Jerusalem Post - 06.20.2002

 

The Jerusalem Post

Our Man In Siberia: Home, Weary, Amazed

By Elli Wohlgelernter

Back here in Jerusalem now, after a tiring trip [to Siberia] spanning eight time zones. But learning about new Jewish communities is always worth getting up early for dawn flights on rickety looking old planes. 

Why? Because you realize how similar we Jews all are, even those living at the very end of the world. What's sad, however, is the Jewishly deprived state of those communities, which have been desperately fighting back from having lived repressed Jewish lives under Communism. 

But fighting they are, with help from organizations like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency, Habad, and the Institute for Jewish Studies, an organization run by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. 

All do their share, with each concentrating on different target groups: the Joint helps run social programs, the agency helps with aliya and ulpan, Habad with day schools, and the Institute with bringing Yiddishkeit to adults of all ages. They are all indispensable, working hard in a system that may be technically free from Communism, but is still tainted with a bureaucratic, plodding infrastructure. 

The organizations have worked miracles helping revitalize these communities, which most certainly would have disappeared within a generation had these groups not stepped in a decade ago when communism fell. 

One measure of success has been the aliya. To take one region as an example, 19,208 people have made aliya from the Khaborovsk region of eastern Siberia since 1995. They have come from towns you have probably never heard of, let alone imagined Jews living in: Arsenev, Dainegorsk, Nakhodka, Ussuriisk, Komsomolsk, Amursk, Blagoveschensk, Sakhalin, Magadan, Ulan-Ude, and Nikolaevsk. 

There are many factors contributing to this aliya, one being economic: the highest year was 1999, which followed the ruble's plummet in August 1998. The lowest aliya will probably be this year, as many are afraid to come because of the security situation. In the meantime, there is an increase of Jewish awareness in the communities, as thousands of previously lost Jewish souls eagerly move forward towards greater involvement in their religion. 

One interesting phenomenon is an ever-increasing interest among gentiles to become Jewish, or just to connect with the Jewish community with no other interest, like making aliya. 

One person I spoke to was 21-year-old Boris Sherba, a student from Novokuznetzk, a city of 600,000 located six hours by train from Novosibirsk. There are an estimated 2,000 Jews there, though only 250 are part of the Kehilla. 

"I want to become a Jew," Sherba told me. "I have a feeling that I'm connected to this community, that I should live a Jewish life. I've learned other cultures, like German my grandfather is German and of course Russian culture, but I never felt any connection to any of it. I've spent three years searching for this Jewish connection." 

Most amazing, Sherba leads the Institute for Jew Studies Bayit LeMidrash Jewish studies program in Novokuznetzk. 

"It gives me a feeling of Jewish life," he said, "to feel what it is to be a Jew." 

Mikhael Sapoznikov, the shaliah aliya for the Jewish Agency in Khaborovsk, said it happens all over. 

"In every city I come to, there's a Russian who asks to convert," he said. 

Proof, according to Steinsaltz, that Russia is not an inherently anti-Semitic country.

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