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Brooklyn Hebrew charter school welcomes children fleeing Ukraine
(New York Jewish Week) — When the fire alarm went off at Hebrew Language Academy in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, most of the students knew the routine: They lined up behind their teacher and got ready to calmly leave the building. They were familiar with the mandatory fire drills, a regular part of American school life.
But for some of the children — recent arrivals from Ukraine — the drill was a frightening experience. They crouched on the floor and put their hands over their heads. “We had students that thought it was an alarm or an explosion and they took cover as we were leaving the building,” said Daniella Steinberg, the head of the school.
The Hebrew Language Academy, one of three Hebrew charter schools in New York, accepted more than 60 Ukrainian students at the start of the 2022-2023 school year. The refugee children are adjusting to not one but two new languages — English and Hebrew — and to a whole new way of life, far from the devastating war that has engulfed their home country.
The initiative was started at the end of the last school year by Valerie Khaytina, chief external officer at Hebrew Public, the national movement of Hebrew charter schools, who is herself a Ukrainian with ties to a family fleeing the war-torn country. She was looking for a way to help her acquaintances and others who had to flee Ukraine since the start of the war, so she promoted the school on social media groups geared towards refugees.
Lesya Rybchynsky and her twins, Stefania and Mykola, were the first Ukrainians to enroll at the school. When, halfway through the semester, the family moved to Forest Hills, Queens, and then to Ukrainian Village — an immigrant enclave near Manhattan’s Washington Square Park — they insisted on staying at the school. “No Mommy, we don’t want to leave school,” Rybchynsky remembered them telling her.
Rybchynsky shared her positive experience on social media. “This school is the best,” she said. “They helped my children with everything. With food, clothing, computers.” Her posts on social media brought in a wave of other Ukrainian families that had just come to New York and were looking for a school.
“Even today, we had a new student register,” Steinberg said when she spoke to the New York Jewish Week in October. “As soon as they come, we take them.”
Since then, the school has enrolled several new families and is still accepting students.
To make sure they were prepared for the new students and their needs, the school had to make some structural changes: Nina Henig, special education teacher and a native Russian speaker, was promoted to a new role as the director of the multilingual learners department. She was thrilled to take the job.
Most of the Ukrainian children did not come to the school speaking English. However, many of them speak multiple languages, and have some knowledge of the English alphabet — “sometimes more than you would expect,” said Michael Moore, English teacher and founder of the multilingual learners department.
Henig and Moore pull the students out of their regular classes at least once a day to work with them in small groups. “A lot of it is just survival English, initially,” said Moore. “You’d have to be there. It involves a lot of body language.”
The American students at the school, from kindergarteners to eighth-graders, have been a big help in supporting their Ukrainian classmates. “There’s been no sort of culture shock on either side,” said Moore.
Two older students even volunteered to help the new children with their classwork during lunch. “We’re really, really proud of our kids,” said Steinberg. She recalls seeing the students trying to communicate with each other through Google Translate while waiting for the bus. “It’s been a really beautiful thing to watch.”
But English is not the only new language the Ukrainian students are learning: The charter school also teaches modern Hebrew. Opened in 2009, the Brooklyn school was the first established by the Hebrew Charter School Center (now known as Hebrew Public), a network founded by hedge funder Michael Steinhardt and others (in an effort that predated accusations that Steinhardt propositioned and made sexually inappropriate remarks to women in his role as a philanthropist).
Most of the Ukrainian children did not come to the Hebrew Language Academy speaking English, but many of them speak multiple languages and have some knowledge of the English alphabet. (Annika Grosser)
As schools that are publicly funded but privately managed, the Hebrew charters do not provide religious instruction but teach Hebrew language and also offer instruction about Israeli history and culture. The school was diverse even before the influx of Ukrainian children: In 2021, 70% of its 600 students were Black, 20 percent were white and 8 percent were Hispanic and other.
“It kind of gives everybody an opportunity to jump in together,” said Steinberg. “Definitely levels the playing field a little for many.”
In many ways, Henig has been the main point of contact for the Ukrainian students and their families. When the school bell rings, the Ukrainian students run up to her and tell her with excited voices about their day in Ukrainian or Russian (about 68% of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian as a first language, and about 30% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language) — with one exception: a little boy who is scared of the school bus and usually gets nervous and quiet at the end of the school day. He and his sister have been living in a shelter in the Bronx and have had to commute three hours every day to get to the school. Their mother does not feel comfortable sharing their names.
“They are not living in good conditions,” said Henig. The family has since moved in with friends because they were not able to stay at the shelter any longer.
Henig has been trying to assist wherever possible and started collecting clothing donations for them. At the end of the school day, she picks the boy up at his classroom, takes him by the hand and leads him downstairs. In the hall leading to the buses, he stands in his oversized shirt that matches the dark circles under his eyes and waits for his sister to get out of class. But when the other Ukrainian students show up, his face lights up.
Helping the students adjust to their new environment is not an easy process. “I think the greatest challenge is the trauma that they have experienced,” said Steinberg.
Such trauma can be triggered in everyday situations, like a mandatory fire drill. The teachers had a faculty meeting with an expert on post-traumatic stress and tried to prepare the Ukrainian students by explaining the drill to them beforehand, but some of them still went down to the floor and put their hands over their heads.
“It kind of breaks our hearts,” said Steinberg. “Things that we can’t fix overnight and things that we feel a little bit powerless over and sad for them.” Professional expertise was needed. The school decided to hire a social worker from Ukraine to provide at-risk counseling and other emotional support to the Ukrainian children, three days a week.
With all the stress and trauma that the children have been through over the last months, it is a rewarding experience to see them opening up to their new environment. “I was worried that they wouldn’t be happy. But they are and they are excited to come to school,” said Steinberg. “It’s just the kids starting to feel comfortable, starting to speak English, starting to talk to us, where at the beginning they were so afraid. Those are the moments we’re trying to hold on to.”
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British Jews could be offered asylum in the US, Trump’s UK-born Jewish lawyer says
(JTA) — The Trump administration might be considering granting asylum to British Jews, according to Trump’s personal lawyer, who said “the UK is no longer a safe place for Jews.”
Robert Garson, a Jewish attorney from Manchester, England, with rising influence in the Trump administration, said he proposed the move to the State Department in an interview with The Telegraph.
Garson said his proposal was well received despite the Trump administration’s general anti-immigration stance.
“I thought: Jews are being persecuted in the United Kingdom,” Garson said. “They fit a wonderful demographic for the United States. They are, on the whole, educated. They speak English natively. They’ve got businesses. They’re exactly the sort of immigrant the United States should want to attract. So, why not?”
Garson said his views on the future of Jews in Britain hardened after the terror attack on a synagogue in his hometown last year. Two people were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation on Yom Kippur after a man rammed his car into a crowd of people and stabbed others.
In October, the White House announced that it would restrict the number of refugees admitted to the United States to 7,500 in 2026, mostly reserving those spots for white South Africans. The number represents a steep drop from former President Joe Biden’s ceiling of 125,000 in 2024.
The administration’s privileging of white South Africans has been widely criticized in South Africa, including by Jews. The country’s chief rabbi Warren Goldstein, otherwise a vocal Trump supporter, called the move a “mistake.”
Garson was hired by Trump in 2022 to sue investigative journalist Bob Woodward for $50 million over Woodward’s publication of Trump interviews in an audiobook. (The lawsuit was dismissed in July.) Donald Trump Jr. has also hired Garson as a lawyer for his publishing house, Winning Team Publishing, which has published the president, Charlie Kirk and other prominent conservatives.
Garson’s rise continued with an appointment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council in May. He was among several Trump allies that the president named to replace members appointed by Biden, including Doug Emhoff, the Jewish husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time, “President Trump looks forward to appointing new individuals who will not only continue to honor the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, but who are also steadfast supporters of the State of Israel.”
Garson moved to New York in 2008 and now lives in Florida, where he is the head of armed security at his synagogue. After the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Garson became a National Rifle Association-licensed instructor and has offered to train any Jews who are interested.
He believes that “if there had been 6 million guns in 6 million Jewish hands, there would have been 6 million fewer deaths” in the Holocaust, he told The Telegraph.
Garson laid much of the blame for dangers to British Jews at the foot of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, saying that he “allowed rampant antisemitism to become commonplace in society and has allowed it to come from those who really don’t have Britain’s best interests at heart.”
Garson has expressed particular concern about the influence of Muslim immigrants in England, charging that non-Jewish Brits would also soon face “sharia-compliant areas.” He said, “They are coming for the Jews and then they are coming for your pubs.”
Some British Jewish groups have rejected the idea that British Jews would seek to leave for the United States. The Community Security Trust, an antisemitism watchdog, told Haaretz that “Jews were murdered by hateful terrorists in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom” last year, so there was no refuge to be found there.
David Aaronovitch, a British journalist and broadcaster, also rebuked Garson’s proposal in a Jewish News op-ed addressed to Trump.
“British Jews wouldn’t be safer in the US, simply because no one is,” said Aaronovitch. “The homicide rate in your country is six times what it is here; in fact, in Mr Garson’s new domicile, Miami-Dade County, it’s over 20 times the rate here in London.”
He also noted the debate in Trump’s own party over its inclusion of avowed antisemites such as Nick Fuentes.
“It hasn’t escaped the notice of many British Jews that some of the most vocal and influential new media supporters of your administration have either given themselves over to overt, old-style antisemitism or have shown themselves happy to tolerate others who have,” said Aaronovitch.
Ofir Sofer, Israel’s minister of aliyah and integration, also responded dismissively to the idea that British Jews should leave for the United States. “The home of British Jewry, and of Jews around the world, is the State of Israel,” he said.
The post British Jews could be offered asylum in the US, Trump’s UK-born Jewish lawyer says appeared first on The Forward.
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How ‘a bundle of letters’ became a cornerstone of life advice for American Jews
January 20, 2026 marks the 120th anniversary of A Bintel Brief, the Forward’s advice column, launched in 1906 by the paper’s founder and publisher, Ab Cahan. Tackling the personal challenges of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Cahan and the Bintel Brief columnists who followed him would dispatch their advice with humor, compassion, and honesty.
By 1906, Der Forverts, as the Forward is known in Yiddish, had grown over its initial three decades to become the leading Yiddish-language newspaper in the United States. But A Bintel Brief — Yiddish for “a bundle of letters” — was something the paper hadn’t tried before. Well, not exactly.
In his introduction to the very first Bintel Brief, which is preserved online at the National Library of Israel, Cahan explained that the new column had been inspired by a section of the paper devoted to letters to the editor that launched three years earlier.
A Bintel Brief, however, would be an advice column, focusing on letters “that expressed issues of … human interest,” Cahan explained. He continued, “Readers will find in the Bintel Brief letters an interesting turning of pages from the Book of Life … Hundreds of diverse emotions, interests and lost opportunities will be expressed here. Hundreds of various vibrations of the human heart will be heard here.”
History would prove him right. Over the next 120 years, A Bintel Brief would explore the “various vibrations of the human heart” with homespun Jewish advice, tens of thousands of times over, and along with its contemporary advice columnists like Dorothy Dix inspire countless advice columns across U.S. newspapers, including “Dear Abby” and Ann Landers (née Esther Friedman).
In his autobiography Pages from My Life, which Cahan published 100 years ago in 1926, he recalled, “I had always wished that the Forverts would receive stories from ‘daily life’ — dramas, comedies or truly curious events that weren’t written at a desk but rather in the tenements and factories and cafés — everywhere that life was the author of the drama … How to do this? Not an easy task — much harder than writing an interesting drama or comedy.”
“One day in January 1906,” he continued, “[my secretary, Leon] Gottlieb told me about three letters that had arrived which didn’t seem suited for any particular department … All three letters were of a personal nature rather than a communal one, and each told an individual story. I considered the three letters and my response was: Let’s print them together and call it A Bintel Brief.”
There’s also the apocryphal version of the story, illustrated by cartoonist Liana Finck while working on a series of cartoons inspired by A Bintel Brief that eventually became a book in 2014. “Rumor has it, the letter on the top of the pile Abraham Cahan’s secretary brought him that strange day in 1906 was two feet long and sewn together with scraps of industrial thread. The spelling was atrocious, but the tears that spewed out of the letter were real — Cahan tasted them to make sure.”
While perhaps nothing more than a mayse, the story rightly captures the willingness of Forverts readers to share their individual problems with A Bintel Brief and seek advice.
And some of them still resonate today.
For example, in the first edition of the column, a bride-to-be reached out because of a debate that erupted with her fiancé after she suggested that mothers are more faithful to their children than fathers because they are the ones saddled with the responsibility of childcare, to which the fiancé angrily replied that women make too big of a deal of their role as caregivers, and that fathers are more dependable. Cahan replied that “smart, serious minded parents raise children that are both truly loyal and have both feet on the ground” like the mother and father. To this, he added, “It’s best for your future children that you read all you can, attend as many lectures as possible, and develop together and grow intellectually. That will create a pair of parents who best know how to raise their children and will be of service in their devotion and love.”
It also did not take long for questions regarding interfaith relationships to emerge in the column. One letter that same year featured a newlywed Jewish man describing the fraying relationship with his Christian wife over the first year of marriage. “Mixed marriage between a Gentile and a Jew is a complicated affair,” Bintel acknowledged, before putting a spin on the then-common story of Jewish parents sitting shiva for their son marrying a Gentile woman: “Not enough has been said about the Gentile family. For while the parents of the Gentile girl may accept the Jewish son-in-law and tolerate the marriage, the girl loses many of her friends, former classmates and relatives.”
Writing for the Forward in 2014 about Finck’s book, Yevegeniya Traps noted that letters like these offered “a succinctly potent representation of the lives of Eastern-European immigrants trying to make their way in early-20th-century New York.” She added, “No artist or journalist could render the doubt, uncertainty and backbreaking work of life in the New World as clearly and honestly as the words of sufferers seeking wisdom” from A Bintel Brief.
Or as Cahan concluded in his autobiography, “Everyone wrote about that which was closest to their hearts. The result was that the Bintel Brief would be assembled out of those letters that revealed the most interesting nooks of people’s souls.”
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How Trump’s first year back in office destabilized our country — and our Jewish community
One year into President Donald Trump’s second term, the American Jewish community is reeling — just like the rest of the country.
For generations now, presidents have at least paid lip service to steadying the ship of state. Trump has taken an axe to the mast.
And as he has destabilized the United States since being sworn into office on Jan. 20, 2025, he has destabilized American Jews.
To mark the end of Trump’s first year back in office, I looked at how a series of his policies and pronouncements have exaggerated already-deep divides in the Jewish community — and bewildered his supporters and detractors alike.
Rooting out antisemitism, or nurturing it?
Trump’s approach to addressing antisemitism has shuttled between a slap and embrace, deeply unbalancing American Jews.
He correctly called out intimidation tactics on college campuses, especially during the anti-Gaza War protests, that violated the civil rights of Jewish students — preventing them from accessing parts of campus or speaking out freely as other students.
But the measures he took against those universities, which included cutting off funding for unrelated research, deporting foreign students for exercising their First Amendment rights, and undermining laudable efforts at diversity, alienated Jews with legitimate concerns about campus antisemitism.
A May 2025 poll from GBAO Strategies reflected the disconnect.
Some 65% of younger Jews expressed concern over antisemitism on college campuses, and 71% said deporting campus protesters made that antisemitism worse.
Any relief Jews felt that Trump was addressing a long-festering problem quickly morphed into the concern that he was using it to carry out an ideological score-settling that had nothing to do with Jews, and that could ultimately backfire on them.
Meanwhile, there’s Tucker Carlson. The ideological Svengali of the GOP, Carlson has used his popular podcast to give a platform to neo-Nazis, push ever more intricate antisemitic conspiracy theories, and suggest that Jews were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
And more recently, he’s provided a serious hint that Trump’s focus on antisemitism isn’t particularly earnest.
“I think we don’t need them,” Trump recently told the New York Times about antisemitic elements in the GOP. “I think we don’t like them.” He thinks, because, well, sometimes he apparently does need them: Carlson lunched twice at the White House this week.
For Trump, antisemitism appears not to be an absolute evil, but yet another issue to use to his political advantage. And as he’s gambled with our community, he’s brought more strife to it. Now, we battle one another over the question of whether Trump has been just what we needed — or the very worst thing that could have happened to us.
Triumph in Gaza, despair in Iran
In October, Trump forged a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza that pleased liberal Jews even as it upset many on the Jewish right with its tacit endorsement of an eventual two-state solution. He cashed in the goodwill he had banked with Israel, and, through incessant horsetrading with the Gulf States, leveraged a diplomatic breakthrough.
“He did something so many of us yearned for in the last two years, and he made it happen, and Biden didn’t make it happen,” Abraham Foxman, former CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told JTA at the time.
Yet Trump started the year making promises to assert U.S. control in Gaza and turn it into a land of luxe resorts, to the horror of many liberal Jews. What can we make of the fact that he then turned around and accomplished a diplomatic feat that so many of us yearned for?
Even this week I find myself rooting for Trump — not something I normally do — to push through his idea of an international Board of Peace to oversee Gaza reconstruction, over the opposition of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yet at the same time Trump has worked for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, his Iran strategy now verges on incoherent, if not cruel. He joined with Israel in attacking and degrading Iranian missile and nuclear ability, and bragged that doing so stripped decades of progress from Tehran’s nuclear program, though evidence suggests the operation brought much more moderate success.
He then threatened to attack again, to stop Iran’s bloody crackdown on protesters who have swarmed the streets this month. That issue is particularly close to the hearts of many American Jews, both because of the Iranian regime’s vehement antagonism toward Israel, and because so many Jews here have roots in Iran and have personal or familial experiences of the regime’s brutality. Then he backed down, convinced, reports say, of Iran’s promise not to execute its political opponents.
“It is unconscionable to say ‘Help is on the way’ and then do nothing,” Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Iran envoy in the first Trump administration, told Jewish Insider. “I hope the president will change his mind.”
Yes, intervention is a tricky business. But to those American Jews who would see Trump take decisive action to change the status quo in the Middle East, his choice to step aside from this fight seems baffling. And for all of us, it raises questions: Does he actually have a long-term vision for the region, and if so, is he able to commit to a path to deliver it?
The Minneapolis worry
The May GBAO survey found that 74% of American Jews disapproved of the job Trump was doing in office. That was five months into office, before the Gaza deal, but also before — the rest.
Signals differ about where, exactly, Trump stands in American Jewish public opinion. But there are some leading indicators, and they all center around Minneapolis.
The killing this month of Renée Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent there; Trump’s knee-jerk defense of the shooting; and his decision to flood the city with more ICE agents prompted a rare attack ad from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which does not normally weigh in on issues unconnected to, well, Israel.
The ad criticized former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, who is running in a Feb. 5 primary for the House seat vacated by New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, for voting in favor of more ICE funding in a bipartisan 2019 border bill.
“We can’t trust Tom Malinowski” to stand up to Trump over ICE, said the ad.
Even if it was a cynical use of an issue to undermine a candidate AIPAC may oppose for other reasons — Malinowski is a former director of the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, which accused Israel of apartheid — AIPAC correctly understands how American Jews feel about Trump’s use of ICE: worried sick.
The abuse of state power, the breach in civil liberties, and the atmosphere of intimidation echoes some of the darkest times in Jewish history.
Nothing in Trump’s response to the situation — or his past efforts to engage with civil protest — suggests he will work to calm the situation, back down, or change the approach to international and domestic affairs that has unsettled Americans and American Jews.
And that suggests the most disorienting fact of all, for Jews as for all other Americans: There’s still three years left.
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