My Kin

It is Friday night in Odessa and we are about to attend a synagogue service. I am not a keen synagogue attender and particularly not keen on praying but I am eager to attend this service as it will be an opportunity to witness an example of what has become the reinvigoration of the Jewish community of the Former Soviet Union.

Our group of 32 arrives at the shul and are offered an effusive welcome by the 20 or so individuals who have come to the Friday night service tonight.  This is a small Reform community in Odessa. Reform means that they have chosen to follow a form of Judaism which values modernity and recognises that the laws and directives written in the scriptures are anachronistic and need to be updated for a modern world.

As we enter the building, we notice an extravagant table of goodies, laden high with bountiful fruit, cakes, biscuits, home-made buns and much else. After shaking hands with a variety of community members who have each made an effort to shake each of our hands, we are ushered to our seats in the small sanctuary part of the building. We take our places on long uncomfortable rectangular benches in front of slightly taller rectangular benches to act as tables in front of us. On each of the tables are a number of siddurim, prayer books, written in Hebrew, Russian and Russian transliteration. Our group mostly choose to follow the Hebrew. There is a sense that for those whose Hebrew reading is slow, this might prove an alienating experience.

Most of the elderly people we meet have little command of English, whilst the younger members seem more able to communicate with us with varying degrees of proficiency. The leader of the community welcomes us with a few words in Russian whilst one of the youngsters translates.

Leader of the community addressing us

 I am reminded of my first days of living in Israel where I met and associated with many Russian new immigrants. They were, to my young eyes, completely alien – culturally, linguistically, anthropologically and socially. We would see the older “Russkies” (as we Westerners unkindly referred to them, conferring a pejorative connotation) in the local dingy makolet (Israeli grocery store, modelled, I thought,  very much on a Soviet style – nothing like the colourful and multi-ethnic corner stores I had been used to in the West). The elderly Russian ladies would push you disdainfully out of the way, whilst making their purchases. Despite linguistic and cultural difficulties, I did manage to make quite a few Russian friends in those days. Some stayed in Israel and became “Israeli” while many moved on – to America, Germany, Italy and other places, and we lost touch. During those early days I picked up a few phrases and taught myself to read Cyrillic and we managed to communicate during ball games and cycling in the streets using the smattering of phrases we exchanged. I was always fascinated, having carried a South African passport which was not valid in a large number of places, by what happened behind the Iron Curtain, how life went on.

So, here I am sitting in a room with a number of little old ladies on the front row who, 40 years ago could have been the little old ladies pushing me out of the way in the makolet or failing to acknowledge the theory of personal space in the street. The service starts and immediately I am struck by the fact that we have no problem following the service, following and reciting the prayers alongside our hosts and even singing in the same tunes, tunes we are all – regardless of our origins – familiar with. At this point I realise that those “Russki” ladies pushing me out of the way 40 years ago are my kin, a salient realisation.

The service is led by a young man in his 30s. He picks up his guitar and starts to sing the songs with the most exuberant and enthusiastic attitude I have ever witnessed. A broad smile comes over his face as he chants the songs and never leaves him until the service is over. I am enchanted by him and can understand how he manages to hold his “audience” in thrall week after week. I want to take him home to spread his brand of sunshine.

Service leader who broke out into a broad enthusiastic grin as soon as he started the service, a grin which never left him until the service ended.

About 20 minutes after it has started, the service seems to be over. Our hosts are all out of their seats and parading up and down the aisles wishing us a good Sabbath and once again shaking our hands exuberantly. We start to gather our things in order to proceed to the Kiddush table to break bread together. No sooner have I picked up my handbag than the service suddenly recommences and the congregants are seated back in their places, the vociferous handshaking over. I am told by one of our party, who has attended this community for a service before, that this is what they regularly do – spontaneously break to reaffirm the Sabbath greeting before recommencing.

I am not a regular synagogue-goer but I thoroughly enjoyed everything about this service - the charm of the congregation, the effusive welcome, the generosity of spirit and the enthusiastic singing and even more enthusiastic handshaking.

We help ourselves to the mountains of food that are on offer after we have blessed the wine and the bread. This is now a chance to mingle and, language permitting, to share and hear stories. I spend some time talking to some of the youngsters who tell us about their lives, their dreams, their plans and their Jewish pursuits and trajectories. All very interesting.

I then move on to speak (through a translator) to a woman in her late 60s who tells a fascinating tale. The year is 1941 and she is 18 months old and being carried in her mother’s arms toward Babi Yar – and certain death. As the column of weary Jews is being marched onwards, they happen to pass a local village where a young mother is grieving the death of her baby daughter. She runs out to the passing procession of marching Jews, locates a woman carrying a young baby and offers the mother salvation for the baby. The mother agrees, knowing that she will never be able to protect her daughter from the Nazis. The women swap babies and our protagonist lives for many years thinking that her adoptive parents are her birth parents and never knowing that she was born Jewish. In her fifties, she receives a letter from the mother she thought had given birth to her, on her deathbed, letting her know the truth about her birth. It is at this point that she begins to engage with the Jewish community and discover something of her Jewish heritage.

Up and down the FSU such stories are played out - people discovering their Jewish birthright in a variety of ways and with a variety of reactions and outcomes. Not all are as dramatic and heart wrenching as the story above. Not all result in engagement with the Jewish community; but all tell a tale that adds to the huge corpus of such stories, each adding a small fraction to the emergence of Jewish life and a Jewish collective identity behind the former Iron Curtain.