After a year and a half in Siberia, Rabbi Yehudah Weissler, chief rabbi of Siberia and Novosibirsk — and the only rabbi in all of Siberia — recently returned home to England.
But during their stay here, the 26-year-old rabbi and his wife, Mirella, sent by the Israeli organization Shvut Ami, sparked a quiet revolution.
Weissler started a small yeshiva and his wife opened the first Jewish kindergarten in Novosibirsk. Together, they built the only mikvah to be used in Siberia for more than 50 years, and they made sure there is now kosher meat.
Up five fights of stairs in a grim, decaying Siberian apartment building, their home was the first kosher home in Siberia in decades.
Novosibirsk, deep inside Siberia, is the capital and economic and cultural center of Siberia, which stretches across eight time zones. Novosibirsk feels like a frontier town, and is said to be the exact center of Russia.
Noisy, rickety trams lumber through city under a thick network of overhead electric wires. Old women in heavy parkas and fur hats clean mud from the tram tracks.
Gigantic factories line the Ob River, billowing smoke into air already thick with pollution and spewing waste into the water.
Here, as throughout Russia, crime and unemployment have drastically increased over the past several years.
“There are officially about 10,000 Jews in Novosibirsk,” Weissler said in an interview before his departure after Passover.
“But there is enormous assimilation here, and no one really knows how many Jews there are,” he said. “People tell me, `My parents are both Jewish, but I’m not.'”
About 2,000 Jews from Novosibirsk have immigrated to Israel in the past several years.
“In 1989, when it became possible, all the Jews who wanted to packed up and left. Now we are trying to build a community again,” said Weissler.
And the community is growing.
In what has become know here as the “Law of Russian Jews,” the more Jews leave, the more remain. Jews are coming out of the woodwork, attending events and associating with the Jewish community.
Even the mayor of Novosibirsk is believed to have a Jewish father, even though he has not connection with the community.
Under communism, Jewish communal life was forcibly eradicated. Most Jews here have only hazy memories of being Jewish.
“When I arrived, I found virtually no Jewish life,” said Weissler. “Even for Yom Kippur there was only a tiny gathering.”
Now there are many sparks of Jewish life. More than 800 people came to a Purim celebration.
The government of Israel runs an Israeli cultural center and a Sunday school for 75 children. The Jewish Agency organizes aliyah and activities for young people.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee funds many of the new community activities and has established a Jewish library in the center of town.
Originally, there were two synagogues in Novosibirsk. They were both confiscated after the 1917 Communist Revolution.
About 20 years ago, the Jews were allowed to open a synagogue in a tiny blue wooden house on the outskirts of town. They had to stop using it when the ceiling fell in. The oven that was once used to bake matzah now lies rusting and useless.
The community thinks that a large brick building standing in the center of town used to be their main synagogue and they are trying to reclaim it.
There are 27 active Jewish communities across Siberia and the Soviet Far East. But Weissler believes that there could be at least the same number of cities with a sizable number of Jews where there is not yet any organized Jewish life.
Eli Regimov, JDC’s representative in Novosibirsk, estimates that there could be more than 200,000 Jews in all of Siberia.
Weissler has traveled to communities throughout Siberia. “The further East in Siberia you go, the further away from Europe, the more cut off from their past the Jews are and the less Jewish identity they have retained,” he said.
The first Jews are believed to have come to Siberia from Lithuania in the 17th century. Although Siberia lay outside of the Pale of Settlement — the area where Jews were allowed to live — some Jewish criminals and political exiles were sent to labor camps here. Jews also came to Siberia as traders, particularly in furs.
But most of the Jews here today came from Ukraine and Byelorussia during World War II, fleeing the Germans. Others came as factories were moved east, farther from Hitler’s reach.
The neighboring — in Siberian terms — community of Omsk, with about 8,000 Jews, is an overnight journey away on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
Omsk has no rabbi, but the leader of the synagogue, Ruvin Epshtein, leads services and presides over the revival of Jewish life in his town.
For holidays, close to 400 people fill up the hall.
“One hundred years ago, there were two synagogues, a Jewish school and two rabbis. But during the Soviet period, people were afraid to come. After you visited the Jewish community, you might be invited to visit the KGB,” Epshtein says.
A recent fire in the synagogue in Omsk is believed to have been arson, motivated by anti-Semitism. The fire was set immediately after a movie about fascism appeared on television.
Omsk now has a Sunday school with 90 children, Hebrew classes, a Jewish newspaper, a Jewish cultural society and two youth clubs with more than 100 teen-agers.
“It’s our dream to one day set up a Jewish school,” says Ludmilla Brook, a young activist in the community. “And we need a rabbi.”
Throughout Siberia, Passover has very special meaning. For many Jews, Matzah is their only link to Jews around the world.
“It’s like a revival of the dead,” said Weissler. “The matzah here goes like water. When we have matzah to sell, its like they wake up. We had I ton of matzah this year, and it went in an instant.
“As long as the Messiah doesn’t come, I see life in Siberia slowly getting better. I believe there will one day again be proper Jewish communities here.”
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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.
