RACHEL COWAN
RACHEL COWAN After 10 days in the Soviet Union, I was happy to leave. Yet I lobk forward to returning as soon as I can. Why? In a society that has broken down, where people have so litde variety of...
...So they rely on outsiders for expertise...
...some are forbidden to leave because of previous employment...
...It appears that Chabad will win...
...Their task is formidable, for they must teach as they learn...
...I had traveled to the U.S.S.R...
...some wait to see what will happen in Israel...
...Sixty Jews, including me, gather for Kabbalat Shabbat...
...Underground classes meeting subver-sively in apartments have become public classes meeting in rented school rooms or in synagogues that the government has returned to the Jewish people...
...Equally impressive was the dedication of Soviet Jews—and their Israeli and American supporters—who are fashionWe must stay connected to the millions of Jews who will remain in the Soviet Union...
...The fight continues—each side trying to persuade the Moscow Council that it can best serve the Jewish people...
...Numbering between one and two million people, they represent the third largest group of Jews in the world today...
...The sense of the oneness of the Jewish people is intense • It's Friday night in Moscow...
...As a friend said to me, The Russia of the streets is cold and rude, but I love the kitchens—that's where life is, sitting around the kitchen table, talking...
...I visited Hebrew classes in Leningrad full of attractive men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s...
...Today, Jewish life in the Soviet Union takes place in public...
...The answer obviously is both...
...the other engaged in a simple dialogue with a Leningrad native whose Hebrew was not much more advanced than the students...
...It is Yom haShoah, and if you didn't know you were in Moscow, you wouldn't know where you were...
...In a society that has broken down, where people have so litde variety of food, where people don't know what will happen tomorrow or next year, where most Jews experience antisemitism in some form, where nobody believes major economic improvements will occur for at least 20 more years, there is so much human warmth, so much energy, so much good Jewish life...
...Some don't want to leave parents or children...
...to learn about that Jewish life...
...Three hundred people sit in teary silence as an actress in black dramatizes a section from Fassily Grossman's novel Life and Fate—a letter from a mother in a ghetto to her son in the Russian Army...
...Americans and Israelis successfully built a movement to free Soviet Jews...
...With her late husband, Paul, she wrote Mixed Blessings: Marriages between Jews and Christians (Doubleday, 1987...
...With the support of outside groups— especially the Israeli government, the American Joint Distribution Committee and Chabad—the Soviet Jews have founded six day schools, 45 Sunday schools, numerous yeshivot, cultural centers, libraries, theater groups, dance groups, choirs and sports clubs...
...The caretaker of the synagogue had locked the building...
...We are outside because Congregation Hineni, an affiliate of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, is locked out of the shut...
...The fragmentation of the Jewish people thrives in the Soviet Union, too...
...Soviet Jews learn and then they do...
...All this in three years...
...The network of Hebrew classes and aliyah information centers set up by various emissaries from Israel is impressive...
...Russians lead the service, their uncertain voices strengthened by the practiced heartiness of visitors from Israel and the United States...
...Does it only exist as a prelude to aliyah (immigration to Israel) or does it have roots in communities that will be around for another 10 or 20 years...
...ing a Jewish life on Soviet soil, gradually strengthening institutions that will serve the Jews who will remain in the Soviet Union, whether for two years or 20 or 50...
...One class was following a young Israeli through complicated grammatical phrases...
...Israelis from Chabad (Lubavitcher Orthodox) through Reform, from Agudat Yisrael (ultra-religious party with anti-Zionist orientation) through Mapam (Zionist Socialist party), are in the Soviet Union, preparing prospective olim (immigrants) to adopt their agenda when they setde in Israel...
...But many will not soon leave the Soviet Union...
...They have few native experts, and many leaders leave just when they become sufficiendy educated to teach...
...I talked with many people in Hebrew— the only language we shared...
...some don't want to give up their work and culture...
...Rather, because a group of Chabadniks occupied the synagogue the day before to wrest it from Hineni, which had permission to use the building from the Moscow City Council...
...A few vignettes may convey the new Jewish vitality: • Six young men, intense, smoking, lean across a table in a darkly lit Moscow office full of books and papers to talk about the magazine they want to publish—a combination of political analysis, social commentary, Soviet Jewish history, literature and community news...
...They must unearth a culture and a history that had been erased from their people's memory for two or three generations...
...We must stay connected—each of us teaching and learning, one with the other...
...Sf Rabbi Rachel Cowan is director of fewish affairs for the Nathan Cummings Foundation...
...We stand around flickering candles in the synagogue courtyard...
...Not because the Russian authorities prohibit our worship...
...Members of the Association for Judaics and Jewish Culture, they recently published a Russian-Hebrew grammar, sponsored an international conference on Soviet Jewish history and signed a contract with Bar-Ilan University for Bar-Ilan to train 60 Soviet Jews to teach Jewish history in the U.S.S.R...
Vol. 16 • August 1991 • No. 4
