The Ukraine Diaries - Reflections on Performing RISE in the City of Lions

25 November 2025

Tel Aviv, Israel

In the early days of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, a saying circulated widely that went roughly thus: If Russia stops fighting, there will be no more war. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no more Ukraine. While accurate to Ukraine, the saying is not entirely Ukrainian. The original quote belongs to Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel, who famously stated: If the Arabs lay down their weapons, there will be no more war. If Israel lays down her weapons, there will be no more Israel. I say that the phrase is not entirely Ukrainian because, while Golda was the leader of Israel, she was also a refugee from Kiev during the Russian Empire, which makes the phrase, I think, at least a little bit Ukrainian.

So, perhaps it is not inappropriate that my reflections on Lviv are being written in Tel Aviv, sitting at the café that I frequented in the days of war after October 7th, in between supply runs to evacuees and air-raid runs to bomb shelters to avoid Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, Houthi, and Iranian missile fire. While RISE may have been sparked in the Jewish neighborhood of Krakow, it was fed, formed, and trialed by fire in the Jewish State. This is where I researched. This is where I wrote and recorded the first draft. And it was here, in the midst of falling rockets, that RISE was first performed to a people at war, where I first realized that the show might serve a different purpose other than that traditionally ascribed to a musical theatre show, where I first began thinking in earnest about how to get it to Ukraine.

It took a year and half to figure out a way, a year and a half for the right connection to be made. That connection was Project Kesher, a Jewish women’s organization formed at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, dedicated to Judaism, Feminism, and Pluralism. I hoped and felt that it would work because the Hebrew word for the Couriers was Kashariyot, which shares the same root as the Hebrew word Kesher - connection.

At the outbreak of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Project Kesher organized caravans of cars and vans and improvised routes and moved nine thousand people out of the war zone to safety. The invasion coincided with a cultural crackdown within Russia itself which targeted the LGBTQ community. In response, Project Kesher smuggled fifteen hundred LGBTQ Jews and their partners to safety in Israel, where they might be threatened by bombs from Islamists, but not persecution for their sexuality. In the midst of these dire situations in which Project Kesher is actively saving people’s lives, I wondered why they would also take on the task of producing a musical theatre piece.

I wondered something similar regarding the RISE performance in Jerusalem. There was an active war. When the producers told me we would not just perform publicly, but would sell tickets, my first thought was, who is going to come to this? And yet, on the night of our performance, a sell-out crowd left their houses, under rocket fire to sit in an improvised venue in a bunker to see our reading of a new musical. We had to move in extra chairs to accommodate them all. Similarly, in Lviv, to attend the conference where we performed, people traveled through war zones, spent hours, sometimes days on trains just to get there. Russia’s missile and drone attack on Lviv the night before the conference didn’t inhibit the crowd in the slightest.

I wonder about these things, how even in the midst of war when basic needs like physical safety are compromised, we still reach for music and story and art. As happens so often now, I am brought back to the Couriers.

The Couriers are well known for smuggling food and clothes and medicine and supplies - what we think of as the basic essentials for survival. But, in addition to those more common items, the Couriers also smuggled a massive amount of books. The Jewish ghettos all across occupied Europe were rich with reading material that had to be smuggled through checkpoints and over the walls. In the midst of starvation and disease, executions, and deportations to camps, Jewish inmates set up secret libraries. People signed up on waiting lists to read books. Groups would gather in the dark of night to pass a book around, taking turns reading out loud to one another. Music was smuggled as well - songs, poems, melodies - all clandestinely passed from hand to hand. The punishment for any of these activities was death. People risked their lives, time and again, to get their hands on a book or a piece of music or a poem, and then they risked their lives again to pass it on to someone else.

When I think of the people I met in Lviv - the musicians with whom I played, the streets where I walked, the crowds who filled the night right up until curfew kicked in, the attendees of the conference, and our wonderful audience who wanted to hear “Warrior” twice - I also think of the Jerusalemites, and the Tel Avivians, and the Couriers.

Sometimes there is war and we must fight. We are a people who have faced violence and threats and attacks over and over again, across regions and eras, in every generation. But victory is not only won on the field of battle. The victory is also that, even in the midst of war, we are a people who write and play and sing, a people who go out to dinner with friends, swim at the beach, and walk along city streets, a people who can greet the dawn after a night of air raids and still get the kids ready for school, a people who will keep the candles burning - a people who will go out, despite missiles and power outages and drones, to listen to a piece of music that tells the story of our predecessors and what they went through so that we may have a chance at life. No matter the size of the enemy, no matter the scale of the war, that is a people who will prevail.

As a final thought on this first round of RISE in Ukraine, I’ll sign off with this:

In 1878, a broke and wandering Jewish poet wrote a poem called “HaTikvah,” “The Hope.” In it, he spoke of the Jewish longing for the end of exile: “Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two thousand years: To be a free people in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” His poem went on to become a song. The song went on to become an anthem for Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Middle East. It was sung by activists in Switzerland, farmers in the Yishuv, and inmates at Auschwitz. The song survived the Holocaust and is now the national anthem of the world’s only Jewish State, the one in which I currently sit writing at a café. The poet’s name was Naftali Herz Imber. He was from Lviv.