By Emily K. Alhadeff, Assistant Editor, JTNews
The Siberian Airlines flight carried a group of seven young professionals from Seattle. When it touched down in the faraway city of Khabarovsk, two members of the group asked a native woman sitting nearby what she recommended to do in this Russian city.
“Don’t get off the plane,” she responded.
But we did. As we stood on the tarmac, the air heavy with humidity, facing a decrepit building posing as an airport, surely one or two of us wondered if we should have listened. What had we signed ourselves up for?
The idea was relatively new: For the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, or Joint, as it’s often called) to bring a group of Americans to a struggling Jewish community in far eastern Russia. The JDC runs trips like this all over the world, but this was the first of its kind to Siberia.
“It’s not Siberia. It’s the Russian Far East,” Valentina Nemirovski, the Khabarovsk Hillel director, corrected from her seat on our tour bus, the décor of which appeared to be inspired by a Mariachi band and displayed a framed hologram of dolphins by the driver’s seat.
Khabarovsk lies 19 miles from the Chinese border. It is the second-to-last stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a mere 500 miles from the terminus in Vladivostok. For the sake of perspective, Moscow is an eight-hour flight, a trip that jumps seven time zones. It’s so far out there, in fact, it’s considered “beyond” Siberia.
Aside from the initial impression at the airport, to envision Khabarovsk one must forget anything one has ever thought about that vast region east of the Urals. Downtown Khabarovsk, with its boulevard of pastel boutiques bumping up against the Amur River looks more like Lisbon than any stereotyped Russian town.
“It exceeded my expectations,” said Mariel Venhuizen, 24, a participant on the trip and the Hillel at University of Washington’s Repair the World fellow. “I kind of had this idea that it would be kind of like a decrepit city. And when we arrived at the airport I felt those expectations were met. But then once we got into their downtown I was really surprised.”
For the next week, the Seattle group — through Hillel UW’s Jconnect program — along with a smattering of young Jews from the East Coast, toured Khabarovsk and engaged with the local Jewish community and history through conversations and service work.
Joanne (Jhanna) Rossignol, 28, was motivated to join the trip out of her experience studying in Vladivostok in college and working as a Russian interpreter in Seattle.
“Their focus is to rebuild a sense of community,” she said of her impressions of Khabarovsk’s Jews. “Getting people involved, getting people together to explore Jewish identity.”
Rossignol was repeatedly struck by the number of former Soviet Jews and non-Jews who had no idea any Jewish community remains in the region.
“You don’t think there are communities that are forgotten,” she said. “I think this community is forgotten.”
Both the JDC, a welfare organization, and the Hillel, a community center, are active in bringing dignity to Jewish life in Khabarovsk. A Chabad rabbi leads religious services, but Chabad exists in tension with the other organizations, which are more culturally oriented. Unlike American Chabad centers, characterized by their enthusiastic outreach efforts, Chabad of Khabarovsk remains disconnected from the community at large. Part of this is due to the fact that many Russian Jews cannot prove matrilineal Jewish heritage, while the JDC qualifies Jews as having just one Jewish grandparent.
“The rabbi and us have different bosses,” explained the JDC’s Siberian director, Boris Boguslavsky, through a translator. “The rabbi’s boss is God.”
Despite the JDC’s extensive welfare work with the poor, aging community, Khabarovsk’s young population is contributing to a Jewish revival of sorts.
“I was surprised by the dedication by the Jewish professionals that we met. Many of them were finding out their Jewish identity not long before,” said Josh Furman, Jconnect’s director and the trip’s staff person.
The week’s activities included visits with elderly Jews who told stories of their survival through World War II; home visits to recipients of JDC aid packages; discussions with the local staff and the JDC staff about the programs in Khabarovsk; service work; visits to local Jewish organizations, including a preschool founded with funds from Seattle’s Jewish community; and discussions about Jewish life with our “Hillel peers,” as our companion group of late-teen, early-20s Russians was called.
The Khabarovsk Jewish community consists of 12,000 to 14,000 Jews, incredibly. But coming here with an American concept of Jewish practice — for all its diversity — is futile. The majority of Jews we encountered were either poor and coming to the end of long, often sad lives, or young, culturally oriented Jews who did not grow up in homes with any Jewish practice. Some only found out recently that they were Jewish, often through the help of Vadim, Khabarovsk’s Jewish community leader.
The mission of the JDC branch that serves Khabarovsk, based in Novosibirsk – about 2,200 miles away and the largest city in Siberia – is to provide aid to anyone with a Jewish grandparent. The Hillel acts as a community center and houses a synagogue, a parve kitchen, and social spaces that host all of the city’s Jewish activities, such as the weekly throngs of elderly JDC “Hesed” program aid recipients who come to pick up food subsidy cards.
The most powerful experiences included home visits to the aid recipients. The JDC provides food baskets to eligible people of all ages who, for whatever reason, can’t leave their homes regularly. Many are elderly Jews sentenced to walk-up apartments; others are at home with small children or are unable to work.
“The most meaningful thing to me were the homecare visits,” said Venhuizen. “I feel personally so fortunate to have heard from the elderly people…. They were so grateful we wanted to hear their stories.”
Given what she had learned about the Holocaust, she said, it appeared that Russia’s experience was largely forgotten.
“Just because there weren’t concentration camps, [that doesn’t mean] they weren’t equally tortured,” she said. “That was a huge shock for me.”
One of our service projects, the cleanup of a Jewish cemetery, impacted many of our group’s members. The gravesites, tucked away among brambles, suffered from years of neglect.
“We’re supposed to honor the people before us,” said Furman. “I can’t imagine not being able to celebrate publicly and not [being able to] visit a grandparent’s grave…which is why they were covered in garbage.”
For Furman, cleaning up the cemetery and visiting the elderly brought dignity to a long-suffering community. It also left him, and others, with perspective into their own communities and their roles in the Jewish community.
“Personally, this trip has inspired me to go on further with my own exploration of my Jewish identity,” said Rossignol.
Rossignol said she was also inspired to bring attention to the plight of struggling Jewish communities. “If we don’t keep them in our minds and our hearts, where are they going to be in two generations from now?” she asked.
“It makes me realize we have so many opportunities here and so many things we can do,” said Furman. “It reminds me of that bond we have with Jews everywhere we go.”
This is the second in a series by Emily K. Alhadeff about Jewish life in the farthest reaches of Russia.