This summer, K. invites you to rediscover, in each of its weekly issues, a feature consisting of five articles previously published in the magazine. This week: five reports, with articles by Joseph Roche, Anshel Pfeffer, Yeshaya Dalsace, Benny Ziffer, and an interview with Ber Kotlerman by Macha Fogel.
Saving Jewish Odessa
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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.
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In the synagogue on Uspenska Street, during the morning service, Odessa / Joseph Roche
>>> Read the article by Joseph Roche
Postcard from Suriname: Lessons from a Jewish state that didn’t make it
Anshel Pfeffer – Published April 11, 2024
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.
>>> Read the article by Anshel Pfeffer
A short trip to Ukraine: The Converts of Munkács.
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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.
Old Jewish quarter, Munkács [Moukatchevo] © Yeshaya Dalsace -
>>> Read the article by Yeshaya Dalsace
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.
>>> Read the article by Benny Ziffer
“Birobidjan is in my veins” – Interview with Ber Kotlerman
Macha Fogel – Published January 25, 2024
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. K.’s readers have already read several of his texts: “Rothenburg” and “Longing.” 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[1]. 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.
