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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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The Yiddishist Yeshiva is open for registration
ס׳האָט זיך לעצטנס געשאַפֿן אַ נײַער סאָרט לייענקרײַז דורך פֿייסבוק, וווּ מע לערנט תּורה אויף ייִדיש צוזאַמען.
אינעם לייענקרײַז, וואָס הייסט „די ייִדישיסטישע ישיבֿה“, לייענט מען חומש מיט רש״י — סײַ אויפֿן אָריגינעלן לשון־קודש סײַ אויף ייִדיש־טײַטש. „די גרופּע איז אָפֿן פֿאַר אַלע מינים מענטשן,“ האָט דערקלערט דער לינגוויסט און ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסט לייזער בורקאָ, וועלכער האָט אָרגאַניזירט די גרופּע. „פֿרויען און מענער, ייִדן און נישט־ייִדן, געי און ׳גלײַך׳. נײַע תּלמידים דאַרפֿן פֿאַרשטיין ייִדיש גוט, אָבער זיי דאַרפֿן נישט האָבן קיין תּורהדיקן הינטערגרונט.“
די גרופּע טרעפֿט זיך יעדן דינסטיק דורך פֿייסבוק. נאָך מער פּרטים אָדער כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, שטעלט זיך אין קאָנטאַקט מיט בורקאָ, אויפֿן אַדרעס leyzertag@gmail.com אָדער דורך פֿייסבוק.
The post The Yiddishist Yeshiva is open for registration appeared first on The Forward.
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A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall
(JTA) — When David Freedman discovered a long-forgotten photo album in his parents’ Montreal basement last year, he found nearly 100 pages of century-old photographs from his grandfather’s year in British Mandate Palestine, capturing Jerusalem street scenes, market stalls and holy sites.
The photographs were not only century-old and in near-perfect condition, but included figures who would later become central to Jewish medical and political history, among them Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem ophthalmologist Abraham Ticho, malaria researcher Israel Kligler, future British prime minister Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine.
David Freedman said he knew he had “struck gold” when he found the album, which had been untouched for decades. “I realized in disbelief I was looking at extraordinary images of Jerusalem,” he said.
Though Freedman said the album showed his grandfather’s “passion for skillful, impromptu photography,” it was images of a site that epitomizes endurance that are having the broadest impact.
Freedman’s pictures of the Western Wall has inspired a public appeal by the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum, which is asking people to look through old albums and attics for photographs, postcards and other visual material that could help expand the historical record of Judaism’s holiest site.
The request comes ahead of a major exhibition opening in 2027 marking 60 years since the 1967 Six-Day War brought the wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, under Jewish control for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Although the Western Wall is now one of the most photographed sites in the world, museum curators say the visual record of earlier decades remains surprisingly fragmented, with many of the most intimate images likely still tucked away in private collections and family albums.
“The Western Wall, the Kotel, in its simplest form, is a structure of ancient stones. Yet its true meaning has never resided in the stones alone — it has been shaped and elevated by the countless individuals who have stood before it over the centuries,” Eilat Lieber, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement.
Next year’s exhibition, titled “Eyes on the Wall” and curated by Shimon Lev and Yael Brandt, will be the first large-scale exhibition dedicated entirely to the Western Wall, the museum said, and will trace its transformation over nearly 2,000 years. It will be one of the major exhibitions staged by the Tower of David Museum since it reopened in 2023 after a $50 million renovation of its ancient citadel complex.
The wall, the exposed section of an ancient retaining wall around the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Jewish temples, has long been Judaism’s most sacred places of prayer and pilgrimage. From 1948 until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Jews were barred from going there.
Among its most iconic images was David Rubinger’s photograph of three Israeli paratroopers standing at the wall shortly after its capture, looking upward in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The picture was taken 59 years ago this week.
Abraham Orkin Freedman, a Canadian physician and Zionist activist, took his photographs before the site was so contested. He arrived in Palestine in July 1920, just as Britain was replacing military rule with a civil administration, and stayed until 1922, serving during that period as managing director of Hadassah Hospital. His grandson David, also a doctor, said the album’s timing gives it much of its historical value, with photographs that capture people in the streets, as well as the terrain and buildings of Jerusalem during the nascent years of the British Mandate.
Among the images Freedman uncovered, the one that struck him most was a photograph of women praying side by side with men at the oldest part of the Western Wall, a scene far removed from the gender-separated prayer sections at the site today. The question of mixed-gender prayer at the Wall remains politically charged, with a recent High Court order to advance the egalitarian section followed by Knesset moves to strengthen Chief Rabbinate control over prayer at the site.
After recognizing the album’s significance, Freedman met with his family who decided collectively to give it to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum for safekeeping, research and public access. Freedman said the family was proud the album had found “a new home, not many meters from where my grandfather once stood.”
Lev said he hoped the appeal would bring more discoveries like Freedman’s into public view, expanding the visual record of the Western Wall beyond official archives.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,” Lev said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall appeared first on The Forward.
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post 5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances appeared first on The Forward.
