of the war, the western city of Khmelnytskyi saw many refugees from eastern Ukraine.
What began as a welfare organization became a hub for programming, including Jewish holiday celebrations, cultural programs, teen and young adult groups and, at one point, an after-school program for school-age kids.

“So [Hesed Becht is] very much functioning as a community center, even though they’re not called [a] Jewish community center, and it’s [a] very different structure from what [the] Northern American Jewish community is used to, but they are doing a lot of the same things,” Segal said. “They have a choir, they have dancing, stuff like that.”

In May, members of the Pozez JCC community viewed a presentation and virtually toured Hesed Becht. A representative from Hesed Becht discussed the history of Hesed, how the war impacted Khmelnytskyi and how Hesed Becht adapted its programming, then took questions from the American and Israeli attendees.

“During the [meeting], representatives … from Beit Shemesh and Northern Virginia learned about the richness and diversity of our local Jewish community,” read a Facebook post by Hesed Becht.

“They are living in [an] actual war zone, and it’s even, in a way, harder than in Israel because in Israel, they have Iron Dome and lots of technology protecting them. And when there is a siren, there is nowhere to go because there are no bomb shelters,” Segal said.

She spoke to the vibrancy of Jewish life in Ukraine despite hardship.

“The dedication of Jewish [people] in Ukraine is unbelievable,” Segal wrote in a statement to Washington Jewish Week. “The whole winter, they had electricity only for two to eight hours (depending on the day), and yet they were still not only providing essential care to elderly and community members in need, but also hosted Shabbat, social gatherings for teens, women and young adults.”

“Even in these crazy conditions, they were still celebrating Jewish holidays, educating their community members about Jewish tradition, about Israel, and supporting Israel,” she added.

The partnership between the Pozez JCC, Khmelnytskyi and Beit Shemesh encouraged Jewish community leaders from each of the three regions to meet every six weeks to discuss any issues they experienced.

“The idea was to form human connection and to coach each other, like to help with whatever issues we have,” Segal said. “We decided we wanted to go beyond that, and we created this WhatsApp project.”

The international texting project took 10 families from each of the three communities and placed one from each region into WhatsApp chats in June 2025. Each chat consisted of one American, one Ukrainian and one Israeli family.

Segal hoped that participants would view each other’s lives and Jewish lives through snapshots. A weekly prompt would ask for a photo of one’s Shabbat preparation or the oldest Jewish artifact in one’s family, as photos and video bridge language barriers.

“There [were] a lot of insights about how differently and how similarly in different ways, there are simple things in our lives,” she said.

The WhatsApp project launched despite war and conflict — in June 2025, Iran and Israel were enmeshed in the Twelve-Day War and Russian forces bombed Khmelnytskyi.

“It was hard, but very important,” Segal said. “There were so many overlaps between family histories of families in Ukraine and in Beit Shemesh and here in northern Virginia. It’s important to know the stories and to tell the stories even when we don’t have the same language to discuss it.”

zbell@midatlanticmedia.com