On May 10–11, 2026, the town of Balta in Ukraine’s Odesa region hosted Jewish Culture Days — a festival that showed something important and often overlooked: Jewish life in Ukraine today is not only about war, pain, rescue, and survival. It is also about growth, memory, education, culture, and the quiet determination of communities that continue to build even while the country is fighting Russian aggression.

For many readers outside Ukraine, Jewish life there is now seen mostly through the lens of war. Air raids. Destroyed cities. Volunteer aid. Soldiers at the front. Refugees. Families scattered across Europe and Israel.

But it is not the whole story.

This is precisely the kind of story NAnews – Nikk.Agency Israel News tries to bring into the Israeli conversation: not only the headlines of war, diplomacy, and emergency, but also the quieter evidence that Jewish life in Ukraine continues to organize itself, educate children, preserve memory, and grow.

In Balta, people gathered not to escape history, but to bring it back into public life. They opened a museum, donated books to libraries, organized children’s activities, sang in Yiddish, visited a synagogue, watched a film, met with teachers, and honored the memory of the Balta ghetto.

That is what a living community looks like.

Not only a community that mourns. Not only a community that helps Ukraine resist an aggressor. But a community that also teaches, remembers, creates, and develops.

A Ukrainian Jewish Festival During Wartime

Jewish Culture Days in Balta were held within a UNESCO project in Ukraine with the support of the European Union. The event brought together members of the Jewish community, educators, museum workers, librarians, local residents, guests, and people who understand that Jewish history in southern Ukraine is not a closed chapter.

Balta is not just a small town on the map. It is one of those places where Jewish life was once woven into the city’s everyday rhythm. Synagogues, families, crafts, markets, holidays, languages, cemeteries, memories of prewar life — all of this formed the city’s identity.

And then came the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

That is why the festival had two layers. On the surface, it was a cultural event: music, books, food, film, workshops, meetings. But underneath, it was also a statement: Jewish history in Ukraine belongs not only to the past. It still has people who care for it, restore it, and pass it forward.

For Israel, this matters.

Many Israeli families have roots in Ukraine — in Odesa, Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Chernivtsi, Podolia, Bessarabia, and small towns whose names survive in family stories, old documents, photographs, or only in a vague sentence once heard from grandparents: “Our people came from there.”

Balta is one of those places where memory becomes concrete again.

Books, Yiddish Songs, Food, and Children

The first day of the festival began on May 10 with an official opening and the donation of books to the Balta........

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