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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.”
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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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Waiting on line on Christmas is a time-honored New York tradition — was it ever thus?
At 6 a.m., the morning before Christmas, Charles Licata was waiting outside the door of Russ & Daughters, two hours before the century-old Manhattan appetizing store opened. Each Christmas Eve for the past 42 years, Licata, jones this time by a family member and a friend, has made the hour-long drive from central New Jersey. “I like to be first in line,” he told me.
Licata, who manufactures granite countertops, told me he was hosting 40 for a traditional Italian feast of seven fishes on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, his family had plans to devour another seven fishes and then some. “We got sable, lox, caviar, the spreads, pickled herring, tuna fish salad, hot and cold smoked salmon,” he started to list, before adding, “we got everything.”
Nikki Russ Federman, the fourth-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, instantly greeted Licata who she recognized from years past. By 9 a.m., she was hustling off to the shop’s Brooklyn bakery because they were already running out of bagels.
The Christmas Eve crowds rival Erev Yom Kippur and they grow throughout the day.
“Christmas is a Jewish holiday,” Russ Federman quipped.
For Licata, the line itself, with its banter and camaraderie is part of the ritual, except queuing at Russ & Daughters isn’t traditional. Lower East Side Jews didn’t wait in line; they jostled at deli counters and mobbed pushcarts.
“When I arrived on the scene in 1978 to take over the business,” third-generation owner Mark Russ Federman recounted in his 2013 book Russ & Daughters, “I discovered that there had never been a real attempt to implement a method to maintain crowd control and customer flow.”
First, the lox slicers behind the counter would pick out their regulars from the crowd, and then call “Who’s next?” To which, according to Mark Russ Federman, several elderly women would yell in their Yiddish-inflected English, “My next.” Mayhem would ensue.
“Grandpa Russ, my parents, and my uncles and aunts,” wrote Mark Russ Federman, “felt that having customers take a number from a machine and wait their turn was insulting, impersonal, and too ‘uptown.’”
It was during the Yom Kippur rush of 1978 that Russ Federman established a numbered ticketing system, turning the huddled mass of customers into an orderly line — something he saw as both more efficient for business and fairer for the customers. Since then, the appetizing store’s line has only grown, as have lines throughout the city.
Weathering the wait for Russ & Daughters seems more legit than camping out for the latest TikTok trend. Since the pandemic, lines in New York have become ubiquitous — for oversized pastries, for stunt croissants, for hype pizza. This past spring, a Saturday Night Live skit joked that a New Yorker’s favorite pastime is to “wait in a big dumb line.”
Waiting on line for West Village brunch often feels performative, but for Licata at Russ & Daughters, it isn’t about clout, it’s about continuity. It was a Jewish friend who first brought bagels and lox over for Christmas breakfast at Licata’s home decades ago. “I’m just carrying the tradition forward,” he said.
Down the block, most every year, Jeremy Kahn and his family make a pilgrimage from Washington, D.C. to Katz’s Deli. This past week, he was shocked to find that, even at the off-time of 4 p.m., the line still stretched to the corner. He speculated that there were more tourists. “I thought we’d be able to just walk right in,” he said.
After the 30 minute-plus wait at Katz’s, customers hungry for pastrami take a ticket at the door; they must sort into new lines to wait their turn with a cutter at the counter. And before leaving, customers must again wait their turn at the cashier’s line.
For Kahn, the wait is worth it. “This is where my grandfather would come to eat,” he said, and now he was taking his two young children and his father. “It means something that there is a line to get in. People are willing to wait in the cold.”
Katz’s with its shared cafeteria tables is known for its hustle and bustle, but things feel orderly compared to how it once was. In 1966, the iconic cheap eats guide, Underground Gourmet, deemed Katz’s “the largest, nosiest, busiest, and sloppiest delicatessen in Manhattan.” The guide’s authors, the illustrators and graphic designers Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, described ordering as a “struggle” that involved having to “muscle your way up to the endless serving counter and try to make yourself heard.”
Standing on line was foreign enough to Jewish immigrants that the Forverts mostly referred to queues, not by the Yiddish word “rey” (meaning row), but with the English “line,” spelled out in Hebrew letters. In 1930, the Forverts reported that boxing fans were waiting on long lines in the cold and rain to watch a Jackie Kid Berg lightweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden, but Jews at the time mostly seemed to be lining up at Depression-era soup kitchens and unemployment lines in the U.S. or, worse, for handouts at refugee centers in Europe.
It’s not just Jews who were late to line up; lines are actually a fairly modern phenomenon. Often cited as containing the first description of a queue in English is Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 book The French Revolution, which described Parisians lining up at bakers’ shops during a famine. By World War II, queuing had become commonplace in rationing-era Britain.
Lines were then associated with shortages and bureaucracy; now they represent wealth and leisure. There are still long waits at the DMV and over-burdened food pantries, but today, many lines are fueled by social media. A long line at a bakery signals that their $8.50 pistachio rose croissant is popular; joining the line gives you online bragging rights, not joining risks FOMO.
My friend Miriam Berger, a 91-year-old Manhattanite, says she has no memory of these types of lines in the 20th century. “I have no patience to stand on a line for anything,” she told me, “probably because such behavior didn’t exist in my growing-up environment.”
We still manage to do much without lines. We squeeze into rush hour subway cars, flag down bartenders at crowded pubs, and hail cabs. At times, it feels cut-throat, but there’s an unspoken etiquette — someone waves you into a lane, a stranger holds the door.
Lines promise efficiency and equity, but the first-come-first-serve system easily breaks down. There are cutters, professional line waiters, and ways to pay your way to the front of the line with priority passes and VIP options for most anything.
And very often, there are ways to avoid lines altogether. At the end of his book, Mark Russ Federman writes that when his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh entered the business in 2001, they started online ordering. “This wasn’t the way the Russ family did business,” he initially thought before he accepted the idea. “If you wanted to buy our fish, you came to the store. If you wanted to place an order over the phone, we had to recognize your voice or know your family.”
Now, Russ & Daughters ships nationwide, and with delivery apps, lox and herring can be ferried almost instantly to your door on an electric moped.
That’s too uptown for my tastes. I’d rather take a number.
The post Waiting on line on Christmas is a time-honored New York tradition — was it ever thus? appeared first on The Forward.
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The data is in: For many in the Northeast, Christmas isn’t Christmas without Chinese food
It’s not just a myth that Jews head to Chinese restaurants on Christmas. It’s science!
Sort of. A new report from the financial services company Coventry Direct claims to have quantified the trend. The report analyzed search data for “Chinese food near me” during the week of Christmas from 2020 to 2024, and found that the Northeast dominated the results.
The top five states included Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire, while New York, which is home to the largest Jewish population in the country, came in seventh place. Under the assumption that Jews are overrepresented in the Northeast, the study confirms that Coventry Direct is not peer-reviewed.
The study also analyzed Google search trends over the past year to find the top-searched Chinese food dish in each state. While Szechuan chicken was the most popular dish, taking first place in eight states, New York’s most searched item was Buddha’s Delight, a — IYKYK — vegetarian stew.
The Jewish Christmas tradition was famously referenced during Elena Kagan’s United States Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2010 when she was asked where she was on Christmas day:
“You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” replied Kagan.
In recent years around Christmas, social media has also been flooded with images of a sign where the seemingly fictional “Chinese Restaurant Association” of America thanks its Jewish diners for their patronage.
“The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” the sign reads. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insist you eat our food on Christmas.”
Two men enjoy Chinese cuisine prepared by Chinese chefs within the guidelines of kosher food preparation at a restaurant. (Getty Images)
But the now-ubiquitous tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas traces back to the early 20th century, when Jewish immigrants began carving out distinctly American rituals of their own. If for no other reasons, Chinese restaurants were more likely to be open on Christmas.
A classic 1993 study on the tradition, “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” by Gaye Tuchman and Harry Levine, traced the Jewish affinity for Chinese food to a few factors: Chinese restaurants at the time “welcomed everyone,” offered flavors familiar to an Eastern European Jewish palate and were considered a “sophisticated” dining experience for new-ish, Jewish Americans stepping outside their comfort zones.
While Chinese restaurants do not typically offer kosher fare, Tuchman and Levine also argued that Chinese restaurants were viewed as “safe treyf” because Chinese cuisine rarely mixes milk and meat and ingredients like pork and shrimp are chopped into hard-to-identify pieces.
To celebrate the longstanding tradition, a comedy club in New York’s East Village is set to host “Kosher Chinese: The Comedy Show,” with patrons enjoying kosher dumplings and an “unapologetically alternative holiday spirit we all secretly love.” In San Francisco, the 33rd Annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show kicks off tonight, and runs through Friday, Dec. 26.
From Massachusetts to Ohio, Jewish delis have also planned their own Chinese-inspired menus to mark the tradition.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric
(JTA) — The activist group StopAntisemitism has awarded the conservative personality Tucker Carlson its ignominious honor of “Antisemite of the Year,” citing his frequent invocation of classic antisemitic stereotypes.
The announcement comes as Carlson sits at the center of controversy on the American right about whether extremists should be welcomed in the Republican Party. It also marks the second year in a row that StopAntisemitism has selected a right-wing figure for its accolade, after years of awarding the mantle to mostly left-wing figures.
“Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. “By legitimizing extremist voices and weaponizing conspiratorial imagery at massive scale, he has helped drag antisemitic ideas back into the mainstream.”
A watchdog presence with more than 300,000 followers on X, StopAntisemitism regularly mobilizes against activists and social media posts. The group has faced criticism for what some perceive as an inordinate focus on Muslim personalities, pro-Palestinian actions and non-prominent individuals. Its defenders deny that, pointing out that StopAntisemitism also regularly spotlights neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on the right.
Its finalists for Antisemite of the Year included pro-Palestinian celebrities Ms. Rachel, Cynthia Nixon and Marcia Cross; mixed-martial-arts athlete and Holocaust denier Bryce Mitchell; two personalities associated with left-wing network The Young Turks; and social media personalities on both the far left (Guy Christensen) and far right (Stew Peters).
Carlson received the accolade on Sunday night, at the end of a weekend in which he was a keynote speaker at the convention of Turning Point USA, the young-conservatives group founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this fall. In its announcement, StopAntisemitism noted Carlson’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service, in which he described the murder of Jesus in a way that both his critics and fans interpreted as implying that Jews or Israelis had been behind Kirk’s assassination.
At the convention, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro continued his campaign against Carlson and Carlson declared himself to free of the anti-Jewish animus that he has long been criticized as propagating.
“Let me just affirm one final time. Not only am I not an antisemite — and I would say so if I was — I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason,” Carlson said in his speech. “Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I don’t have any donors. I’m not an antisemite because anti-semitism is immoral in my religion. It is immoral to hate people for how they were born.”
It was the same explanation that Vice President JD Vance offered earlier this month when he said in an NBC News interview that he believed antisemitism is wrong.
In his own speech to Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Vance again refrained from criticizing extremists in the Republican Party, saying that he opposes “purity tests” for inclusion in the conservative movement. He also said he believed that antisemitism in the United States was being fueled by “a real backlash” against U.S. aid to Israel..
As the convention was underway, last year’s “Antisemite of the Year,” the right-wing streamer Candace Owens, embarked on a four-hour broadcast eviscerating Shapiro; amplifying antisemitic theories, including that Jews controlled the slave trade; and promoting a classic work of antisemitism by August Rohling, a German Catholic who believed in the blood libel and argued that the Talmud is a secret guide used by Jews for nefarious purposes. Rohling died in 1931.
The post StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric appeared first on The Forward.