As soon as he discovered his passenger was Jewish, the cab driver issued a warning. “When we come to Fergana, don’t tell anyone you are Jewish,” said Jamshi, 33, a Muslim from Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent. “I don’t mind it, but some Muslims there have a different view. They think Jews are evil.” The government in… More ▸
Testifying to a rich Jewish past, museums in the western Ukrainian city of Lvov hold hundreds of Jewish artifacts that once belonged to local synagogues and Jewish institutions. Now the few practicing Jews here say they need the artifacts back to reinvigorate their community. “Our congregation is trying to bring Jewish tradition back, and we… More ▸
In an effort to end overlap between the two groups, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life and the Jewish Agency are joining forces to form one combined organization serving college-age Jews in the former Soviet Union. The new arrangement also will allow Hillel to move onto college campuses, where it can reach out to… More ▸
Vladimir Solomonovich Polykovsky is the editor in chief of the Concise Uzbekistan Jewish Encyclopedia. And don’t let the title fool you: When it’s finished, the edition is expected to fill eight volumes. “This work is needed so that the huge contribution of the representatives of the Jewish Diaspora is recorded and doesn’t fade from memory,”… More ▸
When Rabbi Loraine Heller began her service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine, she asked the organization to place her in a city with a Jewish community. A U.S. Reform rabbi who came to Ukraine in December to teach English at a local technical college, she found in this central Ukrainian industrial city an… More ▸
When hundreds rallied this week in downtown Moscow to protest the Russian crackdown on Georgians, many of the protesters had yellow stars pinned to their chests. Sunday’s rally had been called to voice criticism of the deportation of hundreds of Georgians and closure of Georgian-owned businesses in Moscow in the wake of Russia’s spy dispute… More ▸
Jewish tombstones and abandoned cemeteries, the remains of once-vibrant Jewish communities, are scattered across Ukraine today. Few communities have managed to do what the Jews in this Crimean town have done: assemble a collection of these tombstones for a museum dedicated to the community’s history. During the German occupation of the Crimea in World War… More ▸
- The resignation of a longtime leader of one of the largest Reform congregations in Ukraine has thrown the spotlight on a bitter controversy over homosexuality within the post-Soviet Reform movement. Boris Kapustin, 70, founder and chairman of the Reform congregation in the Crimean town of Kerch, quit his post in September. While Ukrainian Reform… More ▸
Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, symbolizes one of the worst massacres to take place during World War II. But some young Ukrainians have never heard about the tragedy. “I know nothing about that ravine. Probably some people were killed there but I’m not sure who, by whom and when,” said Anna,… More ▸
The Reform movement has been working in the former Soviet Union for 16 years, but it still lacks a central facility for its operations in the region and suffers from a shortage of rabbis, cantors and community workers. That may change, movement leaders say, with the introduction of a new, extended curriculum at the movement’s… More ▸
