# 228 / Editorial

During this summer break, the magazine is suspending its publication of original articles. Until we return in the fall, each issue will feature a dossier bringing together some of our articles published this year on a specific theme. This is an opportunity to discover articles you may have missed, rediscover those that caught your attention, and share some of K.‘s publications with friends who are not yet familiar with the magazine.

As a reminder, our archives are open, and we invite you to browse through the hundreds of articles we have published over the past four years.

This week, our Postcards dossier features travel stories and reports. Fans of legendary characters and places can join Benny Ziffer in Albania on the trail of the false Jewish messiah Sabbatai Tsevi, or discover, in an interview with Ber Kotlerman, memories of a childhood spent in the Jewish Autonomous Region of the USSR, Birobidzhan. Those with a taste for the exotic will be captivated by the account of Anshel Pfeffer’s expedition to the heart of the Surinamese rainforest, where the remains of an autonomous Jewish community can be found. In a more serious vein, the reports “Saving Jewish Odessa” by Joseph Roche and “The Converts of Munkács” by Yeshaya Dalsace examine the persistence of Jewish life and culture in a Ukraine ravaged by war.

Reports
In search of Sabbatai Zevi, the self-proclaimed messiah who led a crypto-Jewish sect

In search of Sabbataï Zevi, his tomb, and above all his heritage, Benny Ziffer, Israeli journalist and author, invites us on a strange journey to the heart of the Balkans where the presence of the false Jewish messiah and the traces of Judaism continue to imperceptibly infuse the minds. Another way to visit Albania.

Interviews
“Birobidjan is in my veins” – Interview with Ber Kotlerman

Ber Kotlerman was born in Irkutsk, Soviet Union, in 1971. He grew up in Birobidjan—the “autonomous Jewish region” founded in May 1934 at the edge of the USSR on the Chinese border, with Yiddish as its official language. Ber Kotlerman has lived in Israel for thirty years, where he teaches Yiddish literature and culture at Bar-Ilan University. His novel “Koydervelsh,” which takes the reader from Birobidjan to Tel Aviv, has just been published. This is his fourth book of prose in Yiddish—the first, a collection of short stories, was published in Tel Aviv; the second, a thriller based on rabbinic responsa, in New York; and the third, a family epic, in Buenos Aires. However, he says that everything he writes is in one way or another linked to the region of his childhood, Birobidjan, which is the subject of this interview by Macha Fogel, conducted in Yiddish.

Reports
Postcard from Suriname: Lessons from a Jewish state that didn’t make it

In this “Postcard from Suriname” Anshel Pfeffer regales us with the little known story of the Jewish community of Suriname. Born out of migration and colonialism, to becoming an isolated, autonomous active community in the 18th and 19th century, this is the story of a Jewish state that could have been and never was.

Reports
Saving Jewish Odessa

What has happened to Odessa, once dubbed the “Star of Exile” by Isaac Babel, since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Joseph Roche gives us his account of how the Jewish community is trying to survive there, despite the war and the departures.

Reports
A short trip to Ukraine: The Converts of Munkács.

Rabbi of the Massorti community in France, Yeshaya Dalsace went to Ukraine to Munkács – Moukatchevo in Ukrainian – where only a hundred Jews remain. A rabbinical conversion commission was recently organized there for about fifteen people. The process, which began years ago, had been suspended by the war. A travelogue.

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Thanks to the Paris office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for their cooperation in the design of the magazine’s website.