Jewish Currents: How have the Jews of the former Soviet Union fared during the collapse of communism and the growth of "cowboy capitalism" in their countries? Where do they stand politically?

Martin Horwitz: The Jewish communities have always been for a leadership that has stood for order. They've flourished under the post-communist regimes because, very simply, there's been no state or Party anti-Semitism. That's the fundamental change. The economic changes have mostly benefited the Jewish community because, notwithstanding anti-Semitic restrictions in some fields, Jews were educated and urban and equipped to participate in the changes. Certain groups, however, have been put at risk, primarily the isolated, needy elderly and young working families.

There's also been a rise in Jewish mutual aid. That was a significant outcome of Vladimir Gusinsky's starting the Russian Jewish Congress. He rented a hotel, crowned himself president and said: "If you want to be vice presidents, you have to put in $50,000 each." Not everyone could do that, but in many little communities there was a Jewish businessman who began to give in order to be in that ballroom.

Ukraine is five or six years behind Russia in economic development. It never had a Gorbachev. So, for example, you still can't buy land in Ukraine, and it's much more difficult for small businesses to operate. But Ukraine's political leadership has been almost philosemitic.

J.C.: Has there been any hesitation among the Jews of either country about the growth of capitalism?

M.H.: Not that I've observed. You will hear some Jews, especially Party members, saying, "Damn it, we had pensions, we had a safety net," but, in general, the Jews were much quicker to see the phoniness of the old system. With the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign against the Jews after World War II, the Party's anti-Semitism became painfully obvious.

J.C.: Has the rise — and in some cases, the fall — of the so-called "oligarchs," many of them Jewish, had a particular impact on the community?

M.H.: Whatever has been done —Putin's arrest of Khodorkovsky, or the exile of Gusinsky and Berezovsky — has had no effect on the regime's attitude toward Jews. Yes, it meant that the Russian Jewish Congress was not an organization in political favor. And every now and then there's a fear that the Jews might be identified with the robber barons — if you have an anti-Semitic soil, the seeds could grow. There are, of course, Russian political groups that play that card. Interestingly, in Ukraine, although there have been some political scandals involving Jews, the opposition groups did not play the Jewish card.

There is Jewish concern about the general state of civil society. Jews are not happy that Putin seems to feel that he can arrest whomever he wants on whatever grounds. But they don’t see a campaign directed at them in particular.

By the way, from our very beginning in 1993, the JCDF has spent 25 percent of its funding on a variety of human rights projects — not just the monitoring of anti-Semitism. We’ve helped councils form to teach tolerance and oppose the spread of xenophobia — coalitions of teachers, police, a Russian Orthodox priest, a Jewish leader and so on.
 

J.C.: What equipped these Jewish communities to revive in the post-communist period?

M.H.: They had memory of holidays, songs, some Yiddish, even food — in some Ukrainian shtetl towns, even non-Jewish neighbors ate matzoh. There had been Israel's Six-Day War victory, and there was anti-Semitism. With people retiring and going on pension, a number would begin to go to shul. They no longer had to worry about retaliations at work.

It's like those old Russian women who kept the Orthodox Church alive. Year after year, people saw only "older women" attending church, but that continued for 70 years! Once Gorbachev allowed freedom of religion in 1989, Jews jumped in with both feet and began to reclaim synagogues and create societies of Jewish culture all over the Soviet Union.

J.C.: Did the Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns affect Jewish perceptions of Israel?

M.H.: Not to the extent you might expect. The campaigns after the 1967 and 1973 wars only widened Soviet Jewish pride in Israel.

Obviously, I work among communities that have decided to remain where they live — unless economic conditions drastically change — but their decision is no different than if you were living in Des Moines or Detroit. You think about your job, your children’s education, the language, your elderly parents, and so on. In terms of solidarity with Israel, the Russian and Ukrainian Jews are even stronger than American Jews because they have more relatives living in Israel.

J.C.: Is there more Yiddish fluency in Ukraine and Russia than in the U.S.?

M.H.: Yes, because they're a couple of generations behind in terms of losing the language. There are still people alive in Ukraine who went to the last government Yiddish schools, which closed in the late 1930s.

Obviously, there's more interest in recapturing Hebrew, because it's the language of possible emigration as well as the language of the entire religious tradition. It's also the language encouraged by most funders. But Yiddish is also a part of many school curricula, if there's someone to teach it.

The klezmer revival has especially fueled the revival of Yiddish. Even younger people know that if they want to sing those fabulous songs, they have to learn some of the language. In 1993, our first year, we gave travel grants to three klezmer musicians from St. Petersburg to come to the U.S. and go to Henry Sapoznik's Klezkamp, to see how it was organized. At the time, much of the Jewish music in the former Soviet Union was imported — mostly Israeli stage hits, brought in with the encouragement of the Jewish Agency or the Israeli embassy. But the musicians saw the difference in the way that audiences responded to klezmer — with recognition and excitement.

Soon they began to run a klezmer festival, a combination of master classes and a culminating concert. The musicians who attended learned the music in the context of Ashkenazi culture, learned some Yiddish, found their way back to Yiddishkayt, brought it home and became cultural leaders in their own communities. The klezmer boom made them feel a part of a worldwide Jewish phenomenon. They were helped enormously by people like Adrienne Cooper, Zalman Mlotek, Frank London and other American Jewish musicians.

The JCDF now supports "Klez-Fests" in St. Petersburg and Kiev, the former now in its ninth year, the latter in its fifth. There's a network of about 170 "KlezFest" alumni, many playing major roles in their communities

J.C.: In the U.S., if you want to enter into Jewish life, the synagogue is more and more the main portal, which creates a real problem for many Jews who have limited time and interest to give to religious activity. How does the situation differ in Russia and Ukraine?

M.H.: The synagogue is not the primary Jewish address in either country. The communities I'm involved with will work to win synagogue buildings back from the government and proudly refurbish them, but the main places where their Jewish consciousness expresses itself are Jewish schools and at cultural events. For the older intelligentsia, being Jewish is more often about the study of Judaica than the practice of Judaism.

The school is often the place where the communal seder happens. The kids learn about Judaism, Jewish holidays, shabbos and so on and bring that home to their parents. But those parents grew up in an atheistic educational system. They are not able to tolerate, as we do, a credibility gap between Jewish practice and real belief. This is the country of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: "Religious" is a big, serious word. People don't talk about being "observant," they ask: Are you a believer or not? But to go to a concert of Jewish music, or see your kids put on a Purim shpil — why not? You can even invite your non-Jewish friends. These events end up serving as what they call an "immunization" against anti-Semitism.
Unfortunately, however, the real life of the Jewish communities in Russia and Ukraine is being determined not by them, but by the priorities set by international Jewish organizations: the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency in Israel, Chabad [Lubavitcher Hasidim], and others. The communities are economically dependent upon these organizations, which, in turn, set the parameters of what can be taught in the schools or from what kind of Jewish families children will even be accepted. Schools have even been threatened with losing their funds if they don't focus on aliyah programs.

Right now, in fact, there is a crisis facing upwards of 50 Jewish community Sunday schools that were previously dependent upon the Israeli government for funding. They were "handed over" to the Jewish Agency, which has decided it has no funds to support them! Our fund is raising money for 10 grants to be made to schools that have managed to live through this crisis year and can show strong local support for their continued existence. We're looking to sustain this grantmaking with a campaign called "Save the Jewish Community Schools!" that we hope will be supported by Federations and private foundations that we're contacting.

At JCDF, we believe that the communities themselves know what they need. We fund grassroots organizations that are already doing something and can do much more with a small amount of money. For example, $5,000 is a yearly budget for a Sunday school in Ukraine. Giving that amount is like spending $50,000 in the U.S. The budget of a KlezFest in Kiev, with about 40 musicians from all over Ukraine performing for four and a half days, is something like $20,000.

J.C.: We sometimes hear complaints from Jewish communities of Eastern Europe about being treated as though they were living in a graveyard. American Jewish teens, for example, come to Poland as part of the "March of the Living," but they only visit Holocaust sites.

M.H.: The agencies that are planning such programs want to give the impression that there is no Jewish life in Eastern Europe — only in Israel. But you couldn't run that kind of program in Russia or Ukraine, because you would see new, vibrant communities. Yes, you would see Babi Yar — there are sites like Babi Yar scattered all over — but you would see Jewish rebirth and vitality as well.

We tend to impose on them our turf battles, our ideological differences — but they just want to recreate Jewish life in every way they can.

There is now a center for Holocaust research in Moscow, and another in Kiev that we helped to found. They often do seminars under titles like, "The Tragedy and the Heroism of the Jewish Community under German Occupation." These communities are aware of the strong role played by Jews in the Red Army, and they identify as victors over the Nazis, not only as victims. The Jewish War Veterans are very active, and they're just publishing volume eight of a registry of all Jews who fought in the Red Army against fascism. This wasn't reported on in the press during Soviet days — one of the anti-Semitic motifs that circulated was that "Ivan" was fighting on the front lines while "Abraham" was back in the rear in Tashkent. The community is making sure the Jewish role in the war is documented today and becomes a part of their kids' Jewish education.

J.C.: Has there been a growth of Jewish Studies departments at universities?

M.H.: A small growth, mainly supported by Sefer, an association of Jewish Studies supported by the Joint Distribution Committee that meets yearly in Moscow. There's also a growth in Jewish publishing. A quarterly magazine we've funded for the past three years is called Roots, started in Saratov along the Volga River. It's become a general Russian-language magazine of Jewish content. They have regular meetings with readers to discuss articles. There's also a publication in St. Petersburg, The People of the Book in the World of Books, which began as a bibliographic publication and now has reviews and has become an intellectual organ.

Russian-speaking Jews would benefit greatly from a magazine that would explore politics and identity from various angles. The Jewish intelligentsia is a little bit left out of this revival if they don't have school-age children and are not active in the new Jewish communal world.

J.C. To what extent do the Jews of Russia and Ukraine identify with Russian or Ukrainian culture?

M.H.: Jews there identify with the majority culture, which was Russian. Even in Ukraine, if you wanted to get ahead in the world, you learned not Ukrainian but Russian. There are culturally assimilated Russian Jews who will say, "I am a person of deep Russian culture" — proudly, not apologetically, explaining that they are not observant or versed in Jewish literature and history. Their standards of cultural achievement are based on Russian culture. That may be one reason why Chabad [the Lubavitcher Hasidim] have not been all that successful. They've revitalized a lot of synagogues and installed foreign-born rabbis, but they tend to transplant a certain dogmatic spirit, which doesn't go over well in Russia or Ukraine.

There is a producer and director from a Jewish theater we supported in Kharkov, who visited Israel and met with a lot of condescension: "Oh, you have a school in Kharkov? Do you have a Jewish theater?" He replied, "Yes, we do. By the way: Don't you have an opera in Israel? No opera? Does this city have a subway? No subway? Very strange!"

I've heard that subscriptions to dance concerts, book publishing, and journals all went up in Israel during the years of Soviet emigration.

J.C. What do these communities have to offer the international Jewish community?

M.H.: They value, and grab hold of with enthusiasm and zeal, what we take for granted. Here, with many synagogues, we can say, "I like this rabbi, I don't like that rabbi." There, there's often only one synagogue or one Jewish school, and if you don't support it, it's not going to flourish. A Jewish library — in our country, the Jewish libraries are dust-covered and no one really uses them. There, they're dying to have up-to-date Jewish resources.

There are three laboratories for modern Jewish life in the world: the United States, where you can do anything you want and have the money to back it; Israel, where you have an army and you're on the land of the Torah and the cop speaks Hebrew; and Russia and Ukraine, which exemplify what a Jewish community can do when it puts cultural values at the center of its Jewish existence.

There's also a multi-denominational attitude in Russia and Ukraine that should be emulated here and in Israel. They're filling the vacuum that was created during 70 years of Soviet rule with anything they can get; they're open to Jewish influences from every direction. We tend to impose on them our turf battles, our ideological differences — but they don't generally buy into these battles, unless they have to accommodate the guy who's paying the bills.

J.C.: The intersection of feminism and Jewish culture has been very fruitful during the past four decades in the U.S. What kind of role do women play in the Jewish communities of Russia and Ukraine?

M.H.: Women are a major source of energy and activity and even leadership. Ideologically, feminism is seen as an "American problem" and has not attracted a constituency in the society as a whole or in the Jewish community. But I should note that Project Kesher, which was founded by Sallie Gratch from Chicago, has been very successful at empowering Russian Jewish women who were used to letting men have the credit while they did the work. Kesher encourages the development of Jewish women's networking. They have found a way to connect empowerment with real communal activity.

J.C.: Do you have a favorite community to visit there?

M.H.: It's not so much any one place, it's the Jews. Whenever I get discouraged about the Jewish community in America, my wife tells me that it's time to go to Russia and "get your Jewish steroids." There's something tremendously inspiring about how much they achieve with so very, very little. 
 

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