When Rabbi Irina Gritsevskaya makes a trip to Ukraine, she aims to get a lot done. This time, when she flies from Israel to Ukraine on Saturday night, she’ll oversee a teachers seminar, the graduation of a new group of kashrut supervisors (mashgichei kashrut), a training course for prayer leaders and — with help from two other rabbis flying in for the occasion to make up a beit din — the conversion of four people. 

After that, Gritsevskaya, who serves as executive director of Midreshet Schechter in addition to her work with the Ukrainian Conservative/Masorti community, will fly back to Israel for a few weeks before returning to Ukraine in mid-July to oversee the movement’s two-week summer camp for some 150 kids — the longest and biggest camp it’s ever run. 

As Russia’s invasion has entered its third year, life in Ukraine is “getting harder and harder” as punishing war becomes the new normal, according to Gritsevskaya. “People are getting used to it. As terrible as it sounds, they are getting used to unbelievable circumstances,” she said.

“The [Ukrainian Masorti] communities are functioning, fully functioning under such extreme circumstances,” Gritsevskaya told eJewishPhilanthropy this week ahead of her trip. “On the other hand, it’s very hard, morally, for the people. I think the level of distress is very high, because it’s hard to live without hope. I think as Israelis we understand it more than anyone else.”

In addition to hosting Shabbat and holiday services, the four main Masorti communities in Ukraine — Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and Chernivtsi, as well as a smaller community in Dnipro — also host youth programs, family camps and Shabbatons. For safety reasons, most of the national programs are run in Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, which is less likely to come under Russian attack. 

“In Kharkiv [a regular site of Russian attacks and battles in the country’s east], it’s much more difficult to do programming on site, because even if we plan something, we never know till the day before [if it will happen]. Like for Pesach, we planned everything, we bought everything, but even the day before we were not sure if we would be able to have the Seder,” she said. 

In addition to dealing with regular Russian attacks, Ukrainians are also contending with the country’s own, increasingly stringent military draft, with men regularly getting picked off the street and pressed into service.

“Because nowadays men who don’t want to be mobilized sometimes just stay inside their houses, and some people just go out only to go to the synagogue,” Gritsevskaya said. “So communities really provide this huge support.”

Following the mass exodus of Ukrainians from the country with the start of the war in February 2022, the local communities have been dealing with a leadership shortage as “many strong families, strong people left,” said Gritsevskaya, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has led Schechter’s Ukraine program since 2019.

The teacher seminar that she is overseeing this month, which will take place over a Shabbat near Chernivtsi, is part of the effort to address that shortage, providing educational and leadership tools to lay leaders in the communities. 

“We will talk mainly about the traumas that Jewish people suffered,” she said, noting the Holocaust in Ukraine and the Oct. 7 massacres. “Rachel Danziger-Sharansky is joining us for this seminar, the daughter of Natan Sharansky. And we are arranging a panel where people will join us from Israel, people who suffered terrible losses personally and have a connection to us: Some of the students from Schechter and a former member of our camp who is now in Israel and serves in the Israeli army during this war.”

While in Ukraine, Gritsevskaya will lead and oversee a number of other programs as well, she said. 

“We also have our course for shlichei tzibur [prayer leaders] led by a cantor, which is ending now. We are training two rabbis in Ukraine right now to like to [develop] new leadership. I’m coming on-site for teaching and doing programs with [the rabbinical students] and another rabbi, [Shlomo Zacharov], is coming with me from Israel for the seminar with those students,” she said. 

“And in September, we are opening a program for non-rabbinical students and lay leaders of the communities. So there are a lot of leadership programs going on. And, in parallel, we have a program for young counselors, which we are starting this summer,” Gritsevskaya added.

While in Ukraine, Gritsevskaya, along with Zacharov and Rabbi Chaim Weiner, the head of the European Masorti Bet Din, will oversee the conversion of four people. (While Gritsevskaya and Zacharov are staying longer in Ukraine to run other programs, Weiner is only coming in for a single day for the conversions, Gritsevskaya noted.)

“We are very conservative in our conversions. I have to tell you, personally, that’s a surprise for me,” Gritsevskaya said. “If you would have asked me before I started to deal with it closely, I would say I’m very open and it’s important to have conversions and people join [the Jewish people]. But when I started actually to work in it and to deal with it, I found out that it’s very important for me [to be thorough]. It’s a huge responsibility as a rabbi… I have to really feel that they’re ready and that it’s really what the Jewish people need.”

Zacharov will run the mashgichim program, training some 25 people on the technical details of kashrut.

“It’s mostly for different activities that we have outside of the communities,” Gritsevskaya said. “Every time we go or other organizations go anywhere [for a program and] they want to have kosher food, they need mashgichei kashrut to come.”

Gritsevskaya said the goal is to not only have these kashrut supervisors available for the Masorti movements programs but to also make them available to other Jewish organizations in Ukraine, who might otherwise forgo offering strictly kosher food.

“Hopefully, other organizations will also use [them] and not do what we call kosher-style,” she said.

Gritsevskaya will return to Israel on July 1, only to go back to Ukraine two-and-a-half  weeks later for the movement’s summer camp. The theme of this year’s camp will be the “well of strength” and finding resilience from Jewish history and tradition, she said.  

“We are actually enlarging the camp this year, both in terms of [the number of] days and also in terms of the number of the kids,” she said. “[Last year,] we had a waiting list of the kids who we could not get into the camp because we were limited. So I really tried to find financing and to find support. And we had the mission that people who came to the camp [last summer] and saw the kids and saw how important it is for them and how it’s really maybe the only period in the whole year when they can be kids.”

This year’s camp will also feature a new partnership with Maccabi USA and Maccabi Ukraine, which are providing funding and sports equipment. Gritsevskaya credited this to Arnie Fielkow, a former CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans and a member of the board of directors of Maccabi USA. 

With new donations and partnerships, Gritsevskaya said she was able to run the camp for two weeks, from July 24 to Aug. 7, which is three days longer than 2023 and open it to 150 kids (30 more than last year — and “and we still have a waiting list!” she added.

Gritsevskaya stressed the connection that the Ukrainian Jewish communities feel toward Israel, considering both of their countries to be at war.

“Right now in our communities we always start and end Shabbat with the prayer for Israel and prayer for Ukraine,” she said. “It’s like bookends for Shabbat. You start and you end with prayer for peace in the two countries that we are stuck in between, like we are stuck in between those two wars, because all the people in the communities, they have friends in Israel, they have family in Israel, they have connections to Israel. So it’s all intertwined very, very tightly.”

Gritsevskaya added that while Ukrainians in general fear being forgotten by the international community as attention has shift to the war in Gaza and other crises, the Ukrainian Jewish community feels “no jealousy” toward Israel and the focus on its struggles after Oct. 7.

”There is a huge, huge support in the Jewish community for Israel,” she said, recalling Ukrainians who offered to make donations to Israel after the attacks. “They’re so happy when there is support for Israel.”

Getting misty-eyed, Gritsevskaya reflected on the current moment in Jewish history, when there is such broad support for both Israel and Ukrainian Jewry, likening it to the rallies for Soviet Jewry in the 1970s.

“It’s like a romantic time of Judaism, when all the Jews around the world worked together in order to help the Jews in the Soviet Union to ‘Let my people go,’” she said. “There is such a unification and feeling of solidarity among the Jews, to the Jews in Ukraine and to the Jews in Israel… I wish people would learn about it at schools and talk about this more because we are always very good about talking about situations when we are not together. And there is so much despair now, especially in Israel, about how tough the situation is or how we are divided. I wish we would talk about those situations when we are amazingly united and we manage to solve things,” she said.