When school bells ring next month in Moscow, things will be very different for Jewish children.
Three full-time Jewish day schools, in session from Monday to Friday, will be holding classes, according to Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the new religious leader of Moscow’s main synagogue and deputy chief rabbi of the Soviet Union.
For some 600 to 1,000 expected students, ages 5 to 16, attending Jewish day school in Moscow also spells the end of the Communist nation’s mandatory six-day school week and the freedom to observe Saturday as the Sabbath.
Although the majority of Jewish students will remain in state schools, which are in session six days a week, those who refuse to attend school on Shabbat now have a full opportunity to attend a Jewish religious school.
“As of now, whoever wants to go to Jewish school can go,” Goldschmidt said during a visit last week to the World Jewish Congress.
Three buildings that will house Jewish schools have been given to the Jewish community for that purpose, although they are not former properties of Jewish groups, he said.
One of the schools will be overseen by the Israeli Ministry of Education, together with a local Soviet Jewish cultural group called Tehiya, not to be confused with the Israeli political party.
The Lubavitch Hasidic movement Chabad, operating through a New York-based organization, Lishkas Ezras Achim, runs a day school at the Choral Synagogue, as well as a yeshiva at the Marina Roscha Synagogue in Moscow.
On Monday, the building adjacent to the Choral Synagogue, also known as the Great Synagogue, will be returned to Jewish hands from the municipality after 50 years, to become a yeshiva and related offices.
That yeshiva will be run by the synagogue, with help from organizations such as the WJC and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and particularly Canadian Jewish businessman Albert Reichmann, Goldschmidt said.
MORE RESPECT THAN IN ISRAEL
The rabbi has returned to Moscow for the ceremonies at the building, which will be attended by government authorities, the Israeli and U.S. ambassadors, and New York Rabbi Arthur Schneier, who is president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, an ecumenical organization promoting religious freedom worldwide. Schneier initiated negotiations on the return of the building with Moscow authorities in 1987.
Goldschmidt, a 28-year-old native of Zurich, is the former head of the Adin Steinsaltz yeshiva in Moscow and formerly taught in the Israeli town of Upper Nazareth.
Describing the strides being made in Jewish education and other transformations for the Soviet Union’s Jews, he said he is still amazed by the respect now accorded religion there. When he hails a taxi in Moscow, he is asked if he is clergy. He is then told he can ride free.
“Even in Israel, I don’t get such good treatment,” laughed the bearded rabbi.
So overwhelming has been the change for Jews, and religious observers of all faiths in the formerly strictly atheistic state, that Goldschmidt was one of two clergymen who gave a blessing last month at the inauguration of the Russian republic’s first freely elected leader, Boris Yeltsin.
The appointment of Goldschmidt, who is also president of the rabbinical court of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in the Soviet Union, brings a strong rabbinic authority to the country.
His position complements that of Rabbi Adolph Shayevitch, considered titular head of the Choral Synagogue and the Soviet Union’s chief rabbi in the eyes of the government.
Goldschmidt described Shayevitch’s knowledge as impressive and called their working relationship excellent.
MORE ASSISTANCE NEEDED
Goldschmidt, who is said to bring home some 20 young men each evening for meals, strongly suggested that the Soviet Union’s Jewish population has not been adequately helped with its religious needs, such as kosher food and the requisite number of rabbis and teachers, to the same degree as the Jewish communities of Romania and Hungary.
He said that the Joint Distribution Committee, which has virtually sustained the Jews of those other countries, should extend itself more within the Soviet Union.
“I would like to see them more involved on the level of providing kosher food and primary and secondary Jewish education,” the rabbi said.
Asked for comment, Ralph Goldman, honorary executive vice president of the JDC, replied, “We are working on a program that Goldschmidt submitted on shechita,” or kosher slaughter. But, he added, “we explained that we are not going to ship in food. What we can do, what we want to do, is train indigenous shochetim. We are also examining the production of kosher wine.”
Amir Shaviv, JDC spokesman, said that in less than three years, the humanitarian agency “has developed a major network of activities, and we are creating a Jewish infrastructure of Jewish religious and cultural life.”
JDC has created libraries of Jewish books throughout the Soviet Union, has shipped “millions of religious items and sponsored major holiday celebrations in almost 30 cities,” he said.
Shaviv said a Jewish art school sponsored by the JDC will open in Moscow next month, with 100 students between the ages of 7 and 14. The afternoon school will meet from 2 to 8, and “will give Jewish children the opportunity to develop their talents in a Jewish atmosphere,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
