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The US wants citizens to help Ukrainian refugees settle here. Jewish New Yorkers are stepping up.
(New York Jewish Week) — A year ago, Diana and Vitalii Nakonechnyi never expected that they and their two young kids would be living in Riverdale, a leafy neighborhood in the Bronx. Then again, they also never expected a war would force them to evacuate their hometown of Kharkiv, Ukraine.
“We heard it was a possibility, but we never would have expected this to happen in our lives,” Diana told the New York Jewish Week via a translator. “And we never thought we’d ever live in as big of a city as New York.”
The Nakonechnyis, a family unit of five — including Vitalii’s mother — are among the nearly 100,000 refugees who have fled Ukraine for the United States since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
They first went to Poland, then stayed in Germany through the summer. There, they heard via Telegram, a global messaging service, that HIAS and other refugee resettlement agencies like it were helping bring people to the United States. HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, was created in 1881 to aid Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe. In recent years, however, HIAS has pivoted to resettling non-Jewish refugees, as well as mobilizing the American Jewish community around advocating for immigrants and asylum-seekers.
As it turns out, the Nakonechnyi family were not resettled directly by HIAS or another refugee resettlement organization — a process that can often take years due to bureaucratic red tape. Instead, they were among a growing cohort of arrivals who were greeted at the airport, set up in new homes and introduced to life in the United States by trained “Welcome Circles,” a private sponsorship group, enlisted by HIAS, that consists of everyday Americans who volunteer to help resettle a refugee family. Within the span of just a few weeks, with the assistance of local community members, the Nakonechnyi family settled in the Bronx at the end of September 2022.
“Nobody really believed that there would be some help on the other side, that everything would be taken care of with housing and airline tickets,” Diana said. “Little by little, we are adjusting.”
The Northwest Bronx Coalition — the Welcome Circle of around 10 individuals that has helped welcome the Nakonechnyis in Riverdale — is largely made up of members from local congregations: Riverdale Temple, Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale, Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and Congregation Tehillah. It’s the latest iteration of how Jews, once refugees themselves, are now using their expertise and experience to resettle others.
“Ukraine is so pivotal in so many of our own histories and our own refugee stories, said Holly Rosen Fink, the president of the Westchester Jewish Coalition for Immigration who, working with HIAS, helps organize and mobilize Welcome Circles. “Nine times out of 10, when you ask [Jewish] people in Westchester where their families are from, it’s usually that part of the world. So it stirred a lot of people’s hearts.”
Welcome Circles like the Northwest Bronx Coalition are made up of five to eight community members who have committed themselves to accommodating and resettling a refugee family for the first six months of their time in the United States. These volunteers handle everything a resettlement agency would: helping secure housing and employment, organizing medical appointments and bills, and smoothing over any other logistics required in the transition to a new country. The groups commit to raising $2,275 for each person they are going to help resettle.
Leading the Northwest Bronx group is Irina Kimmelfeld, who came to the United States when she was 13 as an emigre from the Soviet Union in 1988. “I did feel that I was in more of a unique situation to help because I have the language and some degree of commonality of experience right from that same region,” Kimmelfeld told the New York Jewish Week. “But it really came from feeling so helpless about the war and needing to be able to do something.”
Kimmelfeld, an accountant, has been translating for the Nakonechnyis, helping them find and furnish an apartment, guiding them through public transportation, finding a house of worship (the family is Ukrainian Baptist) and showing them around the city. She’s also helped with social and medical services for Diana, who is eight months pregnant, and her son Filipp, who has special needs.
For Rosen Fink, resettling non-Jewish refugees is undoubtedly a Jewish issue. “After visiting a [refugee] camp during the Syrian refugee crisis, I just became determined to not let that happen again to anybody, not just Jewish people,” she said. “So, for me, it’s a very ingrained issue.”
Rosen Fink operates as a liaison between HIAS and New York Jewish communities, encouraging members to join these Welcome Circles in honor of their Jewish values. “We’ve been going into the community, finding the people that want to step up and giving them the tools and the resources and funding to connect with HIAS and start hosting a family,” Rosen Fink said. “We inspire people to do this work because we see this through a Jewish lens because of our history and values.”
Until recently, Welcome Circles such as the Northwest Bronx Coalition were considered part of an emergency government response towards the Afghan and Ukrainian refugee crises, and not an official resettlement policy in the United States. But as of Jan. 19, the Biden Administration announced the implementation of the “Welcome Corps,” a federally backed private sponsorship program in which refugee resettlement agencies will be able to train American citizens to help resettle refugees on a long-term basis with route to citizenship — a departure from the emergency response programs which only offered short-term, humanitarian parole.
The Welcome Corps, which the New York Times called “most significant reorientation of the U.S. refugee program since its inception more than four decades ago,” will allow an increased number of refugees to resettle in the United States for less of a cost to the government.
As such, programs like HIAS’s Welcome Circles will become an even more common way to resettle more refugees more quickly. In the last 18 months, HIAS has helped establish 80 Welcome Circles in 17 states. In New York City and Westchester, 15 of HIAS’s Welcome Circles have assisted in the resettlement of more than 50 refugees.
“It’s an exciting program that’s is opening up the opportunity for many more volunteers on the ground to get involved with supporting refugee resettlement in areas where they might not have resettlement agencies, or where resettlement agencies do not have the capacity to bring in the people themselves,” said Isabel Burton, the senior director of community engagement initiatives at HIAS.
For now, the Nakonechnyis are still getting used to the city, which is a lot bigger than their hometown (Kharkiv’s population is approximately 1.4 million). They’re not sure yet if New York will be their permanent home — the idea of planning for the future, Diana said, feels like it has been taken away from them.
“You do feel helpless — and this is something you can do,” Kimmelfeld said. “You can’t help everybody but you can make a difference for one family.”
—
The post The US wants citizens to help Ukrainian refugees settle here. Jewish New Yorkers are stepping up. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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For fleeing Jews, Venezuela was a golden land — now in exile, they watch their homeland’s unrest with trepidation
After their overcrowded motorboat ran aground and took on water, the 15 migrants swam up to a Tampa beach. The men they paid back in Havana had promised they’d be in Miami within five hours; instead they were at sea for five days, running out of food and water.
Two of the migrants had to be carried ashore, where they were swiftly detained by the police. Years prior, their entry would have been easy with a pathway to citizenship, but now with an anti-immigrant backlash they were sentenced to a year in jail.
After a week, a sympathetic Cuban-born prison guard smuggled out a letter asking for help. “They hold us,” it read, “as if we were criminals, murderers, in stifling dark rooms. We are given only black coffee in the morning and fed once a day, and very limited at that.”
The letter writer worried that he and his fellow refugees might spend months in the dark cell without air or light. But what he feared most was being deported.
Amazingly, the letter got them out.
The letter’s author was Mordechai Freilich, a 26-year-old Polish Jew who had run into trouble as a socialist organizer in a shoe factory in Cuba then ruled by General Gerardo Machado. Written in Yiddish, the letter was mailed to Freilich’s uncle in New York who was instructed to share it with this newspaper, the Forward, which published it on May 14, 1931 under the headline: “Jewish immigrants rescued from sinking boat and arrested when they try to smuggle themselves into America.”
Mordechai, known as Máximo, had written articles for the Forward before he’d left Poland two years earlier. At the time, it was the most widely read ethnic publication in the United States. The newspaper’s general manager, the influential New York politician Baruch Charney Vladeck, persuaded the future governor of New York Herbert H. Lehman to intervene. Freilich and the others were released on condition they find a country to accept them within two weeks.
“The United States was the goldene medine; it was the salvation, but it was closed,” Máximo’s daughter Alicia Freilich told me by phone from her home in Delray Beach, Florida, “Venezuela became our goldene medine.”
Alicia was born in Caracas in 1939, and for the past 57 years, she has been a columnist for El Nacional, the leading Venezuelan newspaper, which itself has become an exile. In 2018, the government seized its headquarters. Today, the web-only publication is blocked by the nation’s internet providers, limiting its readership to the Venezuelan diaspora and those within the country determined enough to digitally bypass the censorship.
In 2012, Freilich suspected her phone was tapped by the government and fled to Florida. If it wasn’t for her advanced age, she’s sure she would have been jailed for her criticism of then-President Hugo Chavez.
“I became an immigrant at the age of 73,” Alicia told me in Spanish the week after President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were arrested by American forces. “I never thought I’d leave.”
Since 2012, a quarter of Venezuela’s population, nearly 8 million people, have left, fleeing food insecurity, political oppression and spiraling gang violence. Though Venezuela was once home to a community of 25,000 Jews, its Jewish population has fallen to 5,000. Alicia Freilich remembers full synagogues, and generous charities that allowed for even the poor to attend Jewish day schools and take advantage of the busy community center, and Jewish retirement home. Now the first thing visitors to the website of the nation’s leading Sephardic organization see is detailed information on how to apply for Spanish citizenship,
While there was a small Sephardic Jewish community in Venezuela in the 19th century, the country’s Sephardic families came mainly from Morocco during the country’s post-war oil boom. Most Venezuelan Jews, however, are Ashkenazi, the children or grandchildren of Eastern European Jews who left Europe before the Holocaust, like Alicia’s parents Máximo and Rifka, or survivors who came after the war, like Alicia’s ex-husband Jaime Segal.
In 1938, Máximo made a return trip back to Poland. “I begged them [my extended family] to leave, that there was going to be a war,” Máximo told Alicia in an interview published in her 1976 book Interviewees in the Flesh, “but they laughed at me.” After the war, his in-laws, Alicia’s aunt and uncle Gutka and Abraham, who survived Auschwitz, joined the family in Caracas.
Officially, Venezuela had restrictive immigrant policies, but made exceptions. In 1939, the government of Eleazar López Contreras gave refuge to 250 German Jews onboard the Caribia and Köningstein ships which had been denied entry at all other ports. Máximo Freilich was one of the representatives of the Jewish community who welcomed the new arrivals at the port in La Guaira.
“Venezuelans are magnificent, generous,” Alicia told me, “like my father used to say, ‘the people are so generous that even a beggar would offer some of his coffee.’”
Máximo, like most Jewish immigrants at the time, was a “claper,” the Yiddish term for an itinerant salesmen. After years of “claping” on doors, peddling rags, he graduated to a Caracas storefront. Among Jews, the self-educated Máximo was a respected figure, a contributor to Yiddish newspapers like the Forward, a settler of disputes, a man consulted over beet soup and gefilte fish. But he never mastered Spanish, and to Venezuelans he remained a “musiu,” slang for a foreigner.
In 1987, Alicia wrote her first novel, Cláper, adapting Máximo’s Yiddish diary from his early years in America, which she intertwines with her own story. Máximo’s journey is from his shtetl, fictionalized as “Lendov,” Alicia’s is from her sheltered Jewish day school childhood into the wider Venezuelan society, attending college and starting her career. She mixes in literary circles, rubs shoulders with leading intellectuals and leftwing dissidents, yet she’s never fully at ease, discovering she is not so different from the “Polish peasant” parents she wished to escape.
“Half a century ago, a bunch of musiús began arriving. They knocked on doors in order to sell rags. They knocked: clap, clap, clap,” she writes reflecting on her success in journalism. “So daughter of a cláper, I too am a caller. When I knock and knock from the pressroom, what I wish to sell for free is what we might call ethical anxiety.”
Alicia’s part of the narrative comes in the form of a monologue to her psychoanalyst, like in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which she references in her book. But Caracas is not Newark. Beyond the middle class of the cities is vast poverty. Venezuelan Jews helped build the democracy that emerged in 1958 after the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, and for four decades Venezuela was considered one of Latin America’s most stable and affluent countries. But oil wealth bred corruption, inequality fueled unrest and by the 1990s the system was fracturing.
In 1999, the socialist Hugo Chavez, who had led a failed coup attempt seven years earlier, was elected president. Initially popular for promising to redistribute oil wealth to the poor, Chavez chipped away at democratic norms leading many professionals to exit the country in the early 2000s.
“They never directly target the [Jewish] community,” said Alicia, but Chavista anti-Israel rhetoric created a hostile atmosphere. In 2009, armed men overran the nation’s largest synagogue Tiféret Israel in Caracas, desecrated the sanctuary, stole objects and spray painted antisemitic and anti-zionist messages demanding the government expel Jews. That’s when she first thought about leaving.
Soon, she said, her younger sister Miriam Freilich, a culture writer for El Nacional and host of a radio program, decided it was impossible to be an independent female journalist in Caracas. She moved to Colombia before joining her daughter in Israel, and passed away in Spain last year. Alicia’s two sons had left years earlier. They did post-graduate studies abroad in the 1990s and decided not to return.
Ernesto Segal is a physician in Florida and Ariel Segal, who has lived in both the U.S. and Israel, is a communications professor in Lima. “’I prefer Venezuela as a people, as a climate, as the landscape,’ Ariel, 61, told me over Zoom from Lima. “I haven’t returned because of the Chavismo.”
“‘We lived in paradise, but we didn’t realize it,’ Ariel said. He particularly remembers Club Hebraica, the Jewish community center in Caracas, not just a sports center but a hub for youth groups, singles mixers, and holiday celebrations. It’s where he went to school. “After Chavez, we realized, ’wow, that was wonderful. We had freedom. We could change the president every five years. Politicians never threatened each other.’”
For years after he’d left, Ariel returned for weeks at a time each year to lecture at Venezuelan universities on authoritarianism and the Middle East. Then, in 2016, he was accused by name on a government television program of being an agent of the Mossad. He hasn’t been back since.
It was after Chavez’s death in 2013 that most Venezuelans migrants left. With a fall in oil prices and Nicolas Maduro in power came inflation, shortages and increased corruption. Increases in U.S. sanctions further strained the economy making it difficult for the average person to access food and medicine. Early waves of middle-class immigrants left the country on planes with visas. Jewish Venezuelans headed to Florida, Spain, Panama, and Israel.
More recent migrants are poorer without passports or visas. Many fled initially to countries within the region with over 2 million residing in Colombia, but others were forced to head north to the United States. Their treacherous and unauthorized immigration was not so different from Máximo’s journey in 1931.
At the end of his first term, President Trump deferred deportation for Venezuelans. More recently, he has turned hostile claiming “hundreds of thousands” of Venezuelan migrants are members of what he calls “savage” and “bloodthirsty gangs” like the Tren de Aragua, which he says President Maduro sent to “terrorize Americans.” Last year, he stripped the protective immigration status of more than half of the nation’s 1.2 million Venezuelan immigrants, targeting them for deportation. Now, his administration has suggested that with Maduro in prison, Venezuelans can return home.
“They took the clown out of the circus, but they left the rest of the troupe,” Alicia told me. Maduro’s arrest has been celebrated by Venezuelan exiles, but she doesn’t feel it’s enough. The current acting president Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge, the National Assembly president, long allies of Maduro, are extremely dangerous, she says.
She’s hopeful that slowly things will improve, but she says that Trump’s unpredictable personality and disregard for the rule of law worry her, as both a Venezuelan and as a Jew living in the United States. While he has been friendly to Jews, she says she fears he could easily turn on them, and, she added, his focus with Venezuela is oil, not human rights. “They are not acting with solid democratic principles in the country,” she said, “but the United States [democracy] itself is also at risk.”
Even if Venezuela gets on the path to democracy, it will take time. Alicia doesn’t believe exiles will return home anytime soon. She herself doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. At 86, her energy goes into her weekly column for El Nacional. On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she wrote about her survivor aunt and uncle. Mostly, though, she focuses on current Venezuelan politics.
Her father had written from Caracas for Yiddish speakers thousands of miles away. Now, Alicia speaks to a Venezuelan diaspora.
In a recent column, she stressed the only people with the legitimate authority to run Venezuela and restore freedom to the masses are those who were fairly elected in 2024 “There is no other correct way to rescue the imperfect and perfectible democracy,” she concluded.
Florida, Alicia Freilich told me, is not her home; her community, her focus, her heart remain in Caracas. It reminds me of something she quoted her father as saying: “I stayed back in Lendov, just my feet left.”
The post For fleeing Jews, Venezuela was a golden land — now in exile, they watch their homeland’s unrest with trepidation appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu alleges that Israeli soldiers died because Biden-era arms ’embargo’ meant they ‘didn’t have enough ammunition’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleged in comments on Tuesday that Israeli soldiers died during the war in Gaza because of a Biden-era “embargo” on weaponry.
“We paid a very heavy price in the war,” Netanyahu said during an appearance in Jerusalem. “Part of it is that at a certain point, we simply didn’t have enough ammunition, and people fell, heroes fell. Part of the loss of ammunition was also a result of the embargo.”
The Biden administration held back some heavy arms from Israel in mid-2024 in an effort to pressure Netanyahu not to enter the southern Gaza city of Rafah. It pledged to continue supplying other weapons.
Both Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, who resumed sending the heavy weapons in March 2025, have said the Biden-era restrictions amounted to an “embargo” and have charged that the Biden administration held back more arms than it said.
Biden administration officials immediately decried the comments, saying that Netanyahu was lying and emphasizing Biden’s personal and political support for Israel.
“Netanyahu is both not telling the truth and ungrateful to a president that literally saved Israel at its most vulnerable moment,” Amos Hochstein, whom Biden appointed as a Middle East envoy during the Gaza war, told Axios, in one example. He reiterated the point on X, where he noted that the Biden administration sent $20 billion in military aid to Israel and also participated twice in deflecting Iranian missile attacks.
The comments come at a delicate time for Netanyahu. The retrieval earlier this week of Ran Gvili, the last Israeli hostage in Gaza, adds pressure for him to support a new phase in the Gaza ceasefire which has the potential to become a wedge between him and Trump.
At the same time, the prime minister is facing potential political turmoil at home, with elections required before the end of the year and a budget process getting underway Wednesday that could trigger earlier elections if lawmakers cannot reach a deal over haredi Orthodox army enlistment.
The comments also come as Netanyahu has recently said he wants to “taper” U.S. military aid to zero over the next decade and instead position Israel to fund its own defense. A top Republican lawmaker, Sen. Lindsey Graham, said he thought the shift should come sooner.
The post Netanyahu alleges that Israeli soldiers died because Biden-era arms ’embargo’ meant they ‘didn’t have enough ammunition’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Looking back on my 30 years as a Yiddish translator
איך בין געווען אַ מאָדערנער חסיד אַ בעל־תּשובֿה, וועלכער פֿילט זיך היימיש סײַ צווישן די חסידים, סײַ צווישן די וועלטלעכע ייִדישיסטן.
נישט לאַנג צוריק האָב איך געבלעטערט מײַן עלטסטע אָפּגעהיטע העפֿט מיט לידער אויף ייִדיש, אָנגעשריבן אין 1995 – 1996. האָב איך זיך פֿאַרטראַכט, אַז עס באַקומט זיך אַ יוביליי פֿון מײַן ייִדיש־שאַפֿן און אַן אײַנפֿאַל אַ ביסל אָנצושרײַבן וועגן דעם.
עפּעס האָב איך געגראַמט אויף ייִדיש נאָך פֿריִער, אָבער פֿון יענע „אורשאַפֿונגען‟ מײַנע איז נישט געבליבן קיין שפּור. אין יענער אַלטער העפֿט, וואָס האָט דורכגעמאַכט אַ לאַנגן וועג קיין אַמעריקע און מיט יאָרן שפּעטער צוריק קיין רוסלאַנד, געפֿינען זיך אויך דרײַ מײַנע איבערזעצונגען פֿון מײַן באַליבטן רוסישן דיכטער אָסיפּ מאַנדעלשטאַם.
אין 2002 זענען יענע איבערזעצונגען פּובליקירט געוואָרן אינעם אינטערנעץ־זשורנאַל „דער באַוועבטער ייִד‟, נאָר אין גאָר אַנדערע ווערסיעס. די היסטאָרישע העפֿט איז דעמאָלט געווען אין פּעטערבורג, און איך האָב געוווינט אין קווינס. אויף אויסווייניק האָב איך מײַנע טעקסטן נישט געדענקט און ממילא געמוזט זיי איבערשרײַבן. דער נײַערער נוסח האָט זיך באַקומען לאַוו־דווקא בעסער, פּשוט אַנדערש. פֿאַרגלײַכט:
געהיים איז שאָרכען אינעם וואַלד:
אַ פּרי פֿאַלט אַראָפּ אַנטשוויגן
אין אייביק הילכן פֿונעם ניגון,
וואָס וועלדער־שווײַגעניש אַנטהאַלט.
(1995-1996)
אַ טויבער, אַ געהיטער קלאַנג:
אַ פּרי איז אַראָפּגעפֿאַלן
אינמיטן טיף און אייביק שאַלן
אין שטילקייט פֿונעם וואַלד־געזאַנג.
(2002)
אינעם זעלבן יאָר, ווען אָט די שורות זענען דערשינען אינעם „באַוועבטן ייִד‟, האָב איך אָנגעהויבן אַרבעטן ווי אַ נײַעס־איבערזעצער אינעם פֿאָרווערטס. צוערשט האָב איך געאַרבעט צוויי טעג אַ וואָך; ביסלעכווײַז, מיט עטלעכע יאָר שפּעטער, האָב איך אָנגעהויבן אַרבעטן אין דער רעדאַקציע די גאַנצע וואָך. פֿאַרן באַקומען די שטעלע, זײַענדיק אַ יונגער ענטוזיאַסטישער יאַט, האָב איך געפֿירט ייִדיש־לימודים פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל אויף דער אינטערנעץ און פֿאַרשיידענע דיסקוסיעס אַרום דער ייִדישער שפּראַך. מײַן מיטבאַטייליקטער אין דעם איז געווען אַריה לאָנדאָן ז״ל (1946 – 2017) – דער זשורנאַליסט פֿון די ייִדיש־אוידיציעס אויף דער אינטערנאַציאָנאַלער ישׂראלדיקער ראַדיאָ „קול ישׂראל‟. מיר האָבן אָפֿט אַרומגערעדט מאַנדעלשטאַמס לידער.
ווי אַזוי האָב איך געפֿונען די אַרבעט אינעם פֿאָרווערטס? ערגעץ אין די ייִדישיסטישע אינטערנעץ־פֿאָרומס האָט זיך פֿאַרשפּרייט אַ קלאַנג, אַז דער פֿאָרווערטס זוכט אַ מיטאַרבעטער. האָב איך זיך פֿאַרבונדן מיט דער צײַטונג און זיך געיאַוועט אינעם ביוראָ. באַלד איז צו מיר צוגעקומען אַ סימפּאַטישע רויטהאָטיקע פֿרוי, וועלכע האָט זיך פֿאָרגעשטעלט: „איך בין שׂרה־רחל שעכטער‟. מיט אַזאַ באַשטעטיקנדיקן טאָן האָט זי זיך באַגריסט, אַז איך האָב פֿאַרשטאַנען אַז איך מוז זיך מאַכן, אַז איך ווייס, ווער זי איז!
דעם אמת געזאָגט, האָב איך קיין השׂגה נישט געהאַט. אין יענע יאָרן, צו וועלכע עס געהערט מײַן אַלטע לידער־העפֿט, האָב איך געטראָפֿן אַ קופּע נומערן פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס אין דער פּעטערבורגער שיל, איבערגעלייענט אַ פּאָר צי אפֿשר אַ טוץ צײַטונגען. קיין שׂרה־רחל שעכטער האָב איך דאָרט נישט באַמערקט. פּונקט דעמאָלט, ווען איך האָב זיך געלאָזט קיין אַמעריקע, כּדי זיך אָנצושליסן אין אַ וויליאַמסבורגער ישיבֿה, האָט שׂרה־רחל באַקומען איר שטעלע אין דער צײַטונג.
רעדן האָב איך אין אַמעריקע גערעדט די ערשטע יאָרן רק אויף ייִדיש און כּמעט קיין ענגליש נישט געקענט, נאָר אינעם סאַטמאַרער וויליאַמסבורג האָב איך קיין פֿאָרווערטס אַוודאי בכלל נישט געזען.
אינעם ביוראָ האָט מיר יענע, נאָך אומבאַקאַנטע פֿרוי אײַנגעהענטיקט אַ שטיקל פּאַפּיר און געבעטן איבערצוזעצן אַ נײַעסל פֿון ענגליש אויף ייִדיש. האָב איך עס געטאָן, גלײַך באַקומען די שטעלע און זיך באַלד גוט באַקענט מיט דער רעדאַקציע: באָריס סאַנדלער, איציק גאָטעסמאַן, באָריס בודיאַנסקי און אַנדערע. אין גיכן האָב איך זיך אויך באַקענט מיט כּמעט אַלע באַוווּסטע ניו־יאָרקער ייִדישיסטן, און געוואָרן אַ יוצא־דופֿנדיקער פּאַרשוין: אַ מאָדערנער חסיד אַ בעל־תּשובֿה, וועלכער פֿילט זיך היימיש סײַ צווישן די חסידים, סײַ צווישן די וועלטלעכע ייִדישיסטן.
אַגבֿ, יענע איבערזעצונגען פֿון מאַנדעלשטאַמען האָב איך אַמאָל אויך פֿאָרגעלייענט אויף „קול ישׂראל‟. צו דער דאָזיקער ראַדיאָ־אוידיציע האָט דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט געהאַט אַן אומדיקערט צופֿעליק שײַכות. אַריה לאָנדאָן האָט מיר פּשוט אָנגעקלונגען אין דער רעדאַקציע און רעקאָרדירט דעם שמועס.
אינעם ביוראָ האָב איך נישט זעלטן געשמועסט וועגן מאַנדעלשטאַמען מיטן ייִדישן פּאָעט שלום בערגער וועלכער האָט דעמאָלט געפֿירט די וועבזײַט פֿון דער צײַטונג; שפּעטער האָב איך איבערגענומען אָט די מלאָכה.
אין מײַן היים־ביבליאָטעק שטייען נישט ווייניק ביכער, וואָס איך האָב זינט דעמאָלט רעדאַקטירט, איבערגעזעצט צי טיילווײַז אָנגעשריבן. דרײַסיק יאָר איז אַ לאַנגער וועג – אַ גאַנצע תּקופֿה, נאָר צו מאַנדעלשטאַמען קער איך זיך אום כּסדר. דעם פֿאַרגאַנגענעם דעצעמבער, בין איך אויפֿגעטראָטן אינעם פּעטערבורגער ייִדישן קהילה־צענטער מיט מײַנע נײַע איבערזעצונגען פֿונעם דאָזיקן פּאָעט אין פֿאַרגלײַך מיט מײַנע צען ייִדישע איבערזעצונגען פֿון רײַנער־מאַריאַ רילקעס לידער. מסתּמא צום ערשטן מאָל זענען רילקעס לידער איבערגעזעצט געוואָרן אויף ייִדיש; דער ליטעראַטור־פֿאָרשער וואַלערי דימשיץ האָט מיר געזאָגט, אַז קיין פֿריִערע ייִדישע איבערזעצונג פֿונעם דאָזיקן דיכטער אויף ייִדיש האָט ער נישט געזען.
וואָס שייך דעם פֿאָרווערטס, זענען בײַ מיר פֿונעם ייִנגערן דור מיטאַרבעטער פֿאַרבליבן באַזונדערס וואַרעמע זכרונות פֿון צוויי מיידלעך, דעמאָלט גאַנץ יונגע: אַנע (חנה) קוקאַ פֿון בערלין און ליודמילאַ שאָלאָכאָוואַ פֿון קיִעוו. נישט לאַנג האָבן זיי אָפּגעאַרבעט אינעם פֿאָרווערטס, נאָר מיט זיי האָט מען אַלעמאָל געקאָנט שמועסן אויף כּלערליי טשיקאַווע טעמעס (אַרײַנגערעכנט פּאָעזיע!) און זיך גוט אָנלאַכן. משה־יודאַ דײַטש, אַ סאַטמאַרער חסיד, וועלכער האָט דעמאָלט מיט אונדז געאַרבעט ווי אַ מיטדיזײַנער, איז געווען שטאַרק אומצופֿרידן דערמיט. סטײַטש, איך שרײַב טיפֿע אַרטיקלען וועגן חסידות און קבלה, און פּראַווע קלות־ראָש מיט אַ דײַטשקע און אַן אוקראַיִנקע! סאַראַ חוצפּה!
אויך זייער טשיקאַווע איז מיר געווען צו פֿירן די רובריק, דער עיקר, וועגן וויסנשאַפֿטלעכע ידיעות און נײַעס, וואָס האָט טאַקע געהייסן „טשיקאַוועס אַרום דער וועלט‟. כ׳האָף, אַז מע וועט דיגיטאַליזירן יענע נומערן און איך וועל קענען יענע אַרטיקעלעך אַליין איבערצולייענען.
להיפּוך צו אומאָנגענעמע קאָרפּאָראַטיווע צי סתּם העסלעכע אַרבעט־סבֿיבֿות, איז די פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקציע געבליבן אין מײַן זכּרון אַ פֿרײַנדלעכע חבֿרה, כּמעט אַ משפּחה, וווּ מע האָט געקאָנט שעפּן פֿון די מיטאַרבעטער און ביוראָ־באַזוכער אַ סך ידיעות וועגן די סאָוועטישע ייִדישע שרײַבער, דעם בונד, די אַמאָליקע ייִדישיסטישע אָרגאַניזאַציעס, און נאָך, און נאָך. און וואָס שייך מאַנדעלשטאַמען, וועל איך אים, אַוודאי, ווײַטער איבערזעצן.
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