In Kyiv, two September days of Jewish Open Space took place. In the photos, everything looks quite easy: young people are laughing, someone is dancing, Yiddish is heard, there is a playground nearby, workshops. After the second weekend, the organizers wrote that despite the security situation, the festival took place and became a ‘place of support’ for people.
We could end on that note — a Jewish festival in wartime Kyiv, what more is there to explain.
But then half of the story would be lost.
Jewish Open Space has been held for more than ten years, growing from a single Kyiv event into a program in several countries, and its organizer is not CHABAD, not a state Jewish structure of Ukraine, and not a secular cultural fund. The festival grew around the Kyiv Jewish Messianic Community, whose participants believe in Yeshua — Jesus — as the Messiah of Israel. The community itself does not hide this, but on the festival poster, the religious component is much less noticeable than the music and apples with honey.
The author of NANews Pavel Shveyko explored where a simple urban Jewish festival ends and the history of the community itself begins. No spoiler needed here: the boundary is quite blurred.
September 5 — park, Yiddish, and open-air cinema
In 2026, the Kyiv program was divided into two dates — September 5 and 12. The festival’s official website confirms both dates for Kyiv.
The first day took place in Natalka Park. The Kyiv poster described the program as follows: Yiddish songs with a modern DJ set, round dances to live music, sports activities, thematic workshops, and a children’s zone. Separately, at 18:30, a free screening of Jewish cinema was announced at the Wave complex on the Dnipro embankment. Entry was made free, anyone could come.
This is probably the familiar face of Jewish Open Space. Not a conference behind closed doors and not a worship service with mandatory registration, but an urban space where you can come with your family, listen to music, eat something, talk, dance.
This is how the festival was built before.
September 12 — already ‘Nyvky Hall’
There was a slight confusion with the second date. Early announcements mentioned other venues, but the final poster for September 12 already indicated ‘Nyvky Hall’, Brest Avenue, 84, time — from 15:00 to 19:30. There, too, were listed a concert of Yiddish songs with a DJ set, workshops, live music, round dances, a thematic cafe, Jewish souvenirs, and a children’s zone. Entry was again free.
Why exactly the venue changed, we will not assert. We do not have a statement from the organizers with the wording ‘moved due to threat’ — so we should not speculate for them.
But the factor of war is completely open. On the official Jewish Open Space website, it is now separately stated that a shelter is provided near each festival venue in Ukraine, and visitors are asked to go there during an air raid alert. For today’s Kyiv, this is already a usual organizational detail. Although, if you think about it, it’s not usual at all.
And the date of September 12 turned out to be special for another reason.
On the evening of September 11, 2026, Rosh Hashanah 5787 began, and Saturday, September 12, was the first day of the Jewish New Year — and simultaneously Shabbat. The holiday ended on the evening of September 13. Therefore, apples, honey, and the New Year’s motifs of the festival were not a ‘Jewish-style’ decor, but a direct reference to the calendar.
For an Israeli, however, another question immediately arises. We will return to it.
Jewish Open Space did not appear yesterday
According to the history of the festival itself, sources allow us to confidently go back to about 2014. In a master’s thesis from the Ukrainian Catholic University, written in 2021 based in part on interviews with representatives of the Kyiv Jewish Messianic Community, it is stated that at that time Jewish Open Space had been held for seven years. The current KJMC formulates it more simply: the festival has existed for ‘more than 11 years’.
Large pre-war festivals were held in Mariinsky Park.
In 2019, the city ‘Vechirniy Kyiv’ wrote about performances by the National Academic Orchestra of Folk Instruments of Ukraine, the Revutsky Chapel, Jewish ensembles, and invited performers. Organizer Andrey Lugovsky was presented directly — as an assistant to the rabbi of the Kyiv Jewish Messianic Community.
The KJMC itself now speaks of about 10,000 visitors to that festival in Mariinsky Park. This is the organization’s figure, not an independent count, so we will not mix one with the other. But it at least allows us to imagine the scale of the event.
And here a question arises, without which it is difficult to write honestly about Jewish Open Space: what is this Kyiv Jewish Messianic Community?
The community is over thirty years old
The current international structure is called the Kingdom Jewish Messianic Confederation — KJMC. Its central Kyiv community traces its history back to 1995. It is led by Boris Grisenko, whom the organization calls the senior rabbi and head of the confederation.
The About KJMC page currently lists 58 communities and groups in 21 countries. Regarding the size of the Kyiv community itself, the site is not entirely accurate: one page mentions more than 1,700 participants after the start of the war, another — more than 2,000. Before the full-scale invasion, the organization indicated more than 2,200 people. Therefore, we will not give one current figure as ironclad.
But there is no ambiguity with the doctrine.
KJMC directly calls itself a global messianic Jewish movement and speaks of its goal to help Jews ‘discover their Messiah — Yeshua’. The Kyiv community describes itself as an association of Jews and non-Jews who believe that Yeshua is the Messiah of Israel and the whole world.
There, festivals, concerts, and theatrical performances are named as one of the ways to introduce people to Jewish culture, biblical traditions, the God of Israel, and the activities of the community.
So the connection of Jewish Open Space with the religious mission is not a journalist’s guess and not someone else’s accusation. The organization itself says this.
And here a document was found that puts many things in place
There is a source more interesting than advertising pages.
In 2021, Lidiya Moskal defended a master’s thesis at the Ukrainian Catholic University on the theology of the Kyiv Jewish Messianic Community. It contains a separate section on evangelization, based, among other things, on interviews with KEMO representatives.
Community elder Andrey Lugovsky told the researcher that bringing the Gospel to people is the community’s primary goal. The author of the work then describes several levels of such activity — and the largest annual mass event is named as Jewish Open Space.
According to research data from that period, about 700 community volunteer ministers were involved in the festival. The park was divided into thematic zones, concerts and workshops were held, and visitors were then invited to KEMO’s ongoing clubs and other meetings.
But here we must refrain from a convenient and too simple conclusion.
The work describes the community’s activities before 2020. It shows how KEMO itself then viewed Jewish Open Space within its evangelization system. This is a serious historical source, but it does not automatically prove that a person who came in 2026 to listen to Yiddish or bring a child to a workshop necessarily ended up at a religious sermon.
On the other hand, today’s KJMC still calls the festival a way to talk about the faith and mission of the community. This line has not been broken. Just the form has become broader.
That is why NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency separates two things that are easy to mix: the real open cultural program of the festival and the religious identity of the organization that makes this festival.
Both exist simultaneously.
After the Russian invasion, another line appeared — help
In the current description of Jewish Open Space, much more space is devoted to social work than before.
The official website writes about chaplains who visit the military and visit the wounded in hospitals, about volunteer activities and charitable dentistry. KJMC separately talks about humanitarian aid, work with internally displaced people, mobile dentistry in de-occupied areas of the Kyiv region, assistance to military personnel, and projects for people who have experienced war trauma. These are the organization’s own data, and this is how they should be correctly presented.
In recent years, the word ‘festival’ has therefore come to mean something slightly different than in pre-war Mariinsky Park. Music, dances, theater, Jewish symbolism, children remained. Nearby — collections, help, talks about the war, and a shelter nearby.
Some things the war simply placed side by side, although they used to live separately.
This is also visible in other Jewish projects in Ukraine. NANews recently talked, for example, about the Sholem Aleichem Museum in Kyiv and how the living culture of Yiddish is preserved there, as well as about the EU and UNESCO project to preserve the Jewish documentary heritage of Ukraine. Jewish Open Space is in the same large Ukrainian-Jewish reality, but organizationally and religiously, it is a completely different story.
From Kyiv, the festival has spread to several countries
On the official schedule for 2026, Kyiv, Lviv, Berdychiv, Uzhhorod, Khmelnytskyi, and Vinnytsia in Ukraine are now marked. Beyond its borders — Helsinki, Porvoo, Bern, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Cologne, and Sacramento. If you count cities, not separate dates, it turns out to be 13 cities in six countries.
And here, too, the numbers had to be checked because the organization’s own sites slightly argue with each other. One KJMC page attributes 15 cities in six countries to 2024, another writes about 15 cities already in seven countries in 2025. Therefore, retrospective figures are better left with the note ‘according to KJMC data’, rather than building an exact statistical ladder from them.
However, the fact of expansion is not in doubt. In 2026, the official festival website already shows Ukraine, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the USA. Moreover, the programs differ. In American Sacramento, for example, a street festival, Israeli dances, modern Jewish music, and further weekly meetings after the event itself are announced.
So it is not just one Kyiv concert being exported. A model is being exported.
Explanation for Israeli readers: who are Messianic Jews
For a reader in Israel, the word ‘messianic’ fundamentally changes the context.
Participants in the messianic movement may consider themselves Jews and maintain Shabbat, Jewish holidays, prayer forms, music, dances, Hebrew, elements of tradition. But at the same time, the central part of their faith is the recognition of Yeshua — Jesus — as the Messiah and the use of the New Testament.
The main directions of modern Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist — do not recognize Messianic Judaism as a direction of Judaism. At the same time, the messianic movement itself disagrees with such external classification and speaks of itself precisely as a continuation of Jewish faith in the Messiah.
From here, the seemingly strange date of the Kyiv festival becomes clearer.
September 12, 2026 — the first day of Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat. For an Orthodox Jewish community, a public program with a DJ set, music, and similar activities at this time would be impossible according to the rules of observing Shabbat and the holiday. For a Messianic community, religious practice is arranged differently.
There is another point because names often get mixed into one heap. KJMC and Jewish Open Space — not Jews for Jesus. Jews for Jesus is a separate organization. It belongs to the broader field of the messianic movement, but it is not the same legal or organizational entity.
For an Israeli reader, this is probably the key to understanding the whole story. The inscription ‘Jewish festival’ here does not automatically mean an event of the Judaism that a person is used to encountering in Israel.
So what happened on September 5 and 12 in Kyiv
If you only look at the photos — a good open Jewish festival. And that’s not untrue.
There were Yiddish, music, children, workshops, cinema, dances. People came. Despite the war, the event took place, the organizers themselves later described the second weekend as a space where one could breathe a little and be together.
But if you dig one layer deeper, the Kyiv Jewish Messianic Community with a thirty-year history appears. Even deeper — its own mission, Yeshua, work with Jews, and the international KJMC created around the community. Then you go back outside — and there is charitable dentistry, help for the military, children, festivals already in Germany and Finland.
All this is Jewish Open Space. Not one part instead of the others.
And maybe that’s why the project has survived several very different eras. Mariinsky Park and the multi-thousand pre-war festivals. COVID. The Russian invasion. The emigration of part of the community. The relocation of the format to other countries. Kyiv air raid alerts.
And in September 2026, people gathered again in Kyiv. First in the park, a week later — in ‘Nyvky Hall’. Yiddish was played next to the DJ console, apples with honey made it to the poster, and there was a shelter nearby.
For Jewish Open Space, this mix seems to be normal life already.