Arbeter Fraynd[1] (meaning "Worker's Friend" in Yiddish), was a London-based weekly Yiddish radical paper founded in 1885 by socialist Morris Winchevsky. After the emigration of Saul Yanovsky to the United States in 1894, Woolf Wess became the editor in 1895. In 1898, Rudolf Rocker, a German non-Jewish anarchist who had immersed himself into the Yiddish radical culture of London's East End, became the editor of the paper.
During Christmas week in December, 1902 a conference of Jewish anarchists met in London and at the top of their agenda, alongside linking all the Jewish anarchist groups in the region into a Jewish Anarchist Federation, was the reopening of the Arbeter Fraynd. In 1903 the Arbeter Fraynd began republishing under the administration of the Arbeter Fraynd group and the editorship of Rudolf Rocker as the organ of the Federation of Yiddish-Speaking Anarchist Groups in Great Britain & Paris.
In 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, the Arbeter Fraynd was suppressed by the British government. After the war and the Russian Revolution, London's Yiddish-speaking anarchist community never recovered. Many of its members later filtered into the Zionist, Labour or Communist movements. In 1918 Rocker was deported to the Netherlands.
Editors:
- Saul Yanofsky
Contributors:
- Abraham Frumkin
- Shalom Shwartzbard
- Dovid Edelstat[1]
- Benjamin Feigenbaum[2]
Notes
- ^ This is the romanization of the title in the Paris edition, using the contemporary Yiddish orthography. It was initially written as, Arbeyter Fraynd (אַרְבֵּייטֶער פְרַיינְד), following a germanized orthographic practice widely used in Yiddish newspapers at that time.