Ukraine's Jewish community has risen from the ashes, says Rabbi Bleich (11/06/94)

Ukraine's Jewish community has risen from the ashes, says Rabbi Bleich

by Andrij Wynnyckyj

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Although the American Jewish Committee's "Project Ukraine" is significant in itself as a milestone in Ukrainian-Jewish relations, few could have predicted how urgently relevant its participants' "phase two" visit to Ukraine this summer would become, in the aftermath of the CBS television network's broadcast of a "60 Minutes" segment titled "The Ugly Face of Freedom" on October 23.

"Project Ukraine's" mission to lay the groundwork for long-term constructive interaction between Ukrainians and Jews on both sides of the ocean is feasible in large part because of direct contacts with the Jewish community in Ukraine. In this case, these contacts have also provided evidence that CBS's "Ugly Face" program misrepresented the situation of the Jewish community in Ukraine and the climate of inter-ethnic relations in the country.

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On the Saturday afternoon of July 30, the AJC mission, led by trip organizer and Institute of Pluralism Director David Roth and accompanied by New York rabbinical student Lisa Greene, met with the chief rabbi of Kyyiv and Ukraine, Yaakov Dov Bleich.

Rabbi Bleich was shown in the "60 Minutes" program, providing accounts of anti-Semitic incidents and attitudes. Rabbi Bleich has since denounced the broadcast as "unbalanced," saying that it "did not convey the true state of affairs" in the country, and that his words "were quoted out of the context that they were said." (See page 6.)

The meeting with Rabbi Bleich took place in the capital's lone functioning synagogue, on Shchekavytska Street, restored through the efforts of Rabbi Bleich and the Karlin Stolinsky Association, with offices in the directly adjacent complex of buildings.

To begin the meeting with the AJC group, Rabbi Bleich explained that, prior to 1922, Kyyiv was home to over 60 synagogues. Most were razed or seized for other uses by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 1930s; the rest were finished off by the Nazis. The one presently serving as the center of Jewish religious life in Kyyiv escaped destruction because it was used as a stable, and has been the only one in operation since the war. He said the city's officials actually have a poor record for returning shrines to any religious groups.

In 1993, the city government grudgingly allowed a Jewish group (not a part of the main congregation overseen by Rabbi Bleich) to use for prayer three basement rooms of the former central, or Brodsky, synagogue. It had been turned over to the National Puppet Theater in 1927 and has served as a cathedralic setting for children' s entertainment since.

Rabbi Bleich said that when he took over five years ago, his synagogue on Shchekavytska Street was the center of all aspects of Jewish life in Kyyiv. Since, the Israeli government set up a cultural center elsewhere, as did three other local Jewish secular associations. The community that grew up around the synagogue is now flourishing, offering all manner of community services, from regular meals for poor pensioners and children, to art, drama and discussion clubs. Rabbi Bleich also said that summer camps in the Kyyiv region and the Carpathians have become an important focus of his attention.

In 1991, he set up two schools (one for girls, one for boys), with instruction from kindergarten to grade 11, within the city public-school system. With financial and staff assistance from North America and Israel, 600 students are offered courses ranging from Ukrainian to computers to business to lab science.

Rabbi Bleich commended then newly elected President Leonid Kuchma for his responsiveness, saying that Jewish leaders had just been called to a meeting with Mr. Kuchma and senior government officials the day before. With characteristic humor, he said "I wish them luck, because this bureaucracy is almost the same size as in the U.S., and they [the new administration] face a much more difficult task of reorganization [former President Leonid] Kravchuk kept a lot of the old meshuggasen [no good crazy types] around," referring to the previous regime's practice of retaining corrupt old-guard officials.

This extends to the continued activities of the internal security police, now known as the SBU. "Look," said Rabbi Bleich, "our conversation is being recorded right now... SBU, KGB, MVD, Cheka, these people have changed their names and heads many times before, but they haven't changed one employee."

"I can tell you a story about this factional fight between the head of the community and the rabbi in Kharkiv," the Jewish leader related, "after a about six months, the rabbi was visited by an SBU guy who let him know, through biweekly visits, about the contents of all the conversations he'd had in the past month... Bugging and all that stuff is still going on, it's just not being acted on in the same way."

However, he pointed out that President Kuchma's attitude about what religion can give to society, voiced at that Friday's meeting, is an encouraging sign of change. "Kravchuk would have never said anything like that ... Religion was still the 'opium of the people' for him."

Already in the country's brief independent existence, there have been a few shifts in policy toward religion. Initially, Rabbi Bleich said, there was a total liberalization followed by various factional disputes (some provoked) and a massive influx of all sorts of cults from America an all around the world. "Also, the Russian Orthodox Church got very nervous about losing many of its adherents an threatened to make trouble, so the government reasserted control in late 1992 to early 1993," he said.

As a result, to this day, Rabbi Bleich says all foreign religious leaders are subject to controls. This puts the Jewish congregation in a difficult position, since only one rabbi in the country is from Ukraine (born in Odessa, he had emigrated to Israel and recently returned). "This conflicts with Jewish tradition," Rabbi Bleich pointed out, "because usually rabbis are called in from a different city. If he was from your city, you knew too much about him." He added wryly, "After all, you need someone you can respect."

Illustrating the variety of opinion in the Jewish community in Ukraine, Rabbi Bleich voiced his disagreement with a colleague who had told government officials at that Friday's meeting that he was against any Ukrainian Jews leaving the country. "Well, I don't know who he was speaking for," rejoined the Brooklyn born rabbi, "but I'm not against Jews leaving; I'm against any restrictions on freedom of movement. One of the most basic freedoms of democracy is the right to decide where you want to live - whether it's here, Israel, or anywhere else in the world."

If he finds students are struggling in Ukraine's environment, Rabbi Bleich said he urges them to apply to schools in Israel or America or elsewhere, "where they can realize their ambition as a Jew and as a person." He added with conviction: "I don't work to keep people here, I don't work to send people away, I just work to teach them Judaism - that's my job."

Rabbi Bleich said that a holdover law banning any religious organization from opening a school (whether Christian, Muslim or Judaic) makes life difficult. "That's stupid. There is no civilized country, even Russia, where this happens, but you can also get around it: you just register as a private organization, run your school, and bring in individual staff that will teach religion."

Offering a historical perspective, Rabbi Bleich said that in Ukraine there had never been "a democracy that gave Jews the possibility to build the way they can today. Under the tsar, they might have had a more compact and more religious life, but their possibilities were strictly controlled. Under communism, of course, it was all destruction. Now, if the Jews want, they have the possibility to rebuild."

Rabbi Bleich said the principal obstacle is the impoverishment and lack of religious consciousness among Jews, who have largely become assimilated and have few devotional habits. When they send their children to Jewish schools, he anticipated, "a huge cultural gap is going to develop." One of the first things that he seeks to teach is a sense of pride in being Jewish, an effort that is running against the grain of a post-totalitarian people who have learned "to keep their heads down because they were knocked down."

But he points to one statistic with great satisfaction: "If you look at the percentage of our children who are affiliated with some form of Jewish education, I know we're ahead of the United States and most anywhere else. That's a tremendous accomplishment. Maybe some of the smaller communities in Western Europe have higher numbers. But for a large community like the Ukrainian community, which has risen up from the ashes, we're really doing great."

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As told to the AJC's "Ukrainian Seminar" group, Rabbi Yaakov Bleich's account of roughing it in Ukraine is hardly a story without blemish, to be sure, but it is strangely at odds with the apocalyptic portrait drawn by Morley Safer's report for "60 Minutes."

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