From Russia, With Love

Last week, I joined with over a dozen rabbis from the New York area on a UJA-Federation sponsored mission to St. Petersburg, Russia.  The previous week, our president, Alan Klinger, and his wife, Susan, joined a group of lay leaders on a similar trip that also included Moscow.

I’d like to share several highlights of the trip and then try to put it into a larger context.

Naturally, Russia is very different now than it was just 25 years ago in many respects.  A colleague of mine on the trip pointed out that when he was there in the late 80’s, food was scarce for virtually everyone.

Today, food is more widely available.  We ate well at two kosher restaurants, which points to a second major change.

Today, religion can be practiced far more openly than in pre-perestroika times.  We prayed daily in our hotel wearing tallit and tefilin.  We wore kippot in the streets of St. Petersburg.

And we observed a Jewish summer camp, sponsored by the local Jewish community with enormous support from Jewish communities abroad, chief among them the New York community, through the efforts of UJA-Federation of New York.

The camp we observed is organized into 10-day sessions.  During the session, they cover 3 topics – Shabbat, Shoah and Israel.  The director and some of the staff spoke with us about their approach.  They call it a university and give the children latitude in how they engage with the staff.

Why do they call it a university?  Because, as the director put it jokingly, the average St. Petersburg couple has half a dozen PhD’s between them, so they want to make sure the “camp” sounds sufficiently serious.  But they use an educational approach that is much more open than what the children encounter in their secular schools, so it’s more enticing.  The educational piece takes place during the morning, with recreational activities during the afternoon. 

Here’s something hard to believe.  There are children who are brought to that camp, usually at the insistence of grandparents, who don’t know they are Jewish until just before they start the camp.

We observed the last day of the camp.  The children had already learned some Hebrew and they had celebrated one Shabbat together.  For virtually all of the children, this was the first Shabbat experience of their lives. 

We visited the new, state-of-the-art JCC in St. Petersburg, funded in large part by the Federations of Palm Beach and Cleveland.  The JCC offers programs for college students and young adults, the elderly, and children with special needs.  It also contains a Jewish pre-school.

Regarding programming for college students, while we take for granted that in the US there are Hillel rabbis who are graduates of universities themselves and who can relate to the students, there aren’t many such rabbis in Russia, yet. . .

We met a dynamic Reform rabbi, a woman younger than I am, who is serving the Reform synagogue in St. Petersburg.

Many of the people we met at the summer camp and at the JCC told us that they crave an approach to Judaism that is intellectually open.  I had the sense that JTS graduates could do a lot of good if they were willing to serve this community, even for a short while.

Natan Scharansky spoke to us on several occasions.  

He is currently the head of the Jewish Agency in Israel.  He has a wonderful sense of humor.  He said that he spent the same amount of time in the Knesset as he did in the Gulag and found both environments to be quite challenging.  

He pointed out that in the Gulag, in solitary confinement, he prayed every day and somehow felt like he was praying with the Jewish people.  Upon release from prison and emigration to Israel, he went to his first communal service.  At that service, someone walked up to him and adjusted his t’filin.  He heard arguments over who should get a certain honor and what version of the prayers should be recited.  At that moment, he joked, he felt nostalgia for when he used to pray with the Jewish people in solitary confinement!

On a serious note, he shared his sense of how we need to meet the challenges of contemporary Jewry in the Diaspora and in Israel.  He suggested that the younger generation of Jews, wherever they live, needs to be engaged creatively, in keeping with evolving social media and without fear of trying new approaches.

Our group spent an afternoon visiting Jews in need, bringing them food and offering them company.

A few of us visited a 77-year old man.  First, we went shopping for food to bring him.  We were given 500 rubles ($16), about the average monthly amount an elderly person receives through state support, with which to buy food.  The wife of a colleague suggested that we ‘throw in a little extra,’ which of course we did.

Then we visited with Jacob, who told us that he came from a village in Belarus. In 1941 the Nazis rounded up the Jews in his community, shot them, and threw them into a ditch.  His mother, as her final gesture, covered his body with hers, and a Russian partisan eventually discovered him and pulled him out of the ditch.

Jacob suffers from a neurological condition and he lives alone, 20 years after the death of his wife.  Because of the support of the Joint Distribution Committee, he receives 25 hours of homecare per week, which is not nearly enough.

I’d like to put this into a larger framework.

In the final passages of the Book of Numbers, several tribes ask Moses if they can remain east of the Jordan, rather than crossing over with the rest of the people.  Moses initially lambasts them for disloyalty but agrees that they may do so, provided they first accompany the rest of their people as they cross the Jordan and help them to fight the local inhabitants.

Years later, Joshua addresses the descendants of these tribes, urging them to remain faithful to their God and to their people.

The story in the Torah and the follow-up story in the Book of Joshua, raise questions about the concept of inside and outside, who is at the center, who is at the periphery, who defines the essence of the people.

That’s a theme that came up again and again in our trip.  Twenty years ago, following perestroika, all efforts at engaging the Russian Jewish community were devoted to encouraging aliya.  It didn’t occur to anyone that there would ever be vibrant Jewish life in the then Former Soviet Union, so the sole objective was to prepare those who were able to, to leave.

Now, it’s clear that many will remain in Russia, not just the old, but the young, even though a high percentage (30-40%) of young Russian Jews claim they want to leave.

I asked Scharansky what’s going on with the Jewish identity of Israeli Jews and he said that it would be worthwhile for more Israeli Jews to get inspiration from what’s going on in the Diaspora, in Russia and the US.  Our group spent a few minutes talking about the possible merits of a “reverse Birthright,” where Israeli youth visit Diaspora communities.

So the notion of center and periphery, who is in and who is out, is changing.

I watched a group of rabbis have a real hard time listening to one Russian Jew after another say that for them, Judaism is mostly cultural, not religious.

But what many were saying, when we pursued it further, is not that they dislike religion, but that they associate religion with black hats and beards.  What they are looking for, it seems, is a connection to their people and also a connection to something spiritual, which is not easy to articulate.

So we rabbis,  who sometimes imagine ourselves to be on the inside defining what constitutes a religious experience, stopped for a minute to consider that these Jews had a lot to teach us, that “inside” and “outside” are not so easily defined.

And truly, despite the many unique aspects of Russian Jewish life that distinguish it from Jewish life elsewhere, I was struck, in an additional deflation of the simple delineation between inside and outside, by the similar challenges that Jews face everywhere.

At Camp Ramah, two days before I left for Russia, a young man whom I knew since his childhood, now twenty years old, said, “you know, I tend to think of Judaism more as a culture than as a religion.”

The same words that we heard from his contemporaries in Russia.

How to discuss that, how to unpack that, with a new generation, is a challenge that exists in St. Petersburg, New York and Tel Aviv.

Scharansky told us that, when he was in Soviet prison, he got great strength from a book of Tehillim, psalms, that his wife had given him.  In particular, he loved the phrase, ki ata imadi, “for You are with me,” from Psalm 23. 

He said to us that he thought of the “ata” as God, but also as the Jewish people.

I’d say the following.  It is so important for us, as Jews, to support one another wherever we happen to live.  Thousands of years ago it was on both sides of the Jordan; now, the geographic domain is far greater. 

And if, when we are there for each other, we somehow feel God’s blessing, how much the better. 

My trip to Russia gave me some insight into a Jewish community on the other side of the world.  It also shed some light on the challenges and opportunities that face the Jewish community right in our own backyard.

Originally shared at Temple Israel of Great Neck on July 21, 2012