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Breakdown in Aisle 5
What is it about women, madness and supermarkets? By E. Kinney Zalesne
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My book group recently chose two works whose titles evoke grocery store hysteria: Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, a collection of short stories by Hilma Wolitzer, and Crying in H Mart, a memoir by Michelle Zauner. In both, a key character finds herself in a supermarket aisle white-knuckling her shopping cart and sobbing sloppy, uncontrollable tears.
This wasn’t the first time this year I’ve come across such breakdowns. In season two of the television series This Is Us, which my family binged years after its release, postpartum Rebecca goes to pieces in a Giant Eagle when another shopper snags the last yellow onion. And in Mary Beth Keane’s best-selling novel Ask Again, Yes, potential killer Anne succumbs to full-blown psychosis in the deli line at Food King.
What is it about women, madness and supermarkets? Do shopping baskets turn us into basket cases? Or do writers default to supermarkets as the most public spaces women haunt, so that when we’re actually haunted, it’s a tidy backdrop for our woes? And, I wondered, was there anything in my quintessential American Jewish upbringing that could offer any clues?
I’ve had my own 40-year lovehate relationship with grocery stores. When I was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, my mother, Judy, stopped at our local SuperFresh nearly every afternoon, often with me in tow. She said she liked the freshest produce or that she’d forgotten a key ingredient for dinner or an Entenmann’s coffee cake for a holiday dessert.
Watching her do this day after day triggered in me an adolescent resolve. I vowed that when it was my turn, I’d be one of those organized moms who never shopped more than once a week. I figured that if I could shave down hours spent at the supermarket, I could have kids and a big career, whereas my mother mostly just had kids, after she left her fulltime teaching position.
My plan worked, for a while. I became a busy corporate executive with four children. I even married a guy who saw my grocery store ambition and raised it. As our family grew, he could amass a haul from Whole Foods that would last 10 days. Such heady efficiency! I was living out my teenage vow.
Then one day, a colleague who’d taken a break from her own big career mentioned that every afternoon, she stopped at the Giant with her teenage daughter on the way home from school. She laughed out loud that her daughter hadn’t yet figured out that she did this only to get her to talk about her day. Apparently, the girl clammed up in the car, but became downright chatty amid the Cheetos and Cheerios.
I was stunned. Had I opened up to my mother as we strolled through those aisles all those years ago, even as I scorned the whole enterprise? More importantly, I wondered if my calculus had been wrong all along. Perhaps it was my mom, and not I, who’d had the proper regard for supermarkets.
Gingerly, I returned to the Giant. I tried to get my kids, who were all teenagers by then, to accompany me, but having probably absorbed my disdain, they usually passed. So on my way home from the office, I allowed myself to dawdle in the aisles and even developed a little swagger with my cart, steering purposefully like I was hunting on the savannah, plucking new foodstuffs to delight the family.
Then—in an even bigger snub to efficiency—I started driving 40 minutes each way to a kosher supermarket because my kids, who attended a Jewish day school, which I had not, started requesting kosher meat. The boxes of Lieber’s Strawberry Jel and cans of Streit’s
Mushroom & Barley soup made me feel like I’d teleported back to the kitchen of my grandmother Ruth. Had I likewise marginalized her by my lack of interest in food shopping and never learning the difference between a rib roast and a London broil?
And that’s when it dawned on me. The reason writers today have their characters melt down in supermarkets is because lots of women are working out their mother-related complexities amid the meat and potatoes. Michelle Zauner was mourning her mother (and regretting her teenage rebellions) when she broke down in H Mart. Rebecca on This Is Us was grieving a stillborn triplet when she came undone about the onion.
While my career-versus-family conflict wasn’t nearly so wrenching, it was mother-centered just the same. My mother became a symbol of the choice of motherhood instead of career, but I’d wanted both. In my head, the supermarket was the locus of that painful choice, the place that made me feel small for either not being professional enough, or not sufficiently nurturing.
Writers who give their characters these very Publix breakdowns know this supermarket superpower. It is the liminal space in which nourishment is potential but not yet real, where the air is thick with memory, identity and fearsome female choices about whether, what and how to love.
So if you see a woman weeping at Wegmans, give her some space. She might be missing a mother, a child or an as-yet-unattained part of herself. Attention, shoppers.
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E. Kinney Zalesne is a former Microsoft executive and the co-author of the best-selling book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.
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Finding Refuge in Israel
Ukrainians—and Russians—escape the war, uncertain of their future
By Larry Luxner
Anna polisuchenko, a university professor and broadcast journalist at STB, Ukraine’s largest television network, had been hearing talk of an impending Russian military strike against her country for weeks. But she had dismissed the rumors as little more than diplomatic posturing.
That suddenly changed on February 24, 2022, as Polisuchenko was getting ready for work at her Kyiv TV station. She opened the Telegram app on her phone, and it lit up with frantic messages from her daughter, Angelina, who was in Israel on a study program.
“Mom! Mom! Mom! Answer me. You are being bombed!” texted the worried 17-year-old. The war had begun. At 4:50 a.m. the next morning, the deafening roar of an explosion startled Polisuchenko; a rocket had obliterated the building across the street. Grabbing her 76-year-old mother and some snacks, she woke up two blind, elderly neighbors and guided them all down 12 flights of stairs in the darkness to the underground parking lot of a nearby supermarket, where 1,000 people had already taken refuge.
After shivering for a week in that vast subterranean shelter, Polisuchenko managed to board a train for an 11-hour trip to the relative safety of Lviv, in western Ukraine. She had begged her mother to come with her, but she had refused.
From Lviv, she took a bus over the border to Poland, and in mid- March—following the approval of her documents by the Israeli Consulate in Warsaw—Polisuchenko flew to the Jewish state and received citizenship upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport.
For the next five months, she spent five hours a day, five days a week in an intensive Hebrew course at Haifa’s Ulpan Etzion Carmel. Half of her 20 classmates were fellow Ukrainians. Today, her daughter is studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem while Polisuchenko gives lectures remotely to her students at Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts.
She recently signed a contract with the municipality of Haifa to shoot informational and educational videos and is looking for a full-time job. So far, the work is “very minimal,” she said, “but gradually, everything will get better.”
Also in late February, Reuven Stamov, rabbi of five Masorti, or Conservative, congregations in Ukraine—in Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv,
Activism, Aliyah, Absorption In March,
Israelis gathered in Habima Square in Tel Aviv to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (left). That same month, new immigrants began landing at Ben Gurion Airport, including this family on a flight sponsored by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (above); Anna Polisuchenko at her ulpan in Haifa.
Chernivtsi and Dnipro—was preparing to host a Jewish educational seminar in his native Kharkiv.
But after hearing reports of Russian troops massing at the Ukrainian border—only 20 miles to the north—he moved the event to Chernivtsi, a city in southwestern Ukraine, far from any potential Kremlin threat.
“My husband understood that war was very close,” said the rabbi’s wife, Michal, recounting from the couple’s current home in Ashdod how she and her husband and their three daughters had packed for a threeday seminar at Chernivtsi’s Magnat Cinema Hotel. They never imagined, she said, that cluster bombs and missiles would soon devastate their beloved city of Kharkiv.
On March 7, the Stamovs led some 100 Ukrainian Jews who had assembled in Chernivtsi across the border to Romania for resettlement in Germany and Israel; most of those who fled to Germany have established residence in Berlin.
Since then, the rabbi, one of few in Ukraine affiliated with the Conservative movement, has held monthly get-togethers for his congregants in Israel. He also holds Kabbalat Shabbat services every Friday via Zoom with the 40 or so families who remain in Ukraine.
“Very few of our people are left there,” said the rabbi, who briefly returned to Ukraine to conduct Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in Kyiv.
“We all have post-trauma syndrome,” Michal Stamov said. “We really miss the communal life we had in Ukraine. And when we hear about the horrible things that have happened in places like Mariupol, we feel our world is broken.” P olisuchenko and the Stamovs are among more than 40,000 citizens of Ukraine and Russia—and, to a lesser extent, Belarus—who have fled to Israel since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his country’s southern neighbor, sparking bloodshed on a scale Europe hasn’t seen since World War II.
Many of the newcomers, whether they arrived as immigrants under the Law of Return or with tourist visas taking temporary refuge, are traumatized by their experiences. Some came to Israel because they already had relatives or friends there; others were seeking to take advantage of an unknown but safe refuge. A number of the Ukrainians interviewed for this article were reluctant to talk about their current lives in Israel or—given the uncertainty of the war’s trajectory—their plans for the future.
Olga Kartashova has heard dozens of these tragic stories first-hand.
The founder of Haifa’s all-volunteer Refugee Assistance Center, Kartashova started helping new arrivals fleeing the war soon after they began landing in Israel.
“Only a few weeks into the war, we saw that more and more people were showing up here in Haifa, but they weren’t really receiving much support and didn’t know where to go, especially those who arrived as so-called tourists,” Kartashova said, as she showed this reporter around
Light of a New Day Rabbi Reuven Stamov, before the war, lights a havdalah candle and plays guitar at a Jewish festival in Lviv, Ukraine (left); Olga Kartashova sorts through donations of food, clothing and other items at the Refugee Assistance Center in Haifa.
the center’s two-story headquarters on Derech Ha’atzmaut, one of the busiest boulevards in Haifa. The city has become home to one of the largest concentrations of Russian-speaking newcomers in Israel.
Housed in a building that belongs to the Carmelite Order of the Catholic Church, the center looks more like a thrift store than a refugee assistance agency. Powdered milk, baby formula, jeans, T-shirts, winter coats, shoes, electrical appliances, kitchen utensils, toys, books, puzzles and other donated items cram its floor-toceiling shelves.
Boxes are labeled in Hebrew and Russian, while a huge blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag hanging from a wall opposite Kartashova’s desk leaves no doubt as to the leanings of those who staff this place, even though Kartashova herself is half-Russian, half-Ukrainian. Born and raised in Kaliningrad, on Russia’s Baltic coast, she is a doctoral candidate in Holocaust studies at New York University. She began her studies in the United States and continued them remotely from Israel once the Covid-19 pandemic began.
These days, she and 40 or so fellow Russian and Ukrainian volunteers as well as one Arab spend their time sorting through donations of food, clothing and medicines, deciding how best to disseminate them. Open three afternoons a week, the center also provides legal consulting, job-placement assistance, family picnics, city tours and workshops at no cost.
“I’m sure we’re making a difference,” Kartashova said. “What we do is unique, in that we offer not only food and clothing but also information and moral support. Not many organizations are providing the kind of systematic help that we do without any sort of institutional backing.”
Most of the more than 2,500 individuals who have used the center’s services are women, children and the elderly. Ukrainian men of military age are still unable to leave the country; the only exceptions are fathers with three or more children, or cases where a family member is disabled and must be cared for, or if the man claims citizenship of another country.
Besides haifa, the newest arrivals are settling mainly in cities with existing Russianspeaking communities, such as Netanya, Bat Yam, Ashkelon, Jerusalem and Beersheva, while they tend to avoid Tel Aviv because of its extremely high cost of living. Most Ukrainians speak Russian.
Perhaps ironically, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a sharp increase in immigration to Israel from the country under attack, there has been an even greater surge in aliyah from Russia. Global sanctions have devastated the Russian economy and made daily life hard for average citizens, regardless of their views about Putin or the war.
According to the Jewish Agency for Israel, 23,691 Russians settled in Israel during the first eight months of 2022, a 420 percent increase over the same period last year. In addition, 13,321 Ukrainians made aliyah between January and August 2022, a 555 percent jump compared to the same period in 2021.
During the same period, 1,320 immigrants arrived from Belarus, whose authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, is assisting Russia with its war efforts.
All told, immigrants from ex-Soviet republics comprised 84 percent of all new arrivals to the Jewish state during the first eight months of 2022. But as Ukraine’s military takes back previously seized territory and conditions continue to deteriorate in Russia, aliyah figures could change dramatically.
Russians of all backgrounds began fleeing the country after Putin
announced a mandatory conscription in late September.
In response to that development, in early October, the Israeli government approved an emergency plan allocating the equivalent of $25 million for housing, job assistance, health care and education to handle an expected surge of immigration from Russia, home to an estimated 165,000 Jews.
“The State of Israel is a safe haven for every Jew in the world, and their migration to Israel, no matter the cause, lifts the spirit,” Immigration and Integration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata said in a statement. Her ministry, she said, “will ensure that all Russian immigrants arriving in Israel these days under challenging circumstances will receive the holistic care they need to fully integrate into the Israeli society as quickly as possible.”
Under the plan, developed by Tamano-Shata and Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman, until an individual’s eligibility under the Law of Return is clarified, he or she will receive the same rights all immigrants are given, including an absorption package and living allowance. The 1953 law allows anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent to immigrate to Israel, along with his or her non-Jewish spouse.
Israeli policy toward Ukrainians fleeing the bloodshed in their country has evolved since the war began. In early March, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked capped the number of temporary visas for new Ukrainian refugees who didn’t qualify under the Law of Return at 5,000. The move sparked bitter criticism from the Ukrainian government and was eventually overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court.
Before the war, as many as 200,000 Jews and people of Jewish heritage lived in Ukraine, according to Michael Brodsky, Israel’s ambassador in Kyiv. Today, Ukrainians constitute the largest group of olim in Israel, combining those who have fled since February along with the many Ukrainian Jews who came before them, mostly during the massive Soviet emigration of the early 1990s.
“There’s definitely a strong interest from Jews in Ukraine to make aliyah,” the Russian-born diplomat said by phone from Kyiv. “Once the war is over, the number will jump” as the men will be able to leave Ukraine.
Yet just because a new immigrant is eligible for aliyah under the Law of Return doesn’t mean the Israeli authorities will recognize him or her as Jewish. In fact, the vast majority— exactly how many isn’t known—of recent arrivals from Ukraine and Russia are not considered Jews in Israel because they weren’t born to Jewish mothers.
Mariya makarova lives in Netanya with her two children, 12-year-old Vladislav and 10-year-old Barbara. Originally from Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Makarova—an economist who had worked as a sales analyst for a private company—and her husband, Oleg, a materials engineer, fled to Kharkiv in 2014 after Russian troops invaded the Donbas region.
“We were happy in Kharkiv. We had nice jobs,” said Makarova, proudly wearing a yellow summer dress with traditional embroidery made by Nenka, a Ukrainian dress company. “But when the war started, we were very afraid for our children. Every day, bombs were falling. We arrived in Lviv, and we decided I would come here with our children.”
When they arrived in Israel as olim on March 21, Makarova and her kids spent their first two weeks at Jerusalem’s Prima Park Hotel; their stay was paid for by the Jewish Agency. Her kids are so traumatized by their experiences, she said, that she can’t leave them alone at night, even briefly, due to recurring nightmares.
“I’m studying Hebrew now because it’s necessary, and I’m looking for a job,” she said.
As a new immigrant, Makarova received a monthly government subsidy of about $1,480 for six months, plus a monthly rent credit of about $860, which will continue for a year. While she’s at ulpan, her children attend the local school, participate in athletics programs and—like kids everywhere—play games on their phones.
She speaks to her husband, now in the western Ukrainian city of Rivne,
From Kharkiv to Netanya Mariya Makarova is learning Hebrew and looking for a job while her children, 12-year-old Vladislav and 10-year-old Barbara, attend the local school.
every day using Telegram or Viber. For the moment, she said, he is safe and has not been drafted into the military.
Yet even at her ulpan in Netanya, echoes of the war are never far away. More than once, Makarova has overheard her pro-Putin, Russian Jewish classmates ridicule Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—who is Jewish—demanding to know why Zelensky hadn’t been killed yet.
It’s unclear how widespread such attitudes are—or the degree to which friction exists between pro-Putin Russians and Ukrainians. According to one recent poll cited by Israel’s i24 News channel—conducted in late August among 4,712 Israelis just as the war was nearing the six-month mark—37 percent of newly arrived Russian immigrants see Russia as “an enemy of Israel,” compared to 61 percent of new Ukrainian arrivals. Likewise, 58 percent of Russian immigrants have a negative opinion of Russia itself, compared to 76 percent of Ukrainians.
Of the overall Israeli population, 49 percent of those surveyed called Russia an “enemy of Israel,” while 42 percent consider Russia “neither a friend nor an enemy” and only 6 percent view Russia as “a friend of Israel.”
Kartashova, whose Haifa nonprofit helps all newcomers from the former Soviet Union, said hostilities between Ukrainian and Russian Jews in Israel are relatively rare.
“I haven’t heard about any such encounters. There was a pro-Russian rally a few months ago, but the police made sure that no one got in fights with pro-Ukrainians,” she said. But, she added, “there are lots of nasty comments on Facebook [against Ukraine and specifically Zelensky] by Russian-speaking Israelis”—many of whom view Putin as the best protector of Jews that Russia ever had.
While many of the new arrivals say they have no idea if they intend to stay in Israel, Valeriia Kholodova has no doubt that she will.
Born and raised in Donetsk, also in the eastern Donbas region, she served as director of the local Hillel
At This Youth Village, ‘We Are All One Family’
The pastoral setting of the
Meir Shfeyah Youth Aliyah Village— with its bucolic orchards, dairy, chicken farm and organic winery— is a far cry from the bombed-out apartment buildings and missile-ravaged streets of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities devastated by the war with Russia.
It’s hard to imagine a more ideal setting for the 29 Ukrainian Jewish teens now living at this Hadassah-supported boarding school just north of Zichron Ya’akov in northern Israel.
One of the students is 15-yearold David Kofman. An aspiring music producer, he composes tunes in his spare time using a computer and headphones.
Andrey Palienko, 16, is also a musician. He arrived from Krivoy Rog in eastern Ukraine with his mother, who is already considering returning even though he wants to stay.
Both teens belong to the village’s mandolin orchestra. Like the other Ukrainians in their group, they had applied for the Na’ale program prior to the war, which began in February, and were scheduled to arrive in September 2022. The program, subsidized by the Jewish Agency for Israel and Israel’s Ministry of Education, enables Jewish teenagers from the Diaspora to complete their high school education in Israel for free.
“But because of the emergency, the Ukrainian students were accepted immediately, without vetting, and arrived during March and April,” said Lauren Stern Kedem, a longtime English teacher and later coordinator of Meir Shfeyah’s English department.
Meir Shfeyah, established by Hadassah nearly 100 years ago and later used as a safe haven for children escaping Nazi Germany, was the first youth village in Israel to house young new arrivals from Ukraine, according to Yoram Panias, the village director. Meanwhile, nearly 60 Ukrainian athletes were resettled at Hadassah Neurim, a nearby Youth Aliyah village on Israel’s Mediterranean coast.
“What is so special about Shfeyah is the huge diversity of the kids we serve,” Kedem said. “I’m always inspired by these kids because of their willingness to trust us to take care of them.” At Meir Shfeyah, the new Ukrainian teens mingle with Israeli students—Amharic-speaking
Meir Shfeyah’s mandolin orchestra includes new Ukrainian student Dovid Kofman, far left, standing next to music director Boris Feldman.
until she was forced to relocate to Kyiv after the Russians militarily occupied her city in 2014.
Eight years later, when bombs and rockets once again threatened to upend her life, Kholodova, who is also a ballet teacher and student of Jewish culture, decided once again to move—this time to Israel.
Now a resident of Bat Yam—a coastal city south of Tel Aviv where signs in Russian have long been almost as common as those in Hebrew—Kholodova still works for Hillel, but now remotely, as a program director for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus and Azerbaijan. In these countries, Hillel’s programming for young people is community-based rather than located at a particular university.
“Two months before the war, I decided to convert to Judaism. I had thought about it for a long time— more than three years—because all my life I had worked and lived in the Jewish world,” said Kholodova, who is now pursuing her dream in Israel. “A lot of my friends are Jewish, so for me it’s a natural process.”
There are reports of some Ukrainians—as many as half—who had found refuge in Israel returning to Ukraine. Yevgeniy Shyder is among those who have made that return trip before, but now he’s back in Israel.
Shyder, an IT project manager for an outsourcing company, and his wife, Zhenya, spent three years in Ashdod and Petah Tikvah, from 2015 to 2018. But Israel’s high cost of living combined with the difficulties they had learning Hebrew and finding jobs that paid well led them to return to Ukraine.
Along with their two children, 6-year-old Shmuel and 2-year-old Ida, the Shyders lived in an apartment in Kyiv, very close to the United States Embassy as well as a Ukrainian army base that later turned out to be a target for advancing Russian forces.
Shyder painted a scene of desperation one recent afternoon at the family’s apartment in Netanya’s
Ukrainian teens at the youth village learn the letters of the ‘alef-bet.’ Ethiopians, Arabic-speaking Bedouins and Spanish speakers from Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. In all, the school serves 640 students from 7th to 12th grade, 325 of whom live at the village. About half the residential student body is from the former Soviet Union.
Boris Feldman, the school’s Russian-speaking music director since 1991, said some of his Ukrainian students don’t have an extensive music background because they couldn’t afford instruments or lessons—but others have studied music for seven or eight years. “In some cases, their parents had to sell their instruments in order to pay for the kids to come here,” said Feldman, referring to some travel and other expenses the students may be responsible for. “When they arrived, we bought cellos and violins so they could continue, because music is such an important part of their lives.” Fifteen-year-old Sonia Podebriy was born in Uzhhorod, a small town near Lviv in western Ukraine. Her brother, Igor, has lived in Israel for eight years and studies robotics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Podebriy says her mother wants to return to Ukraine, but she’s determined to stay: “I won’t even think about going back because the war is still going on.”
Given the trauma of leaving everything they know, “these kids need a lot of warmth and love— not just financial and physical support, but also emotional support,” said Tatiana Kharlov, who has been teaching mathematics at Meir Shfeyah since late May.
Kharlov can relate. Originally from the Ukrainian city of Kherson, which is now under Russian occupation, she first left for Israel in 2008, but after seven years in the country, she moved to Kyiv. When the war broke out, she and her husband, Alexander, whose Israeli citizenship enabled him to leave, loaded their two children and four dogs into the family car and drove to Poland, eventually making their way to Israel.
Dikla Morgan, Meir Shfeyah’s academic adviser, also noted that the adjustment process hasn’t been easy for the teens.
“They have to undergo a process of acclimation to become students and just be able to sit in class and regain their childhood and happiness,” she said. “There’s also a linguistic issue. Everybody in Israel speaks Hebrew. That’s a huge shift for them, plus they’re without their families. And they come from a war zone and don’t know if they’re ever going home again.”
Given occasional tensions between Russian and Ukrainian Jews in Israel amid the war, Morgan said her staff has spoken to the Russian youth at Meir Shfeyah, urging them to put politics aside and have compassion for their Ukrainian classmates.
Though the school does not attempt to erase any of their students’ previous identities or cultures, “one of our main goals here is to create an Israeli identity that all students can adapt and relate to,” Morgan said. “Here, we are all one family.” —Larry Luxner
A Second Homecoming Yevgeniy and Zhenya Shyder, here with their daughter at their new home in Netanya, have returned to Israel; Valeriia Kholodova on the promenade in Bat Yam
Kiryat Nordau district, as his wife served coffee, dates and warm strawberry cake.
“The first day of the war, I woke up, turned on the TV and saw that Russian forces were only 700 meters from our apartment building,” Shyder recalled as he pet the family dog, a white Scottish terrier named Milka. “The teacher texted us saying not to bring the kids to kindergarten. I saw the traffic jams going out of Kyiv and understood that I couldn’t take my family. I had no car.”
Trains were out of the question, too, especially with children, so Shyder sent his family to a nearby bomb shelter while he figured out what to do. As it turned out, his IT company had hired buses for employees and their immediate family members to travel to Lviv. He immediately reserved places on the first bus, which left four hours later.
At Ukraine’s border with Poland, Shyder faced a tense moment. As a Ukrainian citizen between the ages of 18 and 60, he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country. So Shyder showed his Israeli passport and was immediately waved through. Within a few days, the family arrived at Ben Gurion Airport and began their new lives in the Jewish state.
“I felt guilty about that, but as one of my friends told me, ‘Your job is your family. That’s the most important thing,’ ” he said. “And from another point of view, I continue working and donating to
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the Ukrainian army. I’m a project engineer with an American company, and since May, I’ve hired more than 20 people in Ukraine, so this is a sort of compensation.”
This time around, he said, they are planning to stay. “We were happier in Kyiv and the level of education in Ukraine was higher,” Shyder said of his home city. “But our children are safe here. They’re learning Hebrew, so it’s O.K.”
For many of these new immigrants, getting out of Ukraine is only part of the ordeal. A bigger one is getting a decent-paying job in Israel, one of the world’s most expensive places to live.
That’s where Gvahim comes in. A nonprofit organization based in Ra’anana, just north of Tel Aviv, Gvahim has been helping new immigrants find jobs for 16 years— particularly in the high-tech sector, for which olim from the former Soviet Union are especially wellsuited, given their traditionally high technological literacy and familiarity with computer programming and software development. The charity boasts more than 6,000 alumni, a network of 1,000-plus Israeli companies, 500-plus mentors and a 90 percent job placement success rate.
Juan Taifeld, Gvahim’s Mexican-born CEO, said that soon after the war began, the nonprofit immediately went into overdrive, hiring two Russian-speaking recruiters to identify qualified applicants—all of whom are fluent in Russian—and field phone calls from employers willing to hire these latest arrivals. The immediate goal: secure jobs for 300 olim, helping to integrate them into Israeli society.
“For the first time, we launched a pilot program for Russian-speaking olim,” he said. “The tools we’re giving them are essentially the soft skills: how to find a proper job, how to write a CV, how to do a LinkedIn profile. In Israel, it’s very important to know how to do a pitch. We also offer personalized human-resource consultations in Russian.”
Taifeld waived the $180 fee that participants typically pay for Gvahim’s programs. “Those people need our help,” he said, adding that Gvahim has also begun an online ulpan for Russian-speaking immigrants to learn “business” English. “Lots of organizations will be here for the short term, but I want to be here long after nobody’s talking about the war anymore.”
That day cannot come soon enough for Makarova, the economist now living in Netanya, who recently signed up with Gvahim and is looking for a job.
“First, I want the war to end, and I’ll think about this later,” she said when asked if she’d like to remain in Israel permanently. “It’s a difficult question. I’m afraid for my kids. If we didn’t have children, I would have stayed in Ukraine with my husband and not come to Israel. I’m Ukrainian and I can live anywhere. But I love my kids very much, and their future is my future.”
Larry Luxner, a Tel Aviv-based freelance journalist, is news editor of The Washington Diplomat. He also writes for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Times of Israel and Rare Disease Advisor.
Jewish Matchmaking? There’s an App for That
Searching for my King David online
By Arielle Kaplan
The talmud says that matchmaking is as difficult for God as the parting of the Red Sea. I beg to differ. Finding my bashert is undoubtedly harder. The reverberating tick from my biological clock is a relentless reminder that, at the ripe old age of 28, I have yet to be fruitful and multiply.
This greatly concerns my mother, who at my age was pregnant with her second child. She desperately wants grandchildren, but not at the cost of a schmuck for a son-in-law.
“Don’t go out with people who have substance abuse problems. Don’t go out with people who show you that they are selfish and only talk about themselves,” my mother, Navah, has warned me. “Don’t go out with narcissists, those are the worst people.”
Oy, there goes the majority of the New York City dating pool, I thought. As I tuned out my mother’s unhelpful advice, I couldn’t help but wonder: Why did I elect to go on my Birthright Israel trip with my then-boyfriend when I could have met so many eligible Zionist Jews as a single traveler? What’s the point of having three older brothers if they won’t set me up with their friends? Why aren’t Jewish leaders doing more to find me a boyfriend—I mean, ensure Jewish continuity?
Turns out, I had been too busy crying over undatable duds on the Hinge app to notice the shidduch renaissance that started during the Covid-19 pandemic. From generation to generation, Jews have relied on the tradition of matchmaking to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of dating. Now, two of the newest and buzziest post-social distancing dating apps are going beyond the
algorithms of established platforms like Jdate and JSwipe to incorporate a matchmaker component as well as in-person gatherings.
These innovations are coming as matchmakers also are making their mark in popular culture, from a shadchan plotline on Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to the upcoming Jewish Matchmaking reality show on Netflix.
With raunchy stunts like launching a Pickle Vibrator, cleverly dubbed the “dill-do,” Lox Club is undoubtedly the hottest Jewish dating app for 20- and 30-something Jews. Self-described as the digital place for Jews with “ridiculously high standards,” Lox Club is an exclusive members-only group where singles must apply to join. But one need not be Jewish to join. Indeed, as stated in their online FAQs, “Lox Club is like a deli; it’s culturally Jewish, but you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy it.”
In Lox Club’s early days in December 2020, CEO Austin Kevitch gifted me a free membership to the app, which costs $36 for three months. (At the time, I was working as an influencer on Instagram.) Its success rides on a sleek user experience, a matchmaker whom singles can text within the app and a heavy dose of nostalgia. Upon entering the app, users are welcomed into a digital speakeasy with a fictional tale based on Kevitch’s late grandparents.
Above all, Lox Club is known for hosting rowdy in-person events in New York City, Miami, Austin and Los Angeles.
From comedy shows and fitness classes to live podcast events and happy hour mixers, the app for elite Jews has gatherings for everyone.
That is, unless you’re intimidated by glitzy socialites who look like they’d bully you in high school. Those vain and vapid mean girls who rejected me from the “cool” Jewish sorority at Indiana University, relegating me to Sigma Delta Tau, snidely nicknamed “Slutty Dumpy Trolls.” But, I figured, I joined Lox Club to meet eligible guys, not necessarily befriend women.
As for the men, many of the ones I met took great pride in likening themselves to Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David, only with better fashion sense. I’ll never understand the draw of a materialistic nebbish momma’s boy. Where’s the sex appeal? Give me a hunk of a mensch like Mel Brooks or Harpo Marx; heck, I’ll even take Zero Mostel!
Over the course of several months, and following a handful of unremarkable first dates, I did have a brief fling with a Lox Club suitor. He was handsome and witty and paid for our Friday night dates at Shalom Japan in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Despite his weed dependency, my mom would have approved of his generosity—he spoiled me with trinkets and chocolates—but the relationship was short lived. I broke it off when I learned he was actively anti-Zionist.
Nostalgia Paired With 'Ridiculously High Standards' A Lox Club in-person event held
during New York Fashion Week in September brought together singles looking for love.
DIGITAL DATING 101
Where to search for your bashert online if you’re a 20- or 30-something.
MeetJew operates via Facebook groups | meetjewonline.com
Lox Club seeks to be the coolest destination for singles | loxclubapp.com
Hinge, Bumble and OkCupid offer Jewish filters | hinge.co, bumble.com and okcupid.com
SawYouAtSinai has paired over 2,000 couples, many of them Orthodox sawyouatsinai.com
JSwipe is the No. 1 most downloaded Jewish app | jswipeapp.com
Jdate claims to be responsible for 52 percent of Jewish marriages that began online | jdate.com
FilterOff is the world’s first video speed-dating app | getfilteroff.com
CoronaCrush took off for Jewish singles during the pandemic coronacrush.com
Yente Over the Rainbow matches Jewish queer singles yenteovertherainbow.com
A Masterful 'Shadchan' MeetJew co-founder Aaron Raimi (center) joins the crowd at a Tu B'Av-themed party held in August at The Dean in Manhattan.
I, a cultural Jew and Zioness who was increasingly feeling like a herring out of water, exclusively date Zionists.
If searching for Mr. Right on an app that prioritizes aesthetics over Jewish values isn’t your thing, allow me to introduce you to MeetJew, a nonprofit matchmaking service without Lox Club’s “ridiculously high standards.”
In lieu of an app, the platform operates on Facebook through a handful of groups catering to singles of different cohorts: “MeetJew University Dating” (ages 18 to 26); “MeetJew Post-Grad Dating” (23 to 34); and “MeetJew Professional Dating” (30 and older). Boasting around 60,000 global members, singles are encouraged to post flattering photos with colorful about me blurbs, inviting interested parties to “slide into their DMs” (slang for reaching out).
Touting seven marriages and 36 engagements since launching in 2020, MeetJew co-founders Aaron Raimi and Daniel Ebrahimi are masterful shadchanim. As their Facebook groups exploded, the Los Angeles-based duo drafted an in-depth “MeetJew IQ” questionnaire with prompts like: “Do you consider yourself a Zionist?”; “Do you want to make aliyah?”; “Are you looking for a serious relationship? Yes, no, if the vibe is right, not sure?”
They also enlisted the help of coder Justin Cohen, who met his fiancée through MeetJew, to devise an algorithm that matches participants based on their answers. Now, each week on “Match Monday,” Raimi and Ebrahimi personally email members from the various groups with two to three matches. Singles are encouraged to reach out to their possible basherts.
According to Ebrahimi, the criteria that single Jews seem most adamant about is location, location, location. Long distance is a deal breaker because “Jews don’t like difficulties or hardships,” Ebrahimi asserts, only partly in jest. Above all, he adds,
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“people just want to meet someone who is Jewish.”
And, crucial to me, someone who is a Zionist. MeetJew proudly organizes Yom Ha’atzmaut and Tel Aviv-themed mixers. The founders are committed to “fostering Zionism,” Ebrahimi stresses, and doing “everything to support Jews and Israel.”
The Facebook groups and the questionnaire are the social dating platform’s bread and butter, but like Lox Club, MeetJew hosts house parties as well as events at Instagrammable clubs in Los Angeles, New York City and Boston. As an extrovert weighed down by social anxiety, I find it difficult to approach potential suitors at these types of soirees. MeetJew addresses my timidity by collaborating on a number of their gatherings with FilterOff, a video speed-dating app created by Zach Schlein in 2020.
By arranging speed-dating sessions ahead of some MeetJew events, FilterOff allows nervous nellies like me to ensure that there’ll be someone of romantic interest at the party. FilterOff was Schlein’s response to the mental health risks posed by Tinder, the popular swipe-right hookup app that celebrated its 10th anniversary in September.
I went to a MeetJew Tu B’Avthemed party in August at The Dean, an elegant bar in Manhattan with walls covered in greenery. I arrived just a minute before the open bar closed and managed to snag a White Claw. I quickly chugged the hard seltzer and joined my new friends on the dance floor, swinging my hips to whatever the DJ was playing three decibels too loud.
Surrounded by Jewesses in white dresses in a nod to the Hebrew calendar’s holiday of love, I felt as though we were the daughters of Jerusalem dancing in the vineyards waiting to be plucked by an eligible bachelor. I didn’t meet my King David that night, but for the first time since my biological clock began ticking, I felt a wave of reassurance knowing that the matchmaking renaissance was in full swing. Tradition!
Arielle Kaplan is the digital editor of Hadassah Magazine.
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