Washington Jewish Week - 07.06.2000

 

(Read about NCSJ's June 2000 Community Service trip to Ukraine)

American Jewish support urged in Ukraine

by Deborah N. Cymrot
Community Editor

The situation seems hopeless: The economy is depressed; the young people are educated but have no prospects; even if they do arrive, the elderly’s pension checks don’t cover the cost of food; the medical system is not just inadequate but positively dangerous; and the anti-Semites are uninhibited in expressing their hostility.

The situation inspires hope: Ordinary freedoms exhilarate the people, state-sponsored anti-Semitism is over, Jewish institutions are experiencing a renaissance and Jews are returning to their religion.

Both statements are true about Jewish life in Ukraine 10 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, according to Lesley Weiss, director of community services and cultural affairs for NCSJ: Advocates on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic States & Eurasia (formerly the National Conference on Soviet Jewry).

During a visit there last month that combined professional and personal business (she joined her mother, Irene, and brothers Philip and Ron for a trip to her mother’s hometown), Weiss saw close-up some of the pressing problems facing Jews in Ukraine and also what Jewish money and Jewish involvement from the United States can accomplish.

NCSJ’s mission has changed from “Let my people go” to “Let my people learn,” Weiss said. It supports the building of Jewish infrastructure and education for those who choose to stay as well as aliyah for those who want to move to Israel.

Aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and Boston’s Jewish community have made an enormous difference in Dnepropetrovsk, she said. The city now has its own day school, a teachers’ center to train Jewish educators and a special-needs center for children with up-to-date equipment, doctors and specialists as well as other educational, humanitarian and medical institutions.

Two cities where the unmet needs are great are Uzhhorod and Mukacevo, in the same area as Weiss’ mother’s hometown. Before World War II, they were “full of Jews, 40 to 60 percent of the population,” and important centers of commerce and Jewish learning. Now, only about 600 Jews remain in Uzhhorod and 500 in Mukacevo, most of them elderly survivors.

In Uzhhorod, the Russians had confiscated the synagogue; only one-half of the building has been returned to the Jewish community. The other part houses three non-Jewish families. In the courtyard through which the Jews must pass to reach the shul, there is lots of trash and, more troubling, vicious dogs. The Jews are hoping for help in obtaining different housing for the families and aid in convincing authorities to return other confiscated property.

Mukacevo’s Hungarian-born rabbi runs a soup kitchen for the elderly; the JDC runs another. At least on Shabbat, the pensioners who come have a plentiful meal. Sixty people were there on the Friday night that Weiss visited.

In Uzhhorod, the plight of one veteran who went out of his way to help the Weisses weighed heavily on them. His 55-year-old daughter, a widowed nurse, is gravely ill with kidney disease. She can’t go to a hospital for treatment; conditions are so bad there that it would surely hasten her death. Instead, she has to dialyze herself. The necessary medical fluids cost $1,500 a month and must be brought from outside the country. He beseeched them to help.

As Lesley Weiss described the situation in the two cities at some length, her mother piped in. These places needed to be adopted, like Dnepropetrovsk. “I have some ideas on who should do it,” she said, implying that Washington’s Jewish community take on some of their needs.

“When I go there, they see me as their messenger to the American Jewish community. This could have been us,” Lesley said. They see me as their representative to let people know they need help. That’s what my job is.”

Va. woman’s ‘surreal’ visit to her hometown For Irene Fogel Weiss of Fairfax, walking through her childhood home in the Transcarpathian village of Botragy, now part of Ukraine, was in some ways like entering a time warp. Nothing had changed, and everything had. The stucco exterior, the doors, windows, flooring — even the bedroom wall design that had been painted with a patterned roller — were what she had left behind that day in 1944 when the village’s 10 Jewish families were forced out of their homes and gathered in the town hall for deportation. But the prosperous, well-maintained home imprinted in her memory now stood empty, overtaken by dirt, decay and deterioration. And today, there are no Jews living in Botragy. Visiting the train station created a similar sense of being transported back in time. “Ours was the only family to send the girls to school past sixth grade. There I was sitting, in a daze, on the same bench where I would wait as an 11-year-old for the train to take me to school. It’s not real, I was thinking. It’s surreal.” The villagers who gathered around Weiss as she stood outside her old home — ancient, bent-over, gap-toothed men and women — remembered the Fogels. Her father had owned a lumberyard, an important business in a region where heating with wood was the norm. One old man knew all kinds of details about her family. His family lived next door and had shared a well with hers. With a shock, Weiss realized that the old men and women whom she had taken for her parents’ contemporaries were in fact her own, and the old man was five years younger than she Some could recite the names of her parents and all her siblings. “She was killed,” or “he was killed,” she told them as they went through the list. Of the nine people living in her home — parents, six children and an aunt — only she and one older sister survived. Caught up in their own troubles, the villagers sighed frequently as they shared their experiences since the war. During Russian rule, there was little freedom and they wouldn’t have been able to talk openly with outsiders, they said, but at least they had regular pensions. Now, they didn’t have enough money for food, and many of them were suffering from cancer. Listening to their tales of woe, Weiss pulled out five $20 bills and gave one each to five people standing near her. That $20 would provide more than a few months’ worth of pension checks. The next town, Batavo, only five minutes away, was where her grandparents had lived. Her grandfather also had been a prosperous businessman, the owner of a flour mill. Some people recounted stories of how he had extended credit to their families. As she stood before the unused, partially demolished mill, once a regional institution, she could still see the farmers with their carts lined up along the road, waiting to have their grain ground, Weiss said. While Weiss did more giving than getting during her trip, she did gain one precious memento — a tiny school photograph that includes the only remaining image of one of her murdered sisters.  — Deborah N. Cymrot