A major program to serve the special religious needs of Russian Jews now arriving in increased numbers in Israel has been readied for launching in early summer under the joint sponsorship of the leading American Orthodox Jewish organizations, it was announced tonight by Rabbi Joseph Karasick, president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, at the annual National Dinner of the Union.
Rabbi Karasick stated that funding for the program, with a provisional budget exceeding $3 million, will be obtained either through existing communal fund channels or through other means. The project is to include “schools, synagogues, group and individual instruction in Bible and the fundamentals of the Jewish faith, personalized guidance activities, and other facilities” tailored to the distinctive needs of immigrants coming from a land in which all Jewish religious life and instruction have been suppressed for over fifty years.
Continuing, the UOJC president declared that the “government of Israel and the Jewish Agency are doing a herculean job. They need, deserve, and must receive all our support, through United Jewish Appeal and Israel Bonds, for the absorption and housing of the Russian immigration which, we hope and pray, will continue to increase.” However, he added, absorption and settlement is more than a roof over the head and a job; it extends to the even more vital area of spiritual homecoming.
We are calling upon the fund-raising agencies to recognize that a settlement without a synagogue or a religious school is not “K’litah,” absorption, as we understand it, Rabbi Karasick declared. “These our brethren have come to Israel with messianic yearnings. Their disappointment would be shattering, it would be a bitter mockery of all the values which they have upheld under tyranny, with a heroism of which we can hardly conceive, if the conditions under which they are settled lack necessary provisions for their spiritual life. We simply cannot let this happen.”
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