In one of the most affluent pockets of a Soviet Union that vowed to eradicate class differences, Maia Bartkulashvili and Lev Mikhailovich Neiman once enjoyed very different standards of living in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Take the size of their apartments, where they continue to live today.
Bartkulashvili, 79, a retired Russian-language teacher, lives in the same spartan, one-room apartment she was raised in. Unmarried, she shared the place with her older brother, David, until his death five months ago.
Neiman, on the other hand, lived a life of relative privilege: He was the lead violin soloist in the Tbilisi Opera House for a half-century, while his wife was a ballerina there for 25 years. The opera gave the couple an elegant, three-room apartment.
Despite past differences, however, these two Jews today share a similar plight: They’re among the legions of elderly throughout the ex-Soviet world who have lost out in the 15-year transition from Communist dictatorship to “Wild East” capitalism.
They struggle to survive on meager pensions that even the Georgian government concedes place them well below the national poverty line.
As a result, Bartkulashvili and Neiman fear another bitter winter, which makes it a daily challenge just to stay warm and healthy.
To save money on heating, both say they’ll be reduced to shuffling around cold apartments bundled in layers of clothes, wearing hats and draped in blankets.
Bartkulashvili, points to a small space-heater stashed in a corner.
“I don’t keep it on all day because it’s very expensive,” she says. “So the room stays cold. Of course I get sick quite often. My feet get cold; I can hardly walk.”
Neiman’s large apartment is now a curse: It’s too expensive to heat all of it.
“The winter frightens me,” says the spry 88-year-old. “It’s a very hard time for me. Hot weather is better for my health.”
Bartkulashvili and Neiman have something else in common: They’re two of the 107,000 elderly Jews in the former Soviet Union who have fallen between the cracks when it comes to Jewish welfare.
While tens of millions of Soviet citizens perished in World War II, the German army never made it south of Stalingrad, which spared Jews in Georgia and elsewhere in the Caucasus.
However, only Jews who suffered directly under the Nazis are eligible for reparations money. That means that tens of thousands of elderly Jews are ineligible for the bulk of the funding allocated to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the leading Jewish humanitarian agency serving elderly Jews in 15 former Soviet republics.
JDC officials say the organization’s hands are tied. The JDC has two main avenues of funding. One is comprised of individual donations, private foundations and the North American Jewish federation system; the other is money recovered as compensation for stolen or lost Holocaust-related assets via the Claims Conference, the Swiss banks settlement and the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims.
The JDC has experienced shortfalls in the first funding category, for reasons ranging from U.S. inflation and varying foreign-exchange rates to growing numbers of recipients with a longer life expectancy.
Meanwhile, the latter funds are strictly earmarked for Nazi victims, who make up 125,000 of the JDC’s 232,000 clients in the region.
For every dollar spent on Nazi victims in the region, the JDC says it has only 51 cents for those classified as “non-Nazi victims.”
That predicament has forced the JDC to impose tighter eligibility requirements and slash services to those eligible for aid. According to the JDC, non-Nazi victims in Ukraine, for example, have experienced a 14 percent drop in food programs, while their counterparts in Russia have seen home-care services plummet by 19 percent in recent years.
To make up the difference and offer the same services to all elderly in the region, the JDC is seeking $30 million in additional funds over the next three years from North American donors. The United Jewish Communities — the umbrella group for the North American Jewish federation system — has launched a special campaign, “Operation Promise” for overseas needs. Of the $160 million the campaign hopes to raise, $30 million will go to the needs of the elderly in the region.
Meanwhile, the JDC has taken the unprecedented step of borrowing $5 million to make up the difference, restoring services in line with what victims of the Nazis receive and providing assistance to newly eligible but indigent elderly.
“For more than 2,000 years, Jews in the Diaspora have always said that one Jew is responsible for another,” says Steven Schwager, the JDC’s executive vice president. “The fact is that these Jews are some of the poorest Jews on Earth, and we as Americans have a responsibility to care for them.”
Through its vast network of Hesed organizations, the JDC is a lifeline to Jews in more than 3,000 locations across the former Soviet Union. Hesed offers a range of services including hot meals, meals-on-wheels, monthly food packages, medicine, home-nursing care and health check-ups, home repairs, haircuts, eyeglasses, hearing aids, wheelchairs and “winter relief” such as blankets, wood, heating oil and extra cash for bills.
The JDC is trying to publicize the needs to its donors, especially federations that have greater autonomy to earmark their funds.
“We have gotten targeted support from a number of federations and foundations for FSU welfare, but the targeted support hasn’t been enough to allow us to keep pace with escalating costs and increased need,” JDC spokesman Joshua Berkman says. “As it stands right now, we simply can’t offer non-Nazi victims levels of services that are even close to what we can provide for those classified as victims.”
Those who approach JDC for help in the former Soviet Union must fill out a questionnaire spelling out where they were during the war and what they were doing. A locally appointed committee then determines the application’s validity.
Then the unseemly question is posed: Did this person suffer enough to qualify?
“It’s a terrible situation — to have to decide who shall live, who shall die,” Schwager says.
The breakdown of JDC clients in the former Soviet Union between Nazi victims and non-Nazi victims is roughly even. In Georgia, however, just 110 of nearly 2,500 Hesed clients are Nazi victims.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s economic situation is among the worst in the former Soviet Union.
Since the USSR disintegrated, Georgia has endured civil war, economic crisis and two separatist movements that killed at least 10,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands of the country’s 5.6 million people.
Once one of the more prosperous Soviet republics, Georgia now ranks among the poorest — and no one suffers more than the elderly.
The average monthly pension is 28 lari, or roughly $15. To appreciate how little that is, a loaf of bread in Tbilisi costs about 25 cents: at a loaf every two days, a single pensioner may pay up to $4 a month — or one-quarter of his pension — just for bread.
Then there are the other staples like butter, flour, oil, salt, milk, sugar, tea, soap, toothpaste and toilet paper. There are utilities to pay — water, electricity, gas and heat — that are growing more expensive as the government pushes state-subsidized utility companies to stand on their own.
In many cases, the elderly also need medication — not to mention modest luxuries like new clothes or the occasional trip to the beauty salon.
How to afford it all? The answer is that most can’t, so relief workers say they’re forced into difficult decisions: Heat or medicine?
Bartkulashvili, the retired teacher now with a $15 a month pension, didn’t always depend on others for survival.
Like most other elderly in the former Soviet Union, she’s quick to recall the relative bounty of yesteryear — though she neglects to mention the dictatorship and lack of individual freedom.
She taught at a public school for 48 years.
“I had a career, I had a salary, I had money,” she says. “There were times when 25 people were gathered around the table.”
She lives in a communal flat, with a shared toilet and kitchen. The main room is dimly lit, dominated by a small dining-room table. Hanging from the high ceiling is a fixture with three of five bulbs burnt out.
A few photos and watercolors adorn the walls, but there’s surprisingly little decor, considering how long Bartkulashvili has lived here. As the eyes adjust, one notices cracks snaking up the walls and across the ceiling from the 2002 earthquake.
The only whiff of elegance is the ornate plaster relief work along two edges of the ceiling — a clue that this room was the corner of a once-grand private mansion the Soviets seized, subdivided and parceled out many decades ago.
Bartkulashvili says she budgets carefully, spends frugally and still manages to sock some away.
“When I get my pension, I calculate how to use it, then I take a little bit and put it toward the next month,” she says. “Then I save a little more from the second month, and put it toward the third. By the fourth or fifth month, I buy something delicious — sweets, like chocolates with nuts, or maybe fresh fish to cook.”
Hesed provides half her meals, plus a monthly food package.
“To jump from the way my life was to the situation today, it’s very difficult,” she says. “Even to think about it, it’s difficult.”
Lev Neiman, too, is nostalgic for the past — and with good reason.
He notes that together with his parents and two older brothers, his family has devoted more than 300 years of service to the Opera House. By 13 he was a member of the orchestra; he retired in 1990 at age 73.
“It’s quite rare to find a family that was honored to have such high-level musicians,” he says with pride.
Neiman and his wife, Maria Sergeyevna, were dedicated to the opera and to the Soviet good life: restaurants and cafes, holidays and travels. They would drive their car to the Black Sea, to the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea’s northern coast or into Georgia’s spectacular south Caucasus mountain range.
“During Communist times I was filled up to here with everything I wanted,” he says, drawing a line across his chin. “I had a good salary and even had extra money.”
The couple had no children. His wife later became a ballet teacher, he says, pulling out a newspaper photo of three young ballerinas thanking their teacher for her years of service.
She died in 1992, after 44 years of marriage.
Now, after six decades’ worth of contributions to Soviet high culture, Neiman receives the same $15 monthly pension as most of his contemporaries.
He also receives compensation for his World War II military service — another $21 a month. Still, Neiman receives a monthly Hesed food package that includes sugar, butter and cooking oil.
Neiman is left with two great fears. First is winter. “I spend all day in the kitchen, because the gas in the stove is cheap. I stay warm there.”
The second is loneliness. “I have a book of telephone numbers,” he says, “and when I open it, I remember that almost none of my friends are with me anymore.”
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.
