JTA - 08.13.2004

"Tales From The Pale": Journeys In Ukraine

Women Seek To Become Rabbis

Jews Look To Date

U.S. Shul Donates Torah

Synagogues Fall Into Disrepair

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If I were a rabbi: Jewish women struggle for acceptance in Ukraine 

By Sue Fishkoff

ODESSA, Ukraine, Aug. 11 (JTA) -- Julia Grisebshenko is facing a lot of nastiness in her quest to become Ukraine's first female rabbi. 

First, there are the rumors that Grisebshenko, the leader of Odessa's Reform congregation for the past four years, is not Jewish -- which she is. Then there are the whispers that she's an unwed mother -- which she isn't. 

But the most damning "defect" of all is undeniably true: Grisebshenko, 28, is a woman, and that's a serious hurdle to overcome in a country where Jews and non-Jews alike expect rabbis to be both Orthodox and male. 

"It was a mistake to send a woman here," said Kira Verkhovskaya, chairman of the board of Odessa's Jewish Community Center, a tough, chain-smoking woman one might not expect to come out with such a comment. 

"You hear that in every city in the former Soviet Union," says Rabbi Nelly Shulman, who at 32 is chief rabbi of Russia's Reform movement and one of three native-born Reform rabbis working in the former Soviet Union. 

Grisebshenko hopes to become the fourth. A graduate of the Reform movement's Machon, a two-year "para-rabbinic" training institute in Moscow, she will be entering rabbinical college this August in Berlin. 

"I think it was davka the right decision to send me to Odessa," Grisebshenko says, using the word that loosely translates as "despite it all" in Hebrew. 

"There are two 'chief' rabbis in this city, both fighting over who's the real chief. Because I'm a woman, they don't fight with me the same way. I work quietly, and I've been able to build up my congregation." 

Grisebshenko was born in Bryansk, a city on the Ukrainian-Russian border, to a mother who fought with the Jewish partisans' brigade in World War II. 

Her father's parents, Jews from Poland and the Uzbek region of Bukhara, handed out matzah once a year at a family dinner, although the young Julia never understood why. 

In 1989, as Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of openness hit Bryansk full-force, a friend whispered to the 13-year-old girl that a Jewish Sunday school was being organized. Grisebshenko started going. By 15, she was teaching there; at 16, she was an activist and attending summer camp. 

"The JCC director wrote a letter saying I was 18, since it was an adult camp," she recalled. 

"He was leaving for Israel, and he told me he wanted to make sure there would be good leaders to take his place." 

By 1995, when she was 19, Grisebshenko had become a regular at activities sponsored by Chabad-Lubavitch, the only Jewish religious organization in the city. She was already working for various other Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Agency for Israel and Betar, and was teaching Jewish history and traditions. 

"The Chabad rabbi liked me, and said I'd go far," she recalls. "I asked what he meant, and he said someday I'd be the wife of a rabbi. 

"I told him, 'No, that's not enough for me.' " 

Three years later, Grisebshenko applied to Machon, then located in Kiev; it moved to Moscow in 2000. 

"That first year in Machon was the happiest of my life," she said. "I already had the basics in Hebrew and Judaism, so I could study more in-depth and explore deeper questions. Each day I studied, I understood that I'd made the right choice." 

After graduation, the Ukrainian Reform Association invited her to organize the fledgling Odessa congregation. She did so, and was soon eager to move on to rabbinical studies. 

But the movement wanted her to wait. 

"They said, it's not enough to plant a seed, you have to make sure it grows," she says. 

So she waited. One year, two years, three years. 

The congregation moved three times, finally landing in the cramped quarters it now rents for $510 a month, a hefty chunk of the $880 monthly allowance it receives from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Reform headquarters in Kiev. That budget also includes Grisebshenko's $200 monthly salary. 

This year she finally received permission to leave for Berlin. 

It won't be an easy move. Her husband is "uncomfortable" with her decision, and hasn't decided whether to accompany her. 

Hardest of all, she has to leave her 18-month-old daughter behind, at least temporarily. She's determined, however, to see it through. 

"A rabbi is a teacher, and that's what I want to do," she says. "The young generation, my generation, is leading our parents back to Judaism. I'm very sure that my daughter will know even more than me, because she's growing up with it. She was singing 'Shabbat Shalom' in the womb." 

This article is one in a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. 

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Matchmaker, matchmaker: Singles in Ukraine struggle to find Jewish mates 

By Sue Fishkoff

CHERKASSY, Ukraine, Aug. 11 (JTA) -- Think it's hard finding your soul mate in New York City? Try Cherkassy, Ukraine. 

"There are very few Jewish men, and as you get older, even fewer," says Marina Olexinko, 25, a teacher in the Jewish Agency for Israel's kindergarten in this tired, gray Ukrainian city along the Dnepr River, a two-hour drive southeast of Kiev. 

"And Jewish men like to marry Ukrainian women," charges Lena Horbatyuk, 31, the director of Cherkassy's Chabad youth movement, referring to non-Jewish women. 

Olexinko adds: "My children will be Jewish, no matter what my husband is. Still, I'm so involved in Jewish life, that if my husband isn't Jewish, he won't understand what's important to me. But my chances of finding him in Cherkassy?" 

She brings her right thumb and forefinger together in a circle. "Zero." 

The Jewish pickings are mighty slim here east of the Carpathian Mountains, according to young Ukrainian Jews on the dating circuit. And it's not so easy elsewhere in Ukraine, home to anywhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Jews, many singles say. 

Looking for a Jewish mate in the former Soviet republic is complicated by the fact that many, if not most, of the young Jews active in Hillel and other Jewish organizations have intermarried parents. 

And in the Soviet era, it was virtually unheard of for the non-Jewish spouse to convert. 

Although the Reform movement, with its acceptance of patrilineal descent, did not even exist in the region until the mid-1990s, young post-Soviet Jews tend to have a flexible interpretation of what it means to be Jewish. If you self-identify as Jewish, they say, that makes you part of the community. 

Like most cities in the former Pale of Settlement, Cherkassy once had a large, thriving Jewish community. 

According to the director of the Hesed welfare center in Cherkassy, Dmitry Spivakovsky, Jews made up of 65 percent of the population, some 21,000 people, before World War I. 

The Holocaust and 70 years of communism decimated the community, and today, government statistics put the city's Jews at a mere 880 out of a total population of almost 300,000. 

And in the new Ukraine, where the emerging Jewish community is becoming as concerned as American Jews with "continuity," hooking up with a fellow Jew has become a priority -- even as many of the eligible, Jewishly aware young people have emigrated and moved to Jerusalem, New York or Berlin. 

What's the sense of revitalizing the country's Jewish community, young Ukrainian Jews wonder, if their chances of creating new Jewish families are next to nil? 

"The population of the Ukraine is decreasing, Jewish and non-Jewish," says 26-year-old Mikhail Povolotskyi, who, like many of his friends, is living abroad -- in his case, as an engineering student in Rome. "The average age of a Jew in Cherkassy is over 50. Kiev and Kharkov have a future, but the smaller places? I won't come back here; It's a problem to find a nice Yiddishe maidele." 

His words make the young women in the room roll their eyes. 

"You're just not looking hard enough," Horbatyuk says. 

"You married a non-Jew!" Povolotskyi counters. 

Horbatyuk sighs. "I'm jealous of the young people today," she admits. "You have lots of opportunities to meet other Jews. There are the Sochnut camps," she says, using the Hebrew word for the Jewish Agency for Israel, "Chabad, Shabbat programs, Jewish youth groups. We didn't have that when I was single." 

"Two people who met in the Sochnut camp in February got married this week," chimes in 22-year-old Zhennya Pysina, a Hesed staffer who leads an "English Tea" weekly conversation club through Cherkassy's Hillel. 

Two years ago when she started her club, 15 young Jews showed up each week. Now, she's lucky if she gets 10. 

"They've all left for Israel and Germany," she says. Then she brightens. "I'm dating a Jewish guy now. We met two years ago at the youth camp. 

"Honestly, I'm really glad that he's Jewish," she continues. "But life changes and we could split up. If I meet a non-Jew who appreciates my values and emotions, and I love him very much, it won't be a problem. If he loves me, he'll love my traditions." 

Things aren't much better 250 miles to the south in Odessa, according to 25-year-old Irina Zborovskaya, a sociologist with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee who's looking for Mr. Right in this Black Sea seaport. "Jewish women in Odessa are very intelligent, and we have to compete with all the beautiful girls who wear flashy clothes," she laments, also referring to non-Jewish women. "There are a lot of rich men here, and they don't want a wife who's too smart." 

Zborovskaya says marrying a Jewish man is important to her, yet she's almost over the hill in a society that still marries young. 

"I like to cook, I can sew and knit, I like to dance and sing, I like children, and I'm not ugly," she declares with some exasperation. "But it's clearly not enough. If I were willing to marry a non-Jew, I'd have a bigger pool to choose from." 

Three years ago, she registered with a local marriage agency. Two men came from the United States to meet her. "One was 20 years older than me, and all he talked about was how much money he makes," she recalls. 

"The other, we didn't like each other right away. The agency then set me up on dates with local men, also non-Jews. One was married, and he didn't tell me until we'd been talking for hours." 

By all rights, Zborovskaya shouldn't be having this kind of trouble. 

Ever since Odessa's governor-general invited Jewish merchants from Galicia and Austro-Hungary to settle here in the early 1830s, Ukraine's most southern port city has been a haven for Jewish intellectual, political and economic endeavors. 

By the early 20th century, one-third of Odessa was Jewish, making it the world's largest Jewish community after New York and Warsaw. 

Seventy percent perished in the Holocaust, but the community quickly reasserted itself after the war and, even during Soviet times, maintained a degree of independence unthinkable in most of the former Soviet Union. 

Still today, Odessa is known as a very Jewish city. 

"I think that every second person, if not every person, in Odessa has some Jewish connection," says Liza Gudina, 21, a professional flutist with the National Philharmonic. 

Gudina is sitting with a dozen other young people in Odessa's Hillel clubhouse, a rented apartment filled with overstuffed, second-hand furniture, where a coffeepot is always steaming, and young Jews come and go all evening. 

"When I came to Odessa five years ago for work, I had no friends at all," says 22-year-old Arseniy Finberg, who works for the shipping giant Maersk Ukraine. "The next day I came to Hillel and immediately had friends." 

Maybe if Zborovskaya spent less time at work, and started hanging out at Hillel, these students say, she wouldn't be so lonely. 

"You know Hillel's mission statement," says Finberg with a sly grin. " 'Maximizing opportunities for Jews to do Jewish with other Jews.' " 

Amid peals of laughter from the rest of the room, he continues. "Seriously, for me it's really important for my future wife to be Jewish. And a place to find that is Hillel." 

Of course, that's not the only reason young post-Soviet Jews come to Hillel, says the Hillel director in Kiev, Osik Akselrud, who has headed the group in the Ukrainian capital since it was founded in 1995. 

But in creating a friendly, lively place for young Jews to congregate and learn about their heritage, Hillel has also become a de facto hot spot for Jewish matchmaking. 

"We've celebrated 11 weddings, all people who met at Hillel," Akselrud says. 

"It's easier to meet a Jewish girl here than on the street," Felix Indenbaum, 23, agrees. "Hillel gathers together people who are more deep, thoughtful, spiritual. We discuss all sorts of things -- Jewish life, traditions, values. It's a great foundation for building relationships." 

Viktoria Dianova, 25, met her husband, 31-year-old Alexander, at Hillel in 1997, when both were students at Kiev's Solomon University, the city's Jewish university. 

"Both my parents were Jewish, and I thought I wanted a Jewish husband, but it wasn't obligatory," Dianova says. "I wanted to fall in love first, and then see." 

If she hadn't gotten close to Alexander when the two were leading a Hillel-sponsored Passover seder in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, they would probably have drifted apart. 

"I wasn't concerned about marrying Jewish, but my mother wanted me to," admits Alexander. "She didn't marry a Jew, but she rediscovered her roots and wanted me to have a Jewish family." 

The prevalence of intermarriage throws a wrench into the "Who is a Jew?" question. 

"Here in Hillel we don't divide Jews by halachah," or Jewish law, Finberg says. "We even have non-Jews." 

In fact, one of the founders of Odessa's Hillel has no Jewish relations at all. 

When Hillel International heard this, Finberg relates, "they told us to kick him out." 

But all 300 delegates to a convention of Hillel activists from the former Soviet Union signed a petition demanding his reinstatement; the international body acquiesced. 

"If a person feels Jewish, it doesn't matter if your mother or your father is Jewish," declares Odessa's current Hillel director, 21-year-old Boris Fikhtman, who says he met his girlfriend five years ago through Hillel. "If in your heart you're Jewish, then you are Jewish." 

This article is one in a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. 

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U.S. temple gives Torah, laptop to sister congregation in Ukraine 

By Sue Fishkoff

ODESSA, Ukraine, Aug. 11 (JTA) -- Temple Emanu-El, a large Reform congregation in San Jose, Calif., had a few extra Torahs. The tiny, financially struggling Reform congregation in Odessa, Ukraine, had none. 

So in late April, three members of Emanu-El took one of their Torahs, which had been restored by a scribe in Los Angeles, and put it on a plane to Europe. 

They drove it around Austria and Germany in the back of a rental car -- including a trip to Mauthausen -- and brought it to Odessa, Ukraine, where on April 30 it was presented to the local Reform congregation in an emotional Kabbalat Shabbat ceremony marking the twinning of the two communities. 

"We had three Torahs that weren't kosher," said Jonathan Hirshon, a San Jose marketing consultant who spearheaded the twinning project. "We had the best of the three repaired, and decided to donate it to Odessa." 

As befitting a gift from a temple in California's Silicon Valley, congregation officials also donated some high-tech equipment to the Ukrainian Jews. 

Hirshon says Emanu-El chose Odessa because the city has about 1 million residents, roughly the same as San Jose. Also, many Emanu-El congregants have family ties to the Black Sea resort. 

In fact, Emanu-El Rabbi Dana Magat, who along with ritual committee co-chairwoman Dawn Chaffin accompanied Hirshon to Odessa, found out just a month before their trip that his own ancestors were from Odessa. 

"Many American Jews have their roots in Ukraine, and this is a way to give back to those roots," said Kiev's Rabbi Alex Dukhovny, chief rabbi of the Ukrainian Reform movement. 

Dukhovny noted that, including Odessa, nine of Ukraine's 30 Reform congregations now have their own Torah scrolls. 

In Russia, six of the 31 existing Reform congregations have Torahs, according to the leader of the Reform movement in Russia, Rabbi Nelly Shulman. 

That number pales before the 210 Torah scrolls that are in use at 147 Russian and Ukrainian synagogues affiliated with the Chabad-sponsored Federation of Jewish Communities. 

According to the federation's executive director, Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, most of those Torahs were left in the Soviet Union from pre-Bolshevik days, and returned to Chabad-affiliated congregations by state authorities since 1991; just a few were donated from abroad. 

Berkowitz adds that 150 federation congregations still do not have Torah scrolls, and would welcome foreign partnerships. 

"Twinning" is becoming a popular way for American synagogues to offer moral, and sometimes financial, support to struggling congregations in the former Soviet Union. 

Donating a Torah, often one rescued from the Holocaust, is a way to cement that relationship. All of the Torahs belonging to Reform congregations in Ukraine came from twinned congregations abroad; three of Russia's six were also foreign gifts, including one brought to Chelyabinsk this Passover by a visiting group of Reform rabbinical students from Hebrew Union College. 

Dukhovny wonders whether American Jews can appreciate the impact these donations have on post-Soviet Jewish communities. 

"You in the U.S. grow up with Torahs, but to us it's something new," he said. "Donating a Torah symbolizes a restoration of Jewish life. Its value is beyond money. It's about relationships, human connections. It's a smile between your congregation and ours." 

What makes Emanu-El's donation so unique, however, is that the San Jose group also gave Odessa the high-tech gear: a Hewlett-Packard laptop, fully loaded with software donated by Adobe and Microsoft Ukraine. The California shul also set up the Odessans with a state-of-the-art Web site so the two congregations can maintain an ongoing relationship. 

"We can e-mail each other back and forth with our congregational news, to keep in touch," says Hirshon, who not only purchased the Odessa congregation's domain name, but built their site, set up their e-mail system and spent two days teaching a local congregant how to operate it all. 

On the Friday afternoon before the donation ceremony, Hirshon, Chaffin and Magat met with a dozen members of Odessa's Reform congregation in the group's two-room basement rental apartment. 

The Odessans plied their visitors with questions: How big is the Reform community in America? Is there any anti-Semitism? What is the government's response? Do you have more men than women in your congregation because your rabbi is a man? What do you teach in your Sunday school? 

"Odessa is ripe for a Reform day-care center," said Julia Grisebshenko, the Ukrainian-born "para-rabbi" who has led Odessa's Reform community for the last four years. "Chabad and Ohr Sameah both have preschools, but they only take halachic Jews. It's a very painful problem, because we have a lot of mixed marriages and the children don't have access to a Jewish education." 

"You may be surprised to hear that 60 percent of our preschool is not Jewish," Magat pointed out, eliciting laughter and head-shaking from the Odessans. 

At 6 p.m. that evening, more than 80 local Jews, dressed in their Shabbat finery, squeezed into a rented hall to witness the Torah from California being handed over to their community. 

Grisebshenko was dressed in black trousers and a white silk shirt, a tallit draped across her shoulders. Her eyes shone with excitement. "Today, a new era is opening for us," she said, beaming at the crowd. 

The congregation sang Lecha Dodi, followed by the Amidah. Then Chaffin rose, clutching the Torah to her chest. 

"The Torah is the most precious gift we as a congregation have," she said, her voice shaking. "We in San Jose are blessed to have several. This one came to us soon after the creation of the State of Israel, and it is our great honor to present it to you." 

Tears rolling down her face, Chaffin passed the Torah to Magat, who passed it to Shulman, who handed it carefully to Grisebshenko. 

Holding it tight, the young para-rabbi declared, "We are two different congregations, in two different countries. We speak two different languages. But we share the same faith." 

Shouldering her precious burden, Grisebshenko proudly paraded the scroll around the room as the congregation sang the words, "On three things the world is founded" -- everyone straining forward to touch their Torah for the first time. 

Once back at the lectern, Grisebshenko held the Torah while Magat lifted the covering, laid the scroll on the table and rolled it to Kedoshim, the week's portion. 

Calling the entire congregation to the front of the room, Magat said, "This is your Torah, so I want all of you who are able, to say the first blessing together with me." 

The words spilled out, haltingly, in a variety of accents, but ending together with a loud "Amen." 

After the service, Shulman explained what a tremendous deed had just been performed. 

"One of the most wonderful things San Jose did is provide the Odessa congregation with a laptop, a link to the outside," she said. "Most people don't have computers at home. Especially in more remote places in the FSU that don't get a lot of visitors, it's so important to feel a part of the world Jewish community. 

"But that works two ways," she added. "A lot of American Jews don't get much beyond their own congregations. They don't know how difficult it is for many Jews outside the United States. This kind of act raises awareness that all Jews are responsible for one another." 

This article is one in a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. 

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Odessa synagogue has storied past, but its building's foundation is shaky 

By Sue Fishkoff

ODESSA, Ukraine, Aug. 11 (JTA) -- The names of Odessa's former Jewish residents read like a street directory for Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky, Dizengoff, Bialik, Trumpeldor, Pinsker, Sholem Aleichem and Ahad Ha'Am. 

Back in pre-World War I days, when 30 percent of the city's population was Jewish, this Ukrainian port city on the Black Sea was a hotbed of Jewish intellectual activity and one of the birthplaces of the Zionist movement in the Russian Empire. 

And right in the center of it all stands the Gothic-style, gray stone Brodsky Synagogue. 

It was built in 1863 to replace a small wooden synagogue constructed 20 years earlier by a group of Austro-Hungarian Jews invited to settle in Odessa to bolster the economy of the czar's new port city. 

The Brodsky Synagogue, named after the city of Brody, was the first Reform temple in the Russian Empire. 

It had a mixed-gender choir and a magnificent organ, the first in Eastern Europe, which was played during Shabbat and holiday services. The city's early Zionist leaders held meetings there. Chaim Nachman Bialik's poem "Shabbat Song" was written for it. Sholem Aleichem's fictional character Menachem Mendel went there to plague God with unanswerable questions. 

"Brilliant composers and musicians from all over Europe came here to perform," says Anya Misyuk, a former dissident and a researcher with Odessa's Literary Museum, who has spent almost 15 years uncovering the synagogue's history using old KGB interrogation files. "Every Saturday evening there would be public concerts." 

Even Russian Orthodox priests and government officials came. The composers Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov were influenced by the Jewish music they heard at the synagogue. 

The writer and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin, a non-Jew, said that during the terrible chaos of the Soviet Civil War, which ravaged the area from 1918-1921, the only place one could hear the voice of hope was in Brodsky. 

In 1927, Odessa's 78 synagogues, including Brodsky, were closed by the Bolshevik authorities. Most were destroyed. 

Today, just three remain: Brodsky, still boarded up, its main prayer hall now housing a four-story cement structure containing Odessa's state archives; an 1897 synagogue now belonging to Odessa's Chabad community; and the neo-Classical Great Synagogue, built in the 1860s by the city's Galician Orthodox community. 

Seven years ago, as part of a government program for the restitution of religious property, the Great Synagogue was handed over to Ohr Sameah, an Orthodox group. Three years ago it reopened for services, following renovations paid for by American Jewish supporters. 

And in a festive state ceremony held earlier this year, the Brodsky Synagogue, Eastern Europe's first Reform shul, was handed over to Chabad-Lubavitch. 

Julia Grischenko, the "para-rabbinic" head of Odessa's small Reform congregation, says she and her chairman gathered enough documentation three years ago to convince city authorities that the building belonged to them. "They said to take it," she says. 

But the congregation didn't have the money needed to renovate the interior and fix the cracked foundations without destroying the building's exterior, which is a state architectural monument. 

Chabad did -- they were able to raise the $2 million for reconstruction. 

Grischenko, however, doubts that Chabad, even with its vast fund-raising capabilities, will be able to remove the cement archive safe in the prayer hall. 

Odessa's chief Chabad rabbi, Avraham Wolff, concurs, saying he's not sure what he'll do with the building. 

This article is one in a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

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