Op-Ed – As a Jew, I cannot stay silent about Ukraine."

I am a Jew.

And that identity is not mine alone. It is a memory, a responsibility, a legacy. It compels me.

To be Jewish is to carry within oneself the memory of so many children torn from their families, of men and women taken without explanation, of doctors deported for having cared for the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is to have engraved in one’s flesh the story of what the world allows when it looks away.

Today, in Ukraine, children are being abducted. Civilians, including doctors, are being captured, deported, forcibly transferred to Russia. By the thousands. The numbers are known. Sometimes the faces circulate. But the silence—diplomatic, media, political—is deafening.

How, as a Jew, could I not respond?

History has taught us to recognize the signs. To read between the lines. To hear the inhuman where others still hear political justifications. We know what it means to be erased, displaced, uprooted. We know the cost of endlessly waiting for news of a loved one. We know the damage that forced exile and disappearance inflict on entire generations.

I think of those Ukrainian children who, like so many Jewish children before them, may grow up not knowing who they really are, or conditioned to forget. I think of the civilians and healthcare workers whose only “crime” was to exist or to help in a war zone. I think of the families from whom a son, a daughter, a parent has been taken.

To remain silent would be to betray what it means to be Jewish after Auschwitz.

It would be to accept that, in the 21st century, on our continent, mass abductions can be normalized. It would be to look away, as others did before, while children disappeared into

trains with no return.

I refuse.

Because our duty of remembrance only matters if it becomes action. Because our past cannot justify our silence—but demands our voice. Because humanity is defended not only by commemorations, but by speaking out—here and now.

Today in Ukraine, children cry for their parents. Doctors are imprisoned for having healed. Civilians vanish without a trace. These are not side stories. They are crimes. And they are watching us.

I am a Jew. And I will not be silent.