Eight hundred miles east of Moscow, in the capital city of the republic of Tatarstan, the Volga river turns into ice, thick snow slumbers atop concrete apartment blocks and the few hardy souls out on the slippery streets are well- wrapped in woolens as the thermometer sinks to 13 degrees below zero.
Warmth, buoyancy, energy and joy are a rare treat here, but inside the sturdy old House of Actors, where steam from the doorman’s tea kettle billows into the entrance way, this is exactly what the Simcha Klezmer Band provides.
Six musicians – half of them Jewish, the other half Tatar -sway, sing, tease and perform, creating a spontaneous celebration of the sweet, soulful melodies of the shtetl.
In addition to providing warmth, the music has served as a catalyst for wider Jewish involvement in this isolated community of 7,000 Jews.
How was a klezmer band created in this historically Muslim republic in the middle of the Russian Federation?
“We are musicians, artistic people, our brains are upside down, and we’re not 100 percent healthy psychologically,” answer Leonid Sonts, the green-eyed violist who oversees the group and serves as a one-man source of inspiration for Jewish cultural life in Kazan.
“You have to be crazy and enthusiastic to do this,” he says.
And determined.
The 50-year-old Sonts was trained as a classical musician and was employed for decades as a symphony violinist. But all his life he was entranced by stories about his grandfather, a klezmer performer.
Sonts never actually heard him play, but he did hear some Jewish wedding music as a child, and the vivacious tunes hummed through his memory for years.
When Jewish life became possible again after perestroika, the series of reforms initiated by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, Sonts was more than ready for what he describes as a “folklore expedition” into his past.
He met with senior citizens who remembered the Yiddish tunes of their youth, finagled them to sing and scratched down the notes. He borrowed dusty records and tape cassettes, and he requested Jewish songbooks from foreign visitors.
Then he gathered a group of musician friends and proposed creating a concert of Jewish songs, just to see if it could work.
The event took place in May 1989, and the response was overwhelming: They attracted a concert hall full of people, many of whose eyes welled up with tears.
From this encouraging beginning, Sonts decided to develop his band and to concentrate on klezmer music.
Albert Gilfaneth, a clarinetist who is Tatar, agreed to join in, as did guitarist Oskar Korbungaleyev, drummer Edward Norulin, pianist Vladimir Shteinman and singer Edward Tumansky.
The cross-cultural mix came easily, they say, and is not new here. There is much intermarrying between Tatars and Jews, and relations between the two groups are generally congenial.
“Music is international, especially Jewish music, because Jews are all over the place,” Gilfaneth says, adding, “There is also something Oriental in both Jewish and Tatar culture.”
Besides traveling to perform in places like the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidjan in eastern Siberia, and Moscow, the Simcha Klezmer Band has also become something of an institution here in Kazan, a city of one million people.
The city has been the site of two Jewish music festivals. A recent Chanukah concert brought together 1,200 fans, who were a mixture of Russians, Tatars and Jews.
The group’s open-armed reception in Kazan is no big surprise, Sonts says.
Although some anti-Semitism exists here, Sonts says, Jews have usually been well-treated by the Tatars, a Muslim people who were conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1522 and forcefully joined to the Russian empire.
Today, Tatars comprise less than half the population of Tatarstan, but in the last few years there has been a growing interest in their language and culture, as well as in the cultures of other ethnic groups, including Jews.
As the Simcha band generated respect and goodwill, Kazan’s Jewish community began to re-emerge from decades of repression under Soviet rule.
Using Jewish music as a catalyst, Sonts established the Menorah Cultural Center, which now provides a home for three musical groups, a veterans club, a women’s group and a youth group.
They meet in an old synagogue in the center of the city, a building that was confiscated by the Communists and transformed into a Dom Uchitelya – a House of Learning – for all the ethnic groups of Tatarstan.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, a bus stopped outside the building and a long line of rotund, gray-haired women in babushkas filed out.
They later appeared on a first-floor stage in local costume: brightly- embroidered, cotton-candy pink dresses decorated with flowery embroidery, their foreheads ringed with necklaces of silver coins.
Upstairs, different Jewish groups were meeting throughout the day: a singing group for children under 10, a senior citizens group, the youth group.
Nikolai Kolupayev, a 23-year-old medical student, said he first heard about the Menorah center at a Simcha band concert.
“Simcha brings together the Jews of Kazan,” he says. “You usually meet people there who don’t go to clubs and aren’t involved in the Jewish community. The hall is always full and the music is very special.”
There is not a single functioning synagogue in Kazan, and knowledge of religious Judaism is sparse. But the band’s lively, accessible music does seem to act as a positive, unifying force in a community that lacks the usual institutions and rituals of Judaism.
“We had scientific atheism hammered hard into our brains,” explains Olga Apollonova, a Jewish community activist who has lived in Israel.
“Now some of the youths are curious, but many people say they’ve lived their whole lives without it and they don’t need it now,” she says.
Four months ago, two young Chabad Lubavitch rabbis arrived from Israel to try to spark renewed religious curiosity among the local community.
They began by working with Kazan’s few remaining religious Jews – a small but devoted group that had been praying in the privacy of a tiny apartment.
But they soon held well-attended holiday festivals and even met with Tatarstan’s independent-minded president, Mintimer Shaimiev.
But the work facing the rabbis remains enormously challenging. It is very hard to collect people “who never knew what was a tefillin,” says Rabbi Avraham Lerer, 22.
Another aspect of Judaism is being promoted by Lev and Ilanit Izakovitch, two Israeli university students who chose to work in bitter-cold Kazan instead of sun-drenched Aruba as part of a volunteer program run by Arevim, an Israeli organization connected to the World Union of Jewish Students.
“People here haven’t known that Judaism has many variations – not just Chasidism, but Conservative and Reform,” say Lev Izakovitch, whose family is originally from the former Soviet Union.
“Our goal is to help make the community active, to help them ask questions about doing things for themselves, not religiously, but culturally.”
To do this, he says, he needs resources, everything from Woody Allen videos to Jewish encyclopedias.
Despite these clusters of activity, the future of the Jewish community in Kazan remains elusive, as it does in many of the more isolated parts of the Russian Federation.
The vast majority of Kazan’s Jews are assimilated and uninvolved, and those that do join in religious or cultural life usually end up leaving for Israel or America.
Sonts, for one, harbors no illusions.
“It is not my wish, but the general; trend is that there will not be any more Jews here in 15 or 20 years,” he says. “They are either dying or leaving.”
So why devote days, nights and weekends to a doomed community?
Israel doesn’t need another unemployed violinist, Sonts says, adding that his place is in Kazan.
“If I can perform,” he says, “I feel that I am needed here.”
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.
