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‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war
(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk.
The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal mission: delivering aid to Jews in Sumy.
“There was no time to sleep,” Sherstuk recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently. “All my team members worked the same, 24/7.”
A year later, Sherstuk is still hustling as the Sumy director of Hesed, a network of welfare centers serving needy Jews in the former Soviet bloc. But she has also begun teaching music classes again, too — with performances sometimes held in bomb shelters.
Catch up on all of JTA’s Ukraine war coverage from the last year here.
Sherstuk’s story reflects the ways that Russia’s war on Ukraine has affected Jews in Ukraine and beyond. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands, left even more in peril and fundamentally altered the landscape and population of Ukraine, forcing millions to flee as refugees.
But the war has also mobilized the networks of Jewish aid and welfare groups across Europe, leading to a Jewish organizational response on a massive scale not seen in decades. And Ukrainian Jews who have remained in the country have recalibrated their lives and communities for wartime.
Here are four stories about Jews who stepped in and stepped up to help, and a taste of the on-the-ground situations they found themselves in.
‘I was needed there’
Enrique Ginzburg, second from right, is shown with Ukrainian doctors in Lviv. (Courtesy of Ginzburg)
Since nearly drowning at 23, Dr. Enrique Ginzburg has felt he “had to pay back” for the extra years of life he was granted.
Now 65, the professor of surgery at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine and its trauma division has lent his critical care expertise in Haiti, Argentina, Kurdistan and Iraq, in various emergency situations. But until last year, he had never been to a war zone.
The Cuba native felt drawn to Ukraine because his grandfather is from Kyiv, while his grandmother is from nearby eastern Poland. So early on in the conflict, he called Dr. Aaron Epstein, an old friend and the founder of the nonprofit Global Surgical and Medical Supply Group.
“Get yourself a flak jacket, a helmet, a gas mask and come on over,” Ginzburg said Epstein told him.
He has been to Ukraine twice under the nonprofit’s auspices, last April and July. Ginzburg’s explanation for why he flew across the world to put himself in danger: “I was needed,” he said.
His base was an emergency hospital in Lviv, a city located west enough that it became a major refugee hub. He consulted with front-line Ukrainian physicians, many of them young and inexperienced, and hospital administrators, watching the doctors in action. He also visited patients in hospital wards and helped to treat gunshot wounds and assorted combat injuries.
Ginzburg’s bags were packed with meaningful supplies. Some had been requested by his Ukrainian colleagues for medical use, mostly specialized catheters. But he also brought tefillin, the phylacteries used by Jews in their morning prayers. Ginzburg, who studied in a yeshiva while young but no longer considers himself Orthodox, wrapped them every day while in Ukraine.
Even though Lviv was far from the fighting, he could hear air raid sirens and the explosion of the Russian missiles, sometimes feeling the earth shake. When intelligence reports warned Ginzburg’s medical team of impending missile attacks, they sought refuge in safe houses.
“Today,” he told the Miami Herald last June, “I was calling my life insurance [company] because I have young sons and my wife, so I’m trying to make sure I have good coverage.”
By the end of his trips, Ginzburg lost count of the number of doctors he helped train and the number of patients he saw. “I’m sure it’s hundreds.” He plans to make a third trip sometime this year.
‘This is our new reality’
Karina Sokolowska is the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s activities in Poland. (Courtesy of the JDC)
As the director of the JDC, or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in Poland, Karina Sokolowska has heard countless harrowing stories over the past year. But one sticks out in her memory.
It involved an elderly Ukrainian couple she met at the Poland-Ukraine border in late spring. The husband was in a wheelchair, and Sokolowska helped push him — back towards Ukraine. They had spent three months in a shelter in Poland but eventually “realized we cannot go looking for jobs, we cannot restart our lives. We are too old,” the woman said.
“If they are to die, they’d rather die back home,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a story of hopelessness. They are so vulnerable.”
Last year, about 8 million Ukrainian refugees made their way to Poland, the bordering country that accepted the most refugees. Early on in the conflict, Sokolowska contacted and visited Jewish communities throughout Poland, investigating the availability of places where the soon-to-be-homeless refugees could be housed. She also traveled to some of the border crossings where the Ukrainians entered, to arrange transportation to venues in Poland and to oversee the conditions in which the refugees would begin their new lives.
Later she would help with, among other things: arranging legal advice for the people who arrived with few identification documents; lining up medical care and drugs; finding them short- and long-term housing; connecting them to psychological counseling; providing kosher meals; and even caring for the refugees’ pets (“dogs and cats with no documents”).
According to JDC statistics, the organization “provided essential supplies and care” to 43,000 Jews in Ukraine and “aided 22,000+ people” there with “winter survival needs … more than double the amount served in previous years.” The welfare organization also claimed to provide “life-saving services” to more than 40,000 refugees in Poland, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and other European locations. It also helped evacuate about 13,000 Jews from Ukraine. (Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen recently said 15,000 Ukrainian Jews in total have immigrated to Israel since the start of the war.)
Karina Sokolowska, JDC director for Poland and Scandinavia sits in her office down the hall from a hotline room, in early March 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
At the height of the refugee flood, Sokolowska said her monthly JDC budget ballooned to more than what she previously spent in an entire year. Her office went from having a few employees to over 20. The amount of sleep she got decreased in tandem; she started taking sleeping pills to get rest when she could.
“This is our new reality” in Poland, she says of the JDC work with Ukrainian refugees. “This is our life now.”
Sokolowska, the granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors, became active in Jewish life during college, when a classmate heard her pronouncing some German words with a Yiddish accent and persuaded her to lead the Polish Union of Jewish Students. As JDC director for Scandinavian countries in addition to Poland, she typically organizes educational conferences and helps Jewish families learn about traditions they had not learned while growing up in the communist era.
Today, her sense of optimism has been ground down.
“Everything changed when war came to Ukraine — there is less hope,” Sokolowska said. “It’s a totally new everything. Every aspect of our life changed. Our hope for this to be over soon is going down, down, down. Nothing will change.”
‘It could [have been] me’
Tom and Darlynn Fellman volunteered in Krakow in October 2022. (Courtesy of Tom Fellman)
Sometime in the late 1890s, Harry Fellman, about 20 years old, left his home in Ukraine. According to family legend, he was a sharpshooter in the Ukrainian army and was about to be sent into active combat. Instead, he emigrated to the United States and settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a peddler.
His grandson Tom Fellman — whose middle name is Harry — doesn’t know all the 120-year-old details, but he knows that he is grateful that Harry Fellman decided to leave Ukraine when he did.
“It could [have been] me, if my grandparents had not left when they did,” said Fellman, a successful real estate developer and philanthropist in Omaha.
In October, at 78 years old, Fellman made the reverse trip across the Atlantic to pitch in to the relief effort. He also wanted to pay what he sees as a debt to the memory of his late grandfather and to help the current generation of Ukrainian Jews.
He and his wife Darlynn served as volunteers for a week at the Krakow Jewish community center, joining hundreds (possibly thousands) of volunteers from overseas who have gone to Poland and the other nations in the region over the last year to participate in humanitarian programs on behalf of the millions of Ukrainian refugees. Fellman worked nine hours a day with a half-dozen fellow foreign volunteers in the basement of the community center, transferring the contents of “big, big” sacks of items like potatoes and sugar into small containers to be distributed to refugees in the building’s first-floor food pantry. His wife spent her time in an art therapy program that was set up for the refugee mothers and children to raise their spirits.
Fellman is “not particularly religious” but supports “anything Jewish.” In 1986, he accompanied a rescue mission plane of Soviet Jews headed to Israel. “It was the most rewarding experience of my life,” he recalled.
Fellman says he plans to return to Poland, in June, for the JCC’s annual fundraising bike ride from Auschwitz to Krakow.
What did his friends think of his septuagenarian volunteer stint? “They thought it was cool,” he said. “But none of them are going too.”
‘Everything was a risk’
Elizaveta Sherstuk runs a branch of Hesed, a network of welfare centers, in Sumy, Ukraine. (Courtesy of Sherstuk)
Sherstuk’s parents would have sent their daughter to a Jewish school in her early years if they had had the option. But Jewish education was not permitted In Sumy during the final years of communist rule in the Soviet republic. Sherstuk was exposed to Jewish life only at home.
Her parents infused her with a Jewish identity, she said, and her grandparents used to talk and sing songs in Yiddish. That inspired Sherstuk’s first career as a singer and a music teacher, during which she founded Aviv and took it on tour throughout the region singing traditional Jewish songs. Later, she became the director of Sumy’s branch of the JDC-funded Hesed network.
Sumy, an industrial city with a population of 300,000 before the war situated only 30 miles from the Russian border, was one of Russia’s first targets. In the days before the pending invasion, Sherstuk stockpiled food, which was certain to become scarce in case of war, and arranged bus transportation to safer parts of the country for hundreds of vulnerable civilians, mostly the elderly and disabled. The bus plan fell through for safety issues.
As the bombing started, it became dangerous for members of the local 1,000-member Jewish community, many of them elderly, to venture outside of their apartments. Sherstuk, working out of a bomb shelter, assisted by a Hesed network of volunteers, coordinated food and medicine deliveries.
The situation grew more dire, and she coordinated the Jewish community’s participation in a brief humanitarian corridor evacuation of vulnerable civilians that the Russians permitted. She communicated with Sumy residents mostly by smartphones provided by the JDC — the Russian attacks had cut the landlines — and accompanied the busloads of Sumy Jews to western Ukraine. Some of them eventually moved on to Israel, Germany, or other nearby countries, she said.
Sherstuk stayed in western Ukraine for a while (“The humanitarian corridors are only for one-way trips,” she noted), moving from place to place, keeping in touch with the Jews of Sumy and waiting for Ukraine’s army to make the trip back safe. But Sumy, like many Ukrainian cities, has come under frequent Russian rocket attack.
“Everything was a risk,” she said. “We were following whatever our hearts told us to do. We had to save people. I was the one who had to do it.”
Last May, Sherstuk was among 12 men and women (and the sole one from the Diaspora) who lit a torch at the start of Israel’s Independence Day in a government ceremony on Mount Herzl. During two weeks in Israel, she spent some time with members of her family, and held a series of meetings with JDC officials, government ministers and donors. “It was not a vacation,” she said.
After going back to Sumy, at the suggestions of her choral group members and fellow Sumy residents, she organized concerts in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian — some in person, some in a bomb shelter in the city’s central square, some online. She has now resumed her music classes, too, and it has all boosted morale. “I [teach] all the time,” she said.
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The post ‘There was no time to sleep’: 4 Jews reflect on a year of helping Ukrainians at war appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Italy is having a Yiddish moment. An unprecedented I.J. Singer translation is part of the boom.
(JTA) — In September 1932, Israel Joshua Singer boarded a ship bound for New York, where he had been invited to report on the United States for Yiddish-speaking Jews like himself.
“Americans are a difficult people to understand,” the famed novelist wrote in one of his first articles from the U.S. “They have tried at all costs to be, in every aspect, the opposite of Europeans.”
In a series of articles commissioned by Abraham Cahan, the famed editor of the Yiddish Forverts, Singer sought to help his readers understand this mirror world. On the eve of the Nazis’ rise in Europe, he marveled at the landscapes, the Jewish strivers and dreamers and the Christians who lent a sympathetic ear to the challenges facing Jews back home.
Nearly a century later, Singer’s astonished first encounters with America have appeared together in translation for the first time — not in English, but in Italian. “Viaggi in America” (Travels in America), published by the historic Italian Jewish publishing house Giuntina and translated from Yiddish by Enrico Benella, brings together I.J. Singer’s witty American dispatches for the Forverts.
The articles follow Singer from New York’s Jewish heart on the Lower East Side to Coney Island, the Catskill Mountains, the Warner Bros. studios in Hollywood and a General Motors factory in Michigan, among many other stops. Singer returned to Poland after his visit and moved permanently to the United States with his family in 1934, but he continued to observe the country with the distance of a European Jewish outsider. Most of the pieces in the new volume have never been translated, including into English.
The collection arrives amid an Italian revival of Singer and Yiddish literature in general, enabled by newly accessible digital archives, a new generation of translators and readers increasingly interested in Yiddish culture.
“Yiddish is alive and well — even in Italy,” said Shulim Vogelmann, the book’s publisher.
“I think the reason books like ‘The Family Carnovsky’ succeed [in Italy] is that they are books written in blood,” said Anna Linda Callow, who translated that Singer novel into Italian. Yiddish literature, she explained, emerged from a society being “violently confronted with modernity, the collapse of empires, and profound historical questions.”
Born in Poland in 1893, I.J. Singer was the elder brother of the future Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Their sister Ester Kreytman also became a novelist and short story writer.) Within the Yiddish-speaking literary world, I.J. was once the better-known of the Singer brothers, but his work has long been eclipsed by Isaac Bashevis’.
When the Italian publisher Adelphi published the first Italian edition of his masterpiece “The Family Carnovsky” in 2013, the book became a major success, selling more than 120,000 copies. That was a watershed moment for Yiddish literature — and for I.J. Singer’s popularity — in Italy.
Before “Carnovsky,” Italian publishers had brought out a handful of Yiddish literary works, many of which were translated through English rather than directly from Yiddish (a practice that continues today). Since the success of “Carnovsky,” over 50 new editions of Yiddish books have appeared in Italy, from authors including Kreytman, Sholem Aleichem and Chaim Grade.
Interest in Yiddish culture has not been limited to books — and it does not appear to be closely entwined with surging anti-Israel sentiment in Italy, even as some Yiddishists report renewed interest from those who are embracing diasporic Jewish traditions.
Yiddish began reaching Italian audiences in the late 1980s, when director Mara Cantoni and performer Moni Ovadia staged a Yiddish-themed production at one of Milan’s most established theaters. Their work helped popularize Yiddish culture in the years that followed. (Ovadia later became one of Italy’s most prominent Jewish anti-Zionist public figures.)
But Miriam Camerini, an Italian artist and theater director who specializes in Yiddish culture, said presenting Yiddish material live has become more difficult during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Speaking to JTA from Yiddish Summer Weimar, a festival in Germany that draws Yiddishists from around the world, she said theaters and cultural institutions increasingly told her it was “not the right time” for Jewish programming — even though her work focuses on diasporic and non-Zionist traditions.
“The fact that my work dealt with the history of the Bund,” Camerini said, referring to the Jewish socialist movement founded in the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century, “did not lead people to say, ‘How interesting — let’s listen to Jews with different, non-Zionist ideas.’ No: anything Jewish was to be excluded.”
Instead, the Yiddish publishing boom can trace its roots in part to a practical matter: The copyrights for Singer’s work expired in Europe in 2015. While Elisabetta Zevi, an executive and Jewish literature editor at Adelphi, insisted on publishing “Carnovsky” just a couple of years before the copyrights expired, the financial barrier has been lifted for new titles.
Adelphi’s status as one of Italy’s most prestigious publishers also gave Singer a visibility in the country that earlier editions lacked and primed the pump for further interest.
“It was a masterful publishing coup,” Callow said, who recently began teaching a Yiddish course at the National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah in Ferrara.
Another factor in the Yiddish boomlet was the emergence of new translators able to work directly from the language, a tiny but significant trend helped along by technology and the commitment of a passionate few.
“There are no university-level Yiddish courses in Italy, so you either have to go abroad to study or learn on your own,” said Enrico Benella, the translator of the new collection, in an interview. “It is therefore hardly surprising that so many major authors have been left behind.”
Within the remarkably narrow circle of Yiddish translators in Italy, Benella is an outlier — first and foremost, because he is not Jewish and did not start his career as a translator or a scholar of Jewish literature. Born near Padua in 1979, he only began learning Yiddish a few years ago, driven by a desire to read I.J. Singer’s work in the original.
Benella began studying through the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, which offers free online courses on 18 Jewish vernacular languages, including various Judeo-Arabic dialects, Ladino and Judeo-Italian. Almost immediately, he began reading and practicing translating Singer’s work.
Digital access, also made possible by U.S. donors and research institutions, created another opening. Large collections of Yiddish books, magazines, and daily newspapers are now available online, including almost a century of the Forverts. The Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library at the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts includes more than 11,000 Yiddish titles. YIVO, the Yiddish research center in New York, is digitizing its prewar library and archival collections.
“Yiddish literature will soon become the first modern literature to be completely digitalized,” Benella said.
Benella was inspired to pursue the translation of Singer’s American dispatches while reading “The Homeless Imagination in the Fiction of Israel Joshua Singer” by Anita Norich, one of the most prominent living scholars of I.J. Singer’s work. Benella worked through her bibliography of Singer’s Forverts journalism, much of it published under the pseudonym of G. Kuper. That’s where he first encountered the titles that “sounded American.”
He then approached Vogelmann, Giuntina’s publisher, and pitched the idea for the collection. Benella had already translated two other books from Yiddish for Giuntina. (Giuntina has also published a book by the author of this article.)
Anita Norich still remembers the painstaking work behind that bibliography, which she compiled in the 1980s while working on her first book on I.J. Singer.
“There was no index of the Forverts, and there was no search engine you could use,” she recalled. “I went to the YIVO library in New York, and turned the Forverts microfilm page by page, looking for his name.”
The desire to explain America to Yiddish-speaking American readers reflected a central part of the Forverts’ mission, Norich said.
Singer, who arrived speaking very little English, often looked beyond the stories and places familiar to Yiddish readers, and instead reported from Harlem and Chinatown, compared poverty in New York with poverty in Warsaw, and explored American commerce, culture, and religion.
“There is America to be described, there are American Jews, and then there is Singer, who is neither an American Jew nor an American,” Benella said. “Precisely for that reason, he has an additional point of view. His distance gives him a different perspective on an America that American Jews may be seeing from too close up.”
“You could define ‘Travels in America’ as the encounter between the Jews of Eastern Europe and true modernity in the United States.”
Singer encountered that modernity on his initial voyage. He marveled when the ship’s Christian passengers packed into a talk by a rabbi on the just-completed First Preparatory World Jewish Conference in Switzerland, Hitlerism and antisemitism.
“The large hall immediately filled with crowds of Christians,” Singer wrote. “They sat there listening … and applauded the speaker enthusiastically. It came as a surprise to me. Such a thing is completely incomprehensible to a Jew … and with what interest those genuine Americans listened to a Jewish man speak about Jewish problems!”
The dispatches also move from travelogue to comedy to political witness. One of the collection’s most notable pieces recounts a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden — an article that Italian reviewers have highlighted in a country with its own Fascist past and wartime alliance with Nazi Germany.
“Whenever Jews were mentioned, the crowd roared like bloodthirsty beasts,” Singer wrote. “That hall reeked of a medieval hatred and bloodlust directed against everything honorable, just and humane.”
Norich said Singer’s journalism and fiction cannot be neatly separated. He reported what he saw, but he also turned the people he met into characters.
Benella described Singer’s humor as understated. “It never makes you burst out laughing; it’s closer to a form of analysis, a kind of sly teasing that shows you reality and laughs at it — but not in order to diminish it or belittle it.”
Norich, who has studied and translated Singer for decades, edited a recent three-volume English-language collection of his work for the Israeli publisher Koren. (The collection does not include the American dispatches.)
“I think readers are responding to something that’s going on now in our own world,” Norich said. “Antisemitism and the condition of Jews in Europe are an ongoing theme of his.”
Readers are responding to Singer’s “honest sense of uncertainty,” she said, about “all of these panaceas, all of these cures, all of these convictions that don’t listen to one another.” His work repeatedly returns to “Jewish arguments, political and religious messianism, and the fractiousness of communal life. As Singer put it, ‘I have the diagnosis, but not the cure.’”
Nearly a century after Singer used his European perspective to interpret America for Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the Italian translation adds another layer of distance: American Jewish life returns to contemporary readers through Yiddish and Italian.
“The sign of a great writer is that he’s steeped in his own world but speaks to other worlds and other times,” Norich said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Italy is having a Yiddish moment. An unprecedented I.J. Singer translation is part of the boom. appeared first on The Forward.
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In praise of difficult languages
די גאַנצע וועלט מיינט, אַז לערנען זיך ענגליש איז גרינג ווײַל ענגליש האָט אַזוי ווינציק סופֿיקסן: כּמעט אַלע סובסטאַנטיוון פֿורעמען דעם פּלוראַל אויף -s; ווערבאַלע קאָניוגאַציעס זענען זייער פּשוט; נישטאָ קיין גראַמאַטישער מין, בשעת פֿראַנצייזיש און שפּאַניש האָבן צו צוויי גראַמאַטישע מינים און רײַכע ווערבאַלע קאָניוגאַציעס.
וואָס שייך דײַטשיש און ייִדיש האָבן זיי אַלץ וואָס פֿראַנצייזיש און שפּאַניש, ווי אויך דרײַ גראַמאַטישע מינים, דרײַ אָדער פֿיר בייגפֿאַלן און כּלערליי פֿלעקסיעס (סופֿיקסן וואָס בײַטן דעם גראַמאַטישן טײַטש פֿון אַ זאַץ; grammatical inflections בלע״ז). וועגן לאַטײַן און די סלאַווישע לשונות שמועסט מען נישט: אַלץ וואָס אין דײַטשיש און ייִדיש, אָבער אויך פֿינעף, זעקס אָדער גאָר זיבן בייגפֿאַלן.
איז דאָך קלאָר ווי דער טאָג, אַז ענגליש איז דאָס גרינגסטע. וואָס דאַרפֿט איר מער? בער באָראָכאָוו, דער ייִדישער פֿילאָלאָג און טעאָרעטיקער פֿון דער ציוניסטישער אֵרבעטער־באַוועגונג (1881־1917), האָט נאָך געשריבן אין שמואל ניגערס „פּנקס“ (1913), אַז צוליב דעם וואָס די ענגלישע גראַמאַטיק איז אַזוי פּשוט איז ענגליש איינע פֿון די פּראָגרעסיווסטע שפּראַכן, און אַז הלוואַי וואָלט מאַמע־לשון געגאַנגען מיטן זעלביקן וועג און פֿאַרלוירן זײַנע איבעריקע סופֿיקסן: „דער געזעץ פֿון אַנאַליטישער שפּראַך־פֿאַראיינפֿאַכונג דריקט זיך בולט אויס סײַ אין די סעמיטישע, סײַ אין די [אינדאָ-אייראָפּעיִשע] פּראָגרעסיווסטע, די פֿאָלקסטימלעכסטע און צום מייסטן אַנאַליטישע שפּראַכן פֿון אונדזער צײַט: נײַ־פּערסיש, ענגליש, פֿראַנצייזיש און — ייִדיש“.
נו, מי לנו גדול כּבאָראָכאָוו, אָבער דאָ בין איך מיט אים מחולק: דאָס האָבן אַ שפּאָרע צאָל פֿלעקסיעס איז דווקא נישט קיין חסרון, נאָר גאָר אַ מעלה. פֿאַר וואָס?
לאָמיר אָנכאַפּן פּויליש. אמת, דער אָנהייבער מוז פֿאַרגעדענקען אָן אַ שיעור פֿאָרמעס: פֿלעקסיע פֿון סובסטאַנטיוון, ווערבן, אַדיעקטיוון, פּראָנאָמען און נאָך און נאָך, ווי אויך די דרײַ גראַמאַטישע מינים. אויף ענגליש, ווידער, דאַרף מען כּמעט גאָרנישט פֿאַרגעדענקען — עטלעכע אומרעגולערע סובסטאַנטיוון און אַ צאָל אומרעגולערע ווערבן. אָבער פֿאַר דער טירחה בײַם לערנען זיך פּויליש קריגט מען אַ „פֿעטן ביסן“; מע קען דאָס פֿאַרגלײַכן מיטן טעאַטער און מיטן קינאָ.
איז אַזוי: אַז איר זעט אַ פּיעסע אָדער קוקט אַ פֿילם דאַרפֿט איר דרינגען פֿון די טווּנגען ווער ס׳איז ווער: ווי די פּאַרשוינען הייסן, ווער ס׳האָט די הויפּטראָלע און ווער די קלענערע ראָלעס. טייל מאָל ווילט זיך זען די פֿאָרשטעלונג אַ צווייט מאָל כּדי בעסער צו פֿאַרשטיין דעם אָנהייב פֿונעם סיפּור־המעשׂה. אַזוי איז אויף ענגליש. כ׳ווייס נישט ווי איר, אָבער נישט איין מאָל מוז איך איבערלייענען אַ קעפּל אין אַ צײַטונג צוויי צי אַפֿילו דרײַ מאָל איידער איך פֿאַרשטיי עס, וואָרן מע דאַרף ערשט דערקענען וואָסער וואָרט ס׳איז אַ סובסטאַנטיוו, וואָסער אַן אַדיעקטיוו, וואָסער אַ ווערב. אויף ענגליש קען דאָך איין וואָרט זײַן אַלע דרײַ געווענדט אינעם קאָנטעקסט, און די מאָרפֿאָלאָגיע, ד״ה די פֿאָרעם פֿונעם וואָרט, העלפֿט גאָר נישט.
אויף פּויליש, ווידער, דאַרפֿט איר גאָרנישט דרינגען. מע דערקענט גלײַך וואָס ס׳איז דער סובסטאַנטיוו, וואָס ס׳איז דער ווערב און וואָס ס׳איז דער אַדיעקטיוו. ס׳איז אַזוי ווי אין טעאַטער אָדער אין קינאָ וואָלטן די אַקטיאָרן געטראָגן אויף זיך שילדן מיט אַלע פּרטים: „איך בין משה גאָלדבערג, דער הויפּטהעלד פֿון דער מעשׂה“, „איך בין דער צווייט וויכטיקסטער“ אד״גל. מע דאַרף אַפֿילו נישט קענען אַלע פֿלעסקיעס — אויב מע קען האַלב איז גענוג צו פֿאַרשטיין אַ זאַץ אָדער אַ צײַטונגקעפּל. מע דאַרף גאָר נישט דרינגען; די גאַנצע אינפֿאָרמאַציע האָט מען אונטער דער האַנט און פֿאַר די אויגן.
ייִדיש האָט, פֿאַרשטייט זיך, נישט אַזוי פֿיל זיך אויסצולערנען ווי פּויליש, אָבער גענוג, אַז דאָס קענען זיי אויסנווייניק איז שווערלעך; אָבער פֿאַרשטיין אַ זאַץ איז ווײַטער גרינגער ווי אויף ענגליש. חוץ דעם איז די בייגעוודיקייט פֿון מאַמע־לשון אַ מעלה. אַ שטייגער: אויף ייִדיש איז דער ווערטער־סדר אַ סך פֿרײַער; ענגליש איז געפּענטעט דערמיט וואָס דער ווערטער־סדר שפּילט אַזאַ גרויסע ראָלע בײַם פֿאַרשטיין אַ זאַץ. דהײַנו, אויף ענגליש מוז דער סוביעקט בדרך־כּלל קומען פֿאַרן ווערב, מע זאָל אים דערקענען, בשעת אויף ייִדיש, וואָס האָט די בייגפֿאַלן נאָמינאַטיוו, דאַטיוו און אַקוזאַטיוו, קען דער סוביעקט קומען אויף פֿאַרשיידענע ערטער, וואָס דאָס קען מען אויסניצן כּדי אונטערצושטרײַכן דאָס חשיבֿות פֿון אַ סובסטאַנטיוו וואָסער ראָלע ער זאָל אינעם קאָנטעקסט נישט שפּילן.
למשל: אויף ענגליש קען מען בלויז זאָגן Everyone knows David, בשעת אויף ייִדיש קען מען זאָגן „אַלע קענען דודן“ אָדער „דודן קענען אַלע,“ וואָס גיט דעם זאַץ אַ ביסל אַן אַנדער קנייטש.
מאַמע־לשון האָט אויך, פּונקט ווי דײַטשיש, די סלאַווישע און צום טייל אויך די ראָמאַנישע לשונות, אַ ברייטן באַניץ פֿונעם דאַטיוו, וווּ אויף ענגליש מוז מען אָנקומען צום נאָמינאַטיוו אָדער אין גאַנצן פּאַראַפֿראַזירן. למשל, דאָרטן וווּ ענגליש האָט אין תּוך אַרײַן בלויז איין מעגלעכן אופֿן דאָס אַרויסברענגען: he is cold, אַקעגן דרײַ מעגלעכקייטן אויף ייִדיש: „אים איז קאַלט“ (ער פֿילט זיך קאַלט), „ער איז קאַלט“ (ער איז טויט), „ער איז אַ קאַלטער“ (ער איז אַ מענטש וואָס ווײַזט נישט אַרויס קיין געפֿילן).
נאָך אַ משל: מאָטל פּייסיעס „מיר איז גוט, איך בין אַ יתום“ — ווי זשע גיט מען דאָס איבער אויף ענגליש אַז מע האָט נישט קיין דאַטיוו? איך האָב געפֿונען I’m lucky to be an orphan — טאַקע נישט קיין שלעכטער עקוויוואַלענט, אָבער ס׳האָט נישט קיין ייִדישן טעם. אַגבֿ, ווען מע באַקלאָגט זיך, אַז ס׳איז אוממעגלעך איבערצוזעצן ייִדיש, גילט דאָס מער פֿאַר ענגליש ווי פֿאַר אַנדערע אייראָפּעיִשע לשונות. אין דעם באַנד „מאַקס ווײַנרײַכן צו זײַן זיבעציקסטן געבוירן־טאָג“ (1964) האָט דער פֿילאָלאָג טעאָדאָר גוטמאַן געדרוקט אַן אַרבעט „שלום־עליכם אין די רויוואַרגשפּראַכן“, וווּ ער פֿאַרגלײכט איבערזעצונגען אויף דײַטש, העברעיִש, אוקראַיִניש, רוסיש און ענגליש פֿון שלום־עליכמס „דאָס טעפּל“. דאָרטן קומט ער צום אויספֿיר, אַז דער איבערזעץ וואָס שפּיגלט צום בעסטן אָפּ דער אָריגינאַל איז דער אוקראַיִנישער. דאָס איז צום טייל ווײַל שלום־עליכם האָט געלעבט און געשאַפֿן אין אוקראַיִנע, אָבער אויך דערפֿאַר וואָס די ענגלישע גראַמאַטיק איז אַזוי אומבייגעוודיק אַקעגן דער ייִדישער, וואָס דאָס שפּיגלט זיך אָפּ צווישן אַנדערן אין דעם, וואָס ענגליש האָט נישט קיין דאַטיוו!
דאָ קען מען אויך צוגעבן אַ משל פֿון פֿראַנצייזיש. דער אויסדריק s’il vous plaît פֿאַרטײַטשט מען אויף ענגליש if you please. נישטאָ קיין ספֿק, אַז 99% ענגליש־רעדערס מיינען, אַז דאָ איז you נאָמינאַטיוו, דער סוביעקט פֿונעם ווערב. דאָס פֿראַנצייזישע, אָבער, איז טײַטש if it pleases you, וווּ you איז דאַטיוו, דער אָביעקט פֿונעם ווערב. אויף ענגליש ווערט עס האַמעטנע; אויף ייִדיש, ווידער גיט מען עס גרינג איבער: אויב ס׳געפֿעלט אײַך.
אַ כּלל, באָראָכאָוו איז גערעכט, אַז די טענדענץ בײַ אַ סך לשונות איז צו פֿאַרלירן סופֿיקסן, אָבער דערפֿון קען מען נישט אויספֿירן, אַז אַזאַ פּראָצעס איז אַלע מאָל אַ ניצלעכער. ווען אים וואָלט געווען באַשערט לענגערע יאָרן וואָלט ער אפֿשר אײַנגעזען, אַז אין לשון קען פּראָגרעסיווקייט אויך זײַן אַ חסרון.
The post In praise of difficult languages appeared first on The Forward.
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NYPD chief pledges to protect Jews at Central Synagogue one week after Shabbat attack
(JTA) — New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said she felt a “deeply personal” commitment to protect Jews in a speech at Central Synagogue, where she is a member, in the aftermath of an attack during Shabbat services there.
Tisch addressed the Reform synagogue in Midtown Manhattan during its Friday evening prayers a week after a man disrupted the service by shouting obscenities, punched a congregant in the face and spat on and headbutted a Black security guard while calling him a racial slur. Suspect Larry Montes, who was arrested at the scene, has been charged with hate crimes in federal and state court.
Tisch said there were no serious injuries. She called the attack “a message written in violence,” intended to tell “everyone who shares the victim’s identity that they do not belong, that they are vulnerable, and that they should be afraid.”
She also noted that roughly half of confirmed hate crimes in New York City have for years targeted Jews, who make up about 10% of the population.
“As a proud Jew and a lifelong member of this congregation, you have my word that I stand with you in these uncertain and precarious times,” said Tisch, adding that her commitment at Central Synagogue was “deeply personal.”
Tisch spoke after an interfaith group of seven Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders gave remarks about solidarity between their communities.
“Might our presence here be a testament to the ties, the durable ties that bind each of us together,” said Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
“We are here tonight to affirm that you do not walk through this city alone, but you are held in a covenant between our communities,” added Rev. Adriene Thorne of The Riverside Church. “What affects one of us touches all of us.”
Montes told NYPD officers after his arrest that he felt disrespected at the Central Synagogue service and described the incident as “a racial thing” and “all religious motivated,” according to a federal criminal complaint. He also said that he identified as Jewish.
His aunt, Myriam Montes, told The New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].” The New York Times reported that Montes had a history of mental health issues documented by the NYPD.
A Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes is littered with posts about Israel and Judaism. They include an image of a map of Israel with the text, “Keep Israel in your heart,” a video of Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi discussing why evangelical Christians support Israel and a video comparing Mayor Zohran Mamdani with Iran’s former supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post NYPD chief pledges to protect Jews at Central Synagogue one week after Shabbat attack appeared first on The Forward.
