A Dissenting View: Observers See A Renaissance of Jewish Culture

ANKER, JUDITH COLP AND CHARLOTTE

A Dissenting View While Charles Hoffman's report suggests it will be difficult to reclaim Soviet Jews, Americans who have been working with Russian Jews to bring Jewish culture to the Soviet Union...

...Plans are underway to have a coordinator in the Soviet Union by fall who would develop cultural programs...
...This monthly is written in the Russian language and has a nationwide readership, although it is sponsored by the Latvian Jewish Cultural Society in Riga...
...For the past four years, the Conservative Movement has sent rabbis who have worked with chavurot (friendship groups) and taught classes...
...The drive for Soviet Jewish culture is only just beginning, said Micah Naftalin, director of the Union of Councils of Soviet Jews...
...And there is evidence that these responses are in the tens of thousands, not hundreds, as Hoffman asserts...
...Carlebach evoked emotional highs in his audiences that sent American observers home optimistic, indeed euphoric...
...Judaism's religious movements are also expanding their programs in the Soviet Union...
...The Union of Orthodox Congregations has commissioned a Torah to be written in Jerusalem and completed in the Soviet Union mid-July...
...It will be easier for Soviet Jews to assert themselves knowing there is an independent movement with a year-round coordinating council," she said...
...To whatever extent the cultural movement develops, many feel, as Hoffman reports, its most important purpose will be to pave the way for emigration to Israel...
...The Joint Distribution Committee plans, within the next two years, to create 150 Jewish "libraries" in more than 30 Soviet cities, comprised of books written in Russian about Jewish subjects, and Russian language videocassettes and video player/recorders...
...More than 500 Soviet Jews from 77 cities—many more than expected—flocked to Moscow for five days in December to meet with 200 representatives of international Jewish organizations at the first such gathering since the 1917 Revolution...
...That Friday, 1,000 people showed up at the Kiev synagogue, overflowing to the street outside...
...these books have been printed in Moscow by government-sponsored printers...
...But like other nationalisms on the rise in the U.S.S.R., once the ferment starts, who can tell where it will lead?—J.C...
...B'nai B'nth International (BBI) inaugurated its first Soviet chapter in December 1988 and now has 13 chapters across the country...
...Then there is the Bulletin of Soviet Jewish Culture, or VESK, which began publication last July and now has a circulation of 50,000...
...and C.A...
...On a smaller scale, when the only Jewish Day School in the USSR reopened for the first time since 1941 (in Riga), 400 students enrolled, although the school only Observers See Renaissance of Jewish Culture had room for 200...
...Chlenov and Samuel Zilberg, co-presidents of the congress, traveled to New York in January to a meeting of the International Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress, an event that Steinberg said, "would have been unthinkable a year ago...
...When the Torah is completed, the group accompanying it will organize a processional march to begin in Red Square and carry the Torah to the Great Synagogue of Moscow...
...They report that Jews are hungrily seeking books about Judaism and flock to Jewish cultural events...
...We still have three million Jews spread over three tome zones with the cultural knowledge equal to what you can find in one synagogue in the U.S...
...School personnel estimated they could have had 1500 students— virtually the entire Jewish youth of Riga—if space were available...
...The Reform Movement's World Union for Progressive Judaism, on its first mission to the Soviet Union in March 1988, sent a Russian-speaking rabbi to the Soviet Union to lead High Holiday services and teach classes...
...The Jewish congress reflects "the desire of the [Soviet...
...He considers the creation of the Soviet Jewish congress and its governing body, the Va'ad, "a miracle," something he had previously doubted could be done...
...BBI also distributes to the Soviet Jewish community a newspaper written in Russian and published in Israel about life in the Jewish world...
...In Kiev, for instance, where he played for five nights, Carlebach each night encouraged his audience to go to synagogue on Shabbat...
...The concert tour of Jewish folksmger Shlomo Carlebach last spring, for example, sponsored by the Union of Councils of Soviet Jews (UCSJ), played in four cities— Moscow, Leningrad, Vilnius and Kiev—to audiences totaling 56,000, despite the high costs of tickets (six rubles rather than the normal price of admission, three...
...One of the major blocks to Soviet Jewish participation in the world Jewish community, until now, has been the absence of an organized representative Structure, according to Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress...
...This will be the first Torah to be completed there since earty in the century...
...Shoshana Card in, chair of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) who attended the five-day meeting, predicted that the Jewish congress will further encourage those Jews interested in their heritage...
...also Hebrew teachers are in great demand...
...Samuel Zilberg of Riga, co-chair of the Latvian Jewish Cultural Society, Joseph Zissels, chair of the Public Fund for Development of Jewish Culture in the Ukraine, and Mikah Chlenov, president of the Moscow Jewish Cultural Association...
...Jews to be involved in all kinds of Jewish affairs," according to Chlenov, based on "the desire to be involved in one's own destiny...
...A Dissenting View While Charles Hoffman's report suggests it will be difficult to reclaim Soviet Jews, Americans who have been working with Russian Jews to bring Jewish culture to the Soviet Union are enthusiastic about the response to their programs...
...We are providing Soviet Jews with the opportunity of participating in this mitzvati...
...Chlenov said there are an abundance of Jewish leaders in the USSR, although there are almost no full-time jobs in Jewish affairs...
...There's a great hunger for Jewish literature from a sizable segment of the population," said Jerry Hochbaum, executive vice-president of the Memorial Fund for Jewish Culture, another international organization, established two decades ago to preserve and rebuild Jewish cultural life in the wake of the Shoah...
...We will take the scribe with us as we travel from city to city [Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad...
...Recently, the Memorial Fund *as able to publish in Moscow 10,000 copies of both Pirfce Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) and a haggadah...
...The mission bringing in the Torah will also include concerts and lectures, according to Sidney Kwestol, president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Organizations...
...This group is trying to make Russian books on Judaism—once only sold underground—available in bookstores and kiosks...
...Three co-presidents were elected, Dr...
...Hoffman mentions in passing the recent creation of a nationwide Soviet Jewish community but does not examine its significance...
...On a recent visit to the USSR, BBI representatives were besieged with requests for new chapters and chartered new groups in Alma-Ata, Baku, Birobidzhan, Dnepropetrovsk, Grodno, Kiev, Kokand, Kishinev and Odessa...
...Sometime in 1990 it hopes to open a center with a professional staff...
...One of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) is to write a sefer Torah...
...explained Rabbi Raphael B. Butler, national director of the National Conference of Synagogue Youth...
...Everyone should have one written in a lifetime...
...The school was able to open with a full kindergarten-to-high-school curriculum...
...While manuscripts are prepared in the U.S...
...Organizing themselves into the Congress of Jewish Organizations and Communities of the Soviet Union, they elected a governing body, the Va'ad, to knit together an independent national confederation of Soviet Jewish groups and to outline a strategy for Soviet Jewish life...
...While Hoffman lists, with somewhat grudging approval, American and international organizations who are working with Soviet Jewish leaders, he does not give a sense of the enthusiasm expressed by organizational representatives because of the responses of Soviet Jews to their programs...

Vol. 15 • April 1990 • No. 2


 
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