I've just
spent the last week in Turkey and Kazakhstan on a JDC Strategic Partnerships/Ambassadors Circle
mission and wanted to share something that
made a deep impression on me.
At dinner the other
night in Almaty, Kazakhstan, I sat with two young leaders of the Jewish
community. Michael and his wife Yelena are very involved with the
Almaty community. He is a building contractor and she is a graphic designer.
They're both in their early forties and they both volunteer in the Hesed, our
federation-supported welfare center. In Almaty the Hesed also functions as a
JCC, and they sit on the Board.
Here's the story: Michael grew up knowing he was Jewish. It wasn't a particularly significant part
of his life. His mother actually listed their nationality as "Ukrainian" rather
than "Jewish" on their internal Soviet passports. She had lived through nasty
anti-Semitic attacks in Ukraine before the family moved to Kazakhstan, which has
a low level of anti-Semitism. When Michael and Yelena married, religion wasn't
really an important topic for either of them, and in a country in which there
are high levels of intermarriage, he thought nothing of marrying a nice
non-Jewish girl like Yelena.
But as their two
children started to grow up - they're now 12 and 16 - Michael increasingly felt
the need to connect to his Jewish roots, and to get his children involved in
their Jewish heritage.
Yelena had no
objection; she grew up with no connection to anything religious, and as the
children participated more and more, she and Michael also started to get more
involved. The Hesed reached out (as many do) to the parents through the
children. And since Michael and Yelena's generation grew up with no connection to
Jewish knowledge or community, the Hesed became their Jewish
home.
After some years,
Yelena finally plucked up the courage to tell her parents that her children were
now actively involved in the Jewish community, and that she, too, was becoming
involved through them and increasingly seeing herself as part of the community.
It was at that meeting that she learned, from her mother, that both her parents
were actually Jewish, and so was she! "It hadn't been important for them," she
said, "and they never knew how to explain it to themselves or to me." It's a
very common story in the former Soviet Union, where so many Jews were cut off
from Jewish life for some seventy years.
But here's the final
part to the story that made it all so worthwhile.
After dinner with
Michael and Yelena, I sat in the Hesed and watched as dozens of teenagers talked,
sang and led discussions on Jewish identity. There we were, in the middle of
Kazakhstan, inspired and moved by their commitment to Jewish life and learning.
And in the middle of the performance of "Heyvenu Shalom Aleichem," as I was
watching five beautiful young women sing in harmony, another young member of the
community leaned over to my seat and said, "do you see the girl in the middle - Yulia? With the red hair and the black-brown sweater? I think you just had
dinner with her mom and dad - Michael and Yelena ...."
