On March 15, Sinai Temple hosted an interfaith prayer service with over 20 different faith communities, including Ukrainian churches, participating. Speakers included the host, Rabbi Erez Sherman, as well as Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple David Wolpe and Rabbi Noah Farkas, CEO and president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, who livestreamed from the Polish-Ukrainian border.
The event was organized quickly, Sherman told the Journal. “My friend, Father Gil Martinez of St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, called me a week ago. He said, ‘Is the Jewish community doing anything to pray for Ukraine? If so, we would love to join. I said, ‘We should be doing something.’ So we started calling our friends. One led to another, until we had 20 faith organizations, mostly synagogues and churches coming together.”
Some of the participants included Saint Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral, Saint Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Los Angeles, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Ukrainian Catholic Church, Adat Shalom, Temple Beth Am, HIAS, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, Temple Isaiah and Wilshire Boulevard Temple.
Attendees brought emergency medical kits to send to Ukraine, and three people appeared via livestream: Farkas, along with Ariel Keren, a medical clown from Israel, who also was on the border cheering up people as they fled their homes, and Rabbi Reuven Stamov, a Conservative Ukrainian rabbi who was a classmate of Sherman’s in the rabbinic seminary. Stamov’s family had just made aliyah, and he was going back to Ukraine to help his community.
“The pandemic for the last couple of years has kept us apart physically,” Sherman told the audience. “We literally haven’t been in our own communities but in our own homes. In essence, we have been prisoners [of] ourselves. Yet one blessing that has come from these two years has been a deep faith that has bound us from community to community.”
The Sinai clergy “have been deeply grateful to all of our faith neighbors who have allowed us to worship, sometimes in their spaces,” Sherman continued.
After announcing he had received a $25,000 check to aid Ukrainians from a member that day, Wolpe capped the occasion by talking about experiencing anger during this time.
“Everybody here has prayed for peace, but that does not mean you are not allowed to be angry. There is good cause to be angry. Anger is not hate. Anger is indignation at the wanton destruction of life.”
– Senior Rabbi David Wolpe
“Everybody here has prayed for peace, but that does not mean you are not allowed to be angry,” he said. “There is good cause to be angry. Anger is not hate. Anger is indignation at the wanton destruction of life, at the creation of refugees, men, women and children, at the obliteration of buildings and monuments that took years and lives to build.”
Wolpe drove directly at Vladimir Putin and Russian attackers.
“This was an act of enormous cynicism and cruelty,” he said. “As somebody who is not Ukrainian, I feel free to be able to say how angry we should feel on behalf of the Ukrainian people over the wreckage that has been loosed on their country. Had my great-grandparents not decided to come to America, I would have been Ukrainian, if I had been lucky enough to be alive.”
Sherman, bringing in Torah to inspire the audience, alluded to the prophet Zechariah, “who teaches us people are prisoners,” he said. “We are prisoners of hope. That is why we are here tonight, to be prisoners of hope. Hope is not how we see the world, but hope is the faith that we wish this world could be.”
