Boston Jcrc Program Links U.s., Ukrainian Jewish Youth

A few years ago, the thought of Jewish teen-agers spending their mid-winter vacation in the former Soviet Union would have been impossible.

This year, nine teen-agers from Boston and five from the Israeli town of Haifa traveled to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine to lead a weeklong day camp for Jewish day school students.

“It gave me a sense of who I am as a Jew and a more down-to-earth sense of what the world is like in other places,” said Steve Schwab, a Boston-area high school senior who participated.

The program — called Havayah, the Hebrew word for “experience” — is designed to create “living bridges” between American and foreign Jewish students. The idea for Havayah came from a similar program linking Worcester, Mass., and Vilnius, Lithuania.

Havayah is part of a sister city initiative between Boston and Dnepropetrovsk, called the Kehillah Project. The project began in 1994 “in response to the end of the refusenik movement,” said Barbara Gaffin, associate director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, which together with Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies funds Havayah.

The large migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to the United States and Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced the organized American Jewish community to shift its focus from freeing Soviet Jews to helping immigrants re-establish themselves in their new countries.

But less attention was focused on those Jews who chose to remain in the former Soviet Union, or who were unable to leave.

American Jews “needed to decide if they wanted to rebuild communities in the former Soviet Union,” said Gaffin.

The Kehillah Project involves congregations, schools and organizations from the Boston area. Other projects include providing medical services, donating food and cosmetics, running a summer camp in Haifa that is attended by students from Dnepropetrovsk and orchestrating senior citizen exchange groups between Boston and Dnepropetrovsk.

Boston’s Bureau of Jewish Education sponsored the Havayah trip.

Beginning in December, the teen-agers from Boston and surrounding communities – – a mix of public school and Jewish day school students — attended training sessions to prepare them for the task of running the camp. They learned how to plan a variety of projects, ranging from arts and crafts and drama to discussions about Judaism and Israel.

Israeli students participated for the first time in the 3-year-old program.

“Having the Israelis made the trip even better,” said David Goldstein, overseas programs coordinator for Boston’s Bureau of Jewish Education. The students in Boston and Haifa became acquainted via e-mail before the trip.

Language differences was one of the challenges confronting the American and Ukrainian students. But two of the participating Israelis were originally from Dnepropetrovsk — they served as translators.

Otherwise, the students found creative ways of communicating through gestures and body language.

The Ukrainian students “look forward to us coming all year,” said Rachel Guberman, a high school sophomore, who was one of three Boston students that participated in the program for a second time.

“I always wanted to go back,” she said, despite the fact that the students spend a week in a hotel that is poorly heated and furnished. Some of the rooms did not have working toilets or showers.

This year, “the city was exactly the same, the hotel was the same,” but knowing how much the program means to the Ukrainian students made the undesirable living conditions worthwhile, said Guberman.

Schwab, who is also a veteran of the Havayah program, said the experience gave him “a strong sense of Jewish continuity.” He was struck that Jews in the former Soviet Union still retained a sense of Jewish identity, even though Jewish practice was outlawed under the years of Communist rule.

“They’re still there, striving — the desire to be Jewish is so strong,” he said.

Lilly Needleman, a high school senior, recalled that two years ago the Ukrainian students were “just learning how to be Jews and Ukrainians.”

This year, the Ukrainians had a better idea of what to expect from the program, she said.

Both times, teaching others about Judaism deepened her own knowledge, she added.

Boston is not the only American city with a sister community in the former Soviet Union.

“There are many communities looking for partners,” said Nate Geller, director of community services and cultural affairs for the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, the group that linked Boston and Dnepropetrovsk. “This is a good model. We’d like to encourage other communities to get involved.”

No other JCRC has a similar program.

Other groups that bring American Jewish high school students to the former Soviet Union to run camps include the Orthodox Union, which sponsors a summer camp in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.

Another New York-based Orthodox group, the Yeshiva and University Students for Spiritual Revival, sends college students to Belarus and Ukraine to run camps in both the winter and the summer.

While the Havayah participants have kept in touch since the program took place in February, communication with the Ukrainian participants has been difficult because they have limited access to e-mail.

“It’s a lot more difficult, but it’s almost more meaningful,” said Schwab. “We have to make the time to write to them, and it’s harder for them to translate and write in English.”