Female religious mediation in wartime labour migration: Ukrainian Greek Catholic women in Israel

In wartime, Ukrainian migrant women in Israel sustain religious meaning, community, and national belonging through religious practices enacted outside formal clerical authority. Drawing on an ongoing ethnographic research project that includes in-depth interviews, sustained participant observation in a Ukrainian Greek Catholic parish in Jaffa, and digital ethnography of Facebook, this article develops the concept of female religious mediation to capture the relational, embodied, and affective religious labor through which women bridge home and host society under conditions of double war in both Ukraine and Israel. Three interconnected domains of mediation emerge from the ethnography: religious meaning is mediated across migration through the interweaving of pilgrimage and labor mobility; community is mediated through parish-based social and moral infrastructure; and nation is mediated through prayer, donation, and maternal symbolism that translate devotion into wartime patriotism. The article contributes an ethnographic account of religion as women’s relational labor under conditions of mobility and armed conflict.