Arbayter Fraynd

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The Arbayter Fraynd<ref>As the name of this paper is originally in Yiddish, there exist other common English transliterations of it. Although the correct Yiddish for 'worker' is 'arbeter', the newspaper rendered it in a Germanised way as 'arbayter' (sometimes also transliterated as 'arbeiter' or 'Arbeyter'. Similarly, 'fraynd' is sometimes transliterated as 'freint' etc. See Yiddish orthography on rules of transliteration.</ref> (Worker's Friend), was a London-based weekly Yiddish radical paper founded in 1885 by socialist Morris Winchevsky. In 1898, Rudolf Rocker, a German gentile 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 Arbayter Fraynd. In 1903 the Arbayter Fraynd began republishing under the administration of the Arbayter 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 Arbayter 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.

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