On February 19, 2026, Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine shared what, in a normal year, would read like a community logistics note: Purim is coming, and tens of thousands of holiday packages are being sent to Jewish families across Ukraine.

Nothing about Ukraine in 2026 is “normal.”

Purim this year begins after sunset on March 2, with the main day on March 3 (and in Jerusalem and other walled cities, Shushan Purim extending into March 4). It is also the fourth Purim Ukrainian Jews will mark since February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

That number matters. Four Purims under full-scale war means four years of building holiday life around sirens, blackouts, displacement, and the constant uncertainty of whether a community can gather safely. It also means something else: the holiday cycle did not break. It bent. It adapted. But it did not stop.

Forty-eight thousand packages, more than 150 communities.

The Federation says it is distributing 48,000 Purim sets to over 150 communities across the country. In practical terms, that is trucks, warehouses, sorting lines, volunteers, schedules, and local coordination. In emotional terms, it is a decision: Purim will not be reduced to a distant memory or a private, isolated gesture for the few who happen to be safer than others.

These packages are meant to help families actually observe Purim — not simply “acknowledge the date.”

According to the Federation, the sets include:

a Ukrainian-language Scroll of Esther (Megillat Esther)

a Ukrainian-language guide to celebrating Purim

mishloach manot with kosher treats

a Federation-branded bag

and a small amount of infused spirits for the festive meal

That detail — the Ukrainian-language materials, including a Ukrainian-language Megillah — is not cosmetic. It says something about where Ukrainian Jewish life is situated right now: fully inside the Ukrainian civic space, in the Ukrainian language, while still anchored in Jewish ritual and memory. It’s also a practical tool for families who want to read, explain, and pass on the story in the language their kids use every day.

“We will celebrate, despite everything”.

Meir Stambler, who chairs the Federation’s council, described Purim as the first major Jewish holiday Ukrainian communities observed after the full-scale invasion began.

He remembers synagogues filled with people even then — those first raw weeks — and he insists the same will happen again.

“We will celebrate, despite everything,” he said, emphasizing a straightforward aim: to help every Jew fulfill all four Purim obligations.

In Ukraine, “despite everything” is not a slogan. It’s a daily calculation: Will the roads be open? Will the electricity hold? Will people be able to get to the synagogue? Will there be another strike tonight? Even questions that used to be mundane — “what time do we start?” — now sit inside a larger reality of risk management.

And still, the communities answer with the same stubborn sentence: we will celebrate.

This is not separate from Ukraine’s struggle — it is part of it.

There’s an instinct, especially from outside Ukraine, to treat Jewish communal life there as either “paused” or purely humanitarian — soup kitchens, shelters, evacuation assistance. Those things are real, and they are essential.

But there is another story running alongside them: continuity.

Ukrainian Jews are part of the wider Ukrainian society living through the same war. Members of Jewish communities serve in the armed forces, join territorial defense, volunteer, drive supplies, help displaced families, support older people, and rebuild shattered routines in cities that still wake up to air-raid alerts. They do it not as a separate category, but as Ukrainians who happen to be Jewish — and as Jews whose tradition insists on mutual responsibility.

At the same time, Jewish institutions are not immune to the pressures of war beyond missiles: attempts at destabilization, disinformation campaigns, provocations meant to fracture trust, and the constant temptation — internal and external — to let communal life “freeze” until the war ends.

That is precisely what these Purim packages quietly resist.

War tries to shrink a society down to bare survival. Purim pushes back and says: survival is not the whole story. People still need a moral and cultural spine. They still need neighbors. They still need rituals that tell them they belong to something older than the current catastrophe.

Why this matters to readers far from the front line.

From Israel, North America, or anywhere distant enough that sirens are not part of your calendar, it’s easy to imagine that celebrating a holiday during a war is either denial or escapism.

In Ukraine, it reads differently. It feels more like discipline.

Purim is built around four anchors: hearing the Megillah, giving gifts of food to friends (mishloach manot), giving to those in need, and sitting down to a festive meal. In a stable country, these are traditions. In a country under full-scale attack, they become a communal strategy: keep people connected, keep mutual responsibility active, keep despair from becoming the default language.

And there’s something else: Purim is a holiday about reversal — about plans collapsing, about a threatened community refusing to vanish quietly. That theme is not abstract in Ukraine. It’s painfully current.

The fourth wartime Purim, and the meaning of joy.

Four years into full-scale war, Ukrainian society has learned what “long-term” really means. Not weeks. Not months. Years. That kind of time changes people. It changes what holidays are allowed to feel like.

Joy in wartime is complicated. It can feel guilty. It can feel unsafe. But Purim doesn’t ask for naïve happiness. It asks for a very specific kind of joy: joy as loyalty to life, joy as a refusal to be emotionally conquered, joy as an insistence that community still exists even when everything around it is designed to scatter people.

This is the fourth time Ukrainian Jews will do that since February 2022.

They will read the story of Esther. They will give food to neighbors. They will donate to those who have less. They will gather where they can, however they can. And by doing it, they will send a message that no press release can fully express:

You can disrupt a country. You can destroy buildings. You can attempt to “freeze” public life. But you cannot fully erase the human decision to keep living — and to keep living together.

Purim begins after sunset on March 2. In Ukraine, once again, the Megillah will be read — this time with Ukrainian-language materials in many homes and communities — and the old story will meet the brutal present. Not because anyone is pretending the war is over. Because they are refusing to disappear while it continues.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)