Around the Jewish World: Amid Political Uncertainty, Youth in Minsk Rediscover Jewish Learning

When Yuri Dorn first came to the Main Synagogue here a few years ago, he found a dozen elderly Jews.

Dorn, then in his mid-20s, remembers that the older people eyed him with suspicion. For them, a young man in the synagogue was an unusual sight.

“They looked at me as if I was the KGB,” says Dorn, who is now president of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of Belarus.

Nowadays, the synagogue regularly hosts some 70 young people ages 9 to 20 who come to pray, to study Judaism at the synagogue’s Sunday school and to have Sabbath meals.

Their presence at the synagogue is largely the result of an outreach program launched by the New York-based Yeshiva and University Students for the Spiritual Revival of Soviet Jewry.

Since 1990, the independent, student-run organization has established educational programs for Jewish youth in different parts of the former Soviet Union.

The group’s latest project is a youth center recently dedicated here in the capital of Belarus. The center, the Lauder Lech Lecha Youth Center, is funded primarily by the New York-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Located above the synagogue, it houses classrooms, a dining room, a kosher kitchen and dormitory facilities for youth from other areas of Belarus.

But while increasing numbers of young people are reconnecting with their Jewish heritage, the future of the community is uncertain.

“Life is becoming really difficult” in Belarus, says Roman Burda, 19, a Youth Center activist who is a linguistics student from Minsk.

The Jewish community of Belarus is still large. Its 100,000 members, a quarter of whom live in Minsk, make up the third largest minority in a nation of 10.5 million.

But many are emigrating and like many of his fellow Jewish activists, Burda is not sure whether he will continue to live in this former Communist country, which still retains much of its Soviet character.

The regime of President Alexander Lukashenko has been criticized in Russia and the West for its repression of opposition groups and the press.

Among the population at large, Lukashenko remains highly popular in Belarus, which has struggled with a troubled economy since gaining independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But an increasing number of students have been rallying against Lukashenko’s regime.

Earlier this year, a large number of college students from Minsk were expelled from school for attending opposition rallies.

It is not clear whether any Jews were expelled, but just the same, some members of the community have been experiencing the sting of political repression.

One Lech Lecha Center activist said his college recently forced him to join a new pro-Lukashenko youth group, the Belarussian Union of Patriotic Youth.

Had he not joined, he said, he would not have been able to pass his final exams.

Many teen-agers who are active at the youth center say they will probably soon leave for Israel.

But while still in Belarus, they consider it important to reconnect with the nearly forgotten traditions that defined Jewish life here for generations.

Though his parents and grandparents were not practicing Jews, Burda has been striving to regain his Jewish heritage and to help others learn about Judaism.

“After these few years that I’ve been with the youth group, I’ve learned a lot more about Judaism than anyone in my family knew in the last 70 years,” Burda says proudly.

According to Binyamin Krauss, the executive director of the Spiritual Revival group, the center will provide a “new level of service to a community in desperate need of exposure to its Jewish heritage.”

“We now have a home for Sabbath meals, Passover seders and educational seminars and programs,” says Krauss, a 26-year-old graduate of New York City’s Yeshiva University who came from New York for the center’s dedication.

Earlier this year, Spiritual Revival conducted a Passover seder that brought together 180 participants — making it the largest Jewish event in Minsk after the fall of communism six years ago.

In addition to the youth center, Spiritual Revival also operates summer and winter camps for children and teen-agers, as well as its annual Lech Lecha Summer Leadership Training Program in Israel, which encourages participants to return to their communities in the former Soviet Union and teach others.

As Krauss puts it: “We want the locals to become the leaders.”

And there is much for them to learn: The Jews of Belarus have a rich 500-year history, most of it under Polish and Lithuanian dominance.

Throughout the last century, Belarus, then a part of Imperial Russia, was a spiritual center of European Jewry, boasting two yeshivas and numerous rabbinical academies that were founded in the Minsk area in the early 1800s.

In its outreach work, the Spiritual Revival group is trying to help young Jews realize that “they themselves come from a rich history of Jewish learning,” says volunteer Avi Operman, a recent graduate of Yeshiva University who spends several weeks each year in the former Soviet Union.

In an effort to reconnect young people with that history, Spiritual Revival sponsors occasional trips to the small towns of Volozhin and Mir, near Minsk, where two famous 19th-century yeshivas were located.

The need to reconnect is echoed by Krauss. “Every book I read, every book I learned from comes from somewhere in this area,” he says.

“Seventy years of communism totally destroyed it. We have to try to bring some of this tradition back, to show Jewish kids how rich their tradition is and to make them proud of it.”