Jewish Week - 03.28.2003

 

 

 

 

The Jewish Week  

Binding Their Ties

Once-isolated, now vital Russian community is starting to meld with organized American Jewry. 

 

By Walter Ruby - Special To The Jewish Week

Inna Arolovich never expected to feel at home in the American Jewish organizational world, which she long saw as a less-than-friendly environment. 

A veteran activist within New York’s Russian-speaking community — in 1990 Arolovich co-founded an immigrant advocacy organization known as the American Association of Russian Jews (now the American Association of Jews from the former Soviet Union), and today serves as head of its New York chapter — she believed that her community was treated like an unloved stepchild by a patronizing and sometimes hectoring American Jewish establishment. 

In 1995, she told Moment magazine, “We feel like there is a glass wall between American Jewry and Russian Jews. We have met with little response to our efforts to work with American Jewish organizations.” 

Yet these days, Arolovich is singing a very different tune. 

“Not only do we get financial support from UJA-Federation, but we are made to feel welcome on a personal level,” she said. “As a result, my attitude and that of others [with the Russian community] has been transformed.” 

What has happened over the past half decade to so dramatically improve a relationship between two communities that was often characterized by miscommunication and misunderstanding? 

On one hand, the Russian Jewish community has developed a cadre of volunteer community activists and a class of affluent businesspeople and professionals eager to contribute both money and energy to the development of the Russian community. 

At the same time, the leadership of UJA-Federation and many of its agencies has awakened to a stark reality — with Jews from the former Soviet Union comprising anywhere from one-fifth to one-quarter of the New York City’s five boroughs, the very survival of a sustainable Jewish community is at risk unless it can prove more adept at connecting with the Russians. 

As UJA-Federation president John Ruskay remarked last week to participants at the annual dinner of the Russian Division Young Leadership Group, “You have a lot to teach us about how to live as Jews and are very important to us; every one of you. The question we confront is whether we can reach out to our [respective] communities and bring them together. If we can’t do better than we have, we’ll end up with two separate Jewish communities.” 

The result of this mutual meeting of hearts, minds and wallets has been an unprecedented coming together of the Russian-speaking and American Jewish organizational worlds — to a point. 

While many Russians have become involved in the work of UJA-Federation and its agencies, they have tended to do so within a specifically Russian context. 

The first manifestation of this “together but distinct” philosophy was the Russian Division of UJA-Federation, which was founded 13 years ago and has allowed newly affluent Russian-speaking Americans to learn the ropes of American Jewish philanthropy while remaining within a comfortable Russian atmosphere. 

In recent years, the Russian Division has raised $500,000 to $700,000 annually for the UJA-Federation general campaign. 

The second wave of this phenomenon, the Council of Jewish Emigre Community Organizations, was founded a year and a half ago as a federation-affiliated and supported central coordinating body for New York’s Russian Jewish community. 

COJECO’s mission is to provide a united voice for 26 grassroots organizations within the Russian community and to advocate on behalf of these groups to the mainstream community, especially UJA-Federation and its network of agencies. 

In addition, COJECO’s 21-member board of directors, which includes many of the most affluent Russians in New York, is expected to contribute its energy and financial resources to uplifting the Russian community. 

Now being launched is a third organization, Russian-American Jews for Israel (RAJFI), which in the words of its founder and president, Dr. Daniel Branovan, intends to “advocate on behalf of Israel among Russian Jews, who speak with a more cohesive and stronger voice on behalf of the government of Israel and its policies than does the American Jewish community as a whole.” 

Misha Galperin, a Russian-born communal activist who served as chief operating officer at New York UJA-Federation, said the ongoing improvement in relations between the two communities stemmed from a belated recognition by Jewish groups in New York and elsewhere that the only way to tap the resources and energy of Russian Jews was to grant them a distinct space within the larger communal structure. 

“The idea that the Jews of the former Soviet Union would simply be absorbed into the larger community was both unrealistic and inappropriate,” said Galperin, now executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington. 

“What is true of the Conservative or Reform movement is true of the Russian Jewish community as well; namely that people feel an enhanced sense of Jewish identity when they are part of a particular subgroup of Jews. Being identified as a Russian-speaking Jew is the best way to identify with the American Jewish community as a whole.” 

COJECO originated from a strong feeling in the late 1990s among Russian-speaking professionals and laypeople in the Russian Division and various federation agencies that a new umbrella body for the Russian community was urgently needed. The Russian Division is empowered to contribute only to the general campaign and could therefore not address specific needs in the Russian community. 

At the same time, the two dozen Russian grassroots organizations had sprung up over the past decade. Among them were groups representing World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors and the disabled; women’s groups, engineers and scientists; parents of Russian children in the New York City schools; and “minority” populations like the Bukharans and Mountain Jews. 

Many of these bodies were knocking on the doors of UJA-Federation and its agencies with overlapping requests for funding and programming. 

The impetus for creating COJECO came from the Advisory Committee for Emigres, or ACE, an immigrant-mentoring program under the joint aegis of the New York Association for New Americans and UJA-Federation. 

ACE director Bella Zelkin worked with Galperin, Russian Division director Lydia Vereljan, Gary Rubin and Boris Kerdimun of UJA-Federation’s Commission on the Jewish People, and Susan Green of the Jewish Community Relations Council to create a structure for the new organization with a board of directors independent of the grassroots Russian groups for which the organization would advocate. 

Many of those invited to serve on the COJECO board are also on the board of the Russian Division, including its new president, Felix Frenkel. He recently stepped down as chairman of the division. 

According to Frenkel, a risk arbitrage expert, “COJECO is designed to serve as the principal bridge between the Russian speakers and the American Jewish community. We are bringing the message and expertise of UJA-Federation to the Russian community, and the soul of Russian Jewry to the mainstream community.” 

A critical question involved the choice of executive director. After a protracted search, the decision was made to appoint Alec Brook-Krasny, a former Muscovite and recently minted politician. Brook-Krasny excited many in the Brighton Beach community with the dream of electing a Russian to represent Brighton and surrounding areas during pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful runs for City Council and state Assembly in south Brooklyn. 

Charming and seemingly unflappable, with the glad-handing and coalition-building skills of a far more experienced politician, Brook-Krasny appeared to be the person most capable of maintaining smooth relations with UJA-Federation machers while keeping hard-bitten Russian community activists on board until serious money started to arrive for their community organizations. 

There is still some distance to go before that happens. UJA-Federation agreed to give COJECO a yearly grant of $100,000 for operating costs plus a supplemental grant of $20,000 to divvy up among the grassroots organizations (a figure expected to be significantly higher in the coming fiscal year). COJECO board members kicked in $40,000 this year in personal contributions, which means the organization now has $60,000 to contribute directly to the 26 Russian community groups. 

Yet so far, COJECO has distributed only a one-time grant of $1,000 to each of the groups. An application process is under way for a series of $5,000 grants that will be distributed later this year. 

According to Brook-Krasny, financial support is only one of several important advantages that COJECO offers the Russian community groups. 

“Federation agencies like NYANA, FEGS, the Metropolitan Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty and the Jewish Community Relations Council are sharing with COJECO valuable experience in fields like leadership building and grant writing,” he said. “We are also in a position to refer Russians in need of an array of services to the various federation agencies that provide them.” 

Brook-Krasny cited as an example COJECO channeling hundreds of Russian immigrants traumatized or out of work due to the impact of 9-11 to FEGS, which has a large array of psychological, vocational training and job finding services. COJECO is working with the agencies to help immigrants secure the required American licenses to work in fields like teaching and ambulance services. 

In addition, Brook-Krasny said, COJECO received free from a millionaire Russian businessman a suite of offices in downtown Manhattan that it is sharing with the grassroots organizations, many of which previously had no office space. 

Nearly all of the Russian grassroots groups contacted for this article expressed positive sentiments concerning the impact of COJECO on their operations. 

“Thanks to COJECO we now have office space and a $1,000 grant, and have applied for $5,000 more,” said Dmitri Margulies, a documentary filmmaker who heads the United Association of East European Culture, which promotes appreciation of Jewish culture in the immigrant community. 

Equally as important, he said, is the opportunity COJECO offers him to meet directly with American Jewish leaders. 

“I never had this chance before and I am very glad for it because we want American Jews to better understand the Jews who lived under the Soviet regime for 70 years,” Margulies said. 

Isa Katzab of the Association of Holocaust Survivors from the FSU said that COJECO had helped his group make critical contacts with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and has undertaken a project together with FEGS to create a museum exhibition on the impact of the Holocaust inside the former USSR. 

“These are wonderful developments,” Katzab said. 

Semen Bentsianov of the American Brotherhood of Russian Disabled said his group “is the poorest” of the grassroots groups and “the one most ignored by COJECO.” 

“We want to integrate our invalids into American society, but Brook-Krasny won’t give us a hand,” Bentsianov said. 

Brook-Krasny said a COJECO grant for ABRUD is on the way and that COJECO has linked the agency and its clients to services by FEGS. Nevertheless, he said, Bentsianov “does nothing but complain and demand more.” 

For his part, Ruskay remarked, “So far the reports concerning COJECO’s performance are very promising.” 

Noting that UJA-Federation president Larry Zicklin and its board chairman Morris Offit meet with the leadership of COJECO on an ongoing basis, Ruskay concluded that supporting COJECO “is very much on our agenda. More needs to be done to engage the energy of the Russian community within UJA-Federation and other parts of the organized New York Jewish community.”