Conclusion

Negotiating Traditions

As we have seen throughout this book, Jewish identities in contemporary Odesa take many complex forms. Where once the Soviet state used “Jewish” to describe a broadly defined nationality, in the years after Ukraine’s independence, new and competing senses arose of what it means to be a Jew, and these played out across categories of community, nationality, and religion. Concepts of Jewishness are shaped by the experiences of those who emigrated, those who stayed back, those who left only to return, and those who have built lives that move between Odesa and elsewhere. More discretely, the different forms of Jewish belonging at work in post-Soviet Odesa have been refined by the intricacies of language, kinship, education, political loyalties, local and international networks, and other variables of cultural capital. Undoubtedly, Odesa’s Jewishness has also been shaped by geopolitical conflict and war. While I address these developments in the epilogue, the analysis and effects of the ongoing war on Odesa’s Jewish life go beyond the scope of this book and are the subject of my subsequent study.

In this book, narrated life histories, informal conversations, interviews with Odesan Jews of various backgrounds and ages, and my own observations all demonstrate the wide range of experiences that have shaped Jewish life in Odesa two decades after Ukraine’s independence. Through stories of prerevolutionary, Soviet, Nazi-occupied, and post-Soviet Odesa, as recounted by elderly Odesan Jews, and through the varied and unpredictable life trajectories of middle-aged and younger Odesans, I learned the processes by which Jewishness was constantly being remade and reshaped, developed from abroad and cultivated from within—in every case, with unexpected results.

This complex construction of Jewishness stands apart from the all-too-reductive image of Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry as a case of suspension and revival. While it was always far too simple to cast Jewish life under the Soviet period as a matter of state antisemitism and repression, we can trace how that image did in fact play a role in fueling projects of post-Soviet Jewish identity through the influence of international philanthropy and new forms of migration from, and to, Odesa. In turn, these variables created many forms of Jewish identification—with their different bases of affiliation, loyalty, and obligation—that made up Jewish realities at the time of my fieldwork. These forms of identification were neither static nor predictable. Crafted in the spheres of Odesa’s particular urban climate, they are nonetheless influenced by the transformations affecting the Ukrainian nation-state and the global forces that impact its politics today. Therefore, the transitions of Jewish identification in contemporary Odesa—as witnessed on individual, familial, and communal levels—must be understood as ambiguous, contingent, sometimes contradictory, and always affected by greater societal and political pressures.

Odesa as a Place

Previous chapters have made clear that Odesa has never been a mere backdrop for the cultivation of Jewish identities: it has played a significant role in how Jews there have come to understand themselves. In turn, the city’s Jewish history has molded its image as a cosmopolitan, tolerant, and unique space within the Soviet and post-Soviet worlds. The qualities that make Odesa so distinctive emerged from both its historical development and what we’ve seen as the Odesa myth. This elaborate sense of place shaped how local Jews now make sense of their reality and project themselves forward. When I observed the city from 2005 to 2007, it seemed that in every realm—past, present, and future—some Odesans defended the idea that their city represents something vitally different from the Russian Empire, from the USSR, and, at that time, from the rest of Ukraine.

But in more recent years, with the increased political tension and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and larger assault in 2022, more and more Odesan Jews saw their city as a Ukrainian city (a point I return to in the epilogue). In the post-Maidan years, many of the Jewish Odesans I spoke with expressed a desire for Odesa to remain the city they knew—one that embraced rather than rejected ethnic and religious difference. Religious leaders of different faiths openly protested against Russia’s aggression at the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion. On March 22, 2022, representatives of Odesa’s largest Christian churches, along with one of the chief rabbis of Odesa, Chabad rabbi Avraham Wolf, and Deputy Imam Askar Olegovich Jasimov delivered a powerful address to Odesans that was streamed on the official channel of the Department of Information and Public Relations of the Odesa City Council. In a plea to end the war and support peace in Odesa, the religious leaders cited the fact that Odesa has always harbored people of various nationalities and faiths who have managed to coexist despite their differences. “Let this be a prayer for the city as well as the world that Odesa represents to us all,” said Archpriest Pavlo Polenchuk (Orthodox Ukrainian Church—Moscow Patriarchate). The leader of the Orthodox Ukrainian church, Father Teodor Orobets, spoke more directly to the Russian aggressor, stating that “free people do not need liberation and release. . . . The world that Russia brings is not peace, it is evil.” Father Oleksandr Semrechinsky (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), chief chaplain of the naval force in Odesa, said, “The city of Odesa is one big family. In this family we are different, but we are one. We value everything that makes us a family. We only need to be left alone to develop as a multireligious, multiethnic family, part of the Ukrainian land, the Ukrainian state, looking to the future.” Deputy Imam Jasimov added, “We are all united in the fight against evil, and evil has no nationality.” A prayer for the city was also voiced as a prayer for the world of tolerance that Odesa represents and for all that is dear to the city’s residents. “I am proud to live in a city where I can speak in Russian and everyone understands me and helps me,” Rabbi Wolf said in conclusion. “This is the most loyal city and country for any nation where you can work and develop.”¹ In this way, Odesa offers counterevidence to the recent antiessentialist trend that questions the supposed bonds between people, culture, and territory.²

By arguing for this interrelation of Jewishness to Odesa and Odesa to Jewishness, I’m not suggesting that all Odesans relate to their city in the same way, or even see it as “Jewish.” As mentioned before, Ukrainian, Greek, Turkish, Moldovan, Italian, and other Odesas also exist in the city’s popular culture, imagination, and history. Even some places that are historically Jewish have undergone transformations and produced an array of different memories. Students who played basketball in the Glavnaya (Main) Synagogue when it was used as a sports hall in the Soviet period have their own connections and associations with that building. As modern Jewish studies scholar Barbara Mann writes, “We create different, overlapping spaces, speaking about them in different languages, even calling the very same sites by different names.”³ Still, there’s no denying that the city’s Jewish presence (both real and mythical) provides crucial reference points for a larger, dispersed “imagined community” beyond the realm of the city’s Jewish population. Indeed, the influence of Odesa stretches far beyond its physical location, coming alive in memories, photographs, memoirs, literature, art, discourse, songs, cuisine, and the rhythm of everyday conversation. What it means to be an Odesan has changed with the passage of time and the distance of its emigrants. But many feel that the city, or Odesa Mama, as some call it, has raised a unique type of person. Writing in kinship terms, historian Patricia Herlihy notes how “Odessa has always had a strong sense of its unique cosmopolitan history, priding itself on loose but real ties with the center” and earning a reputation among state rulers as an “enfant terrible” or the “slightly eccentric member” of a nation or family.⁴ Indeed, Odesans see themselves as an urban kinship group, and others see them as a people defined by their city—always in positive, uplifting ways.

At the same time, the attachment to the city felt by Odesa’s Jews has been affected by the migration of people and ideas, including the new constellations of ethnoreligious identities that have emerged, both Jewish and non-Jewish. In the world of Jewish development, for example, Odesa is just one among many post-Soviet cities categorized as “in need.” As chapter 5 detailed, some philanthropic missions identified Odesa as a place of Jewish rebirth but also as a historical relic of Jewish suffering and oppression. Some local Jews felt that such projections offended their status as Odesits, while others willingly engaged with development projects, appreciating the visits and donations and even coming to rely on them. Many saw the arrival of foreign delegations, Jewish emissaries, and tourists from abroad as opportunities to connect with world Jewry and the wider world in general.

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Odesa’s Jews have been introduced to a new symbolic vocabulary—the lingua franca of an international Judaism. And just as philanthropy has flowed in from outside, it has also been cultivated by ex-Soviet Jewry and those with connections to former Soviet states, as in the case of the Genesis Philanthropy Group and Limmud FSU, both set up as organizations that promote the growth and development of Russian-speaking Jewish culture.⁵

The opportunities for identification with the larger Jewish world have held particular sway over the younger generations of Odesa’s Jews. They have come of age in a more religiously infused environment, where the traditions of Jewish faith and observance—daily prayer, wearing a kippah, observing Shabbat, eating kosher food, and so on—are taught and seen. The educational and international institutions that took root after the fall of the Soviet Union introduced these young people to some of the defining features of Jewish life. For example, consider the more than three hundred children being raised in the Tikva and Chabad orphanages run by the Orthodox congregations and the students in Jewish kindergartens and schools, including the boy who spoke to my father and me in the park (described at the start of this book). For those children, the sense of Jewish life in Odesa could hardly be further from the experiences of secular, unaffiliated, and older Jews.

Although some of the observant Jews I met had turned to Judaism before the development of organized Jewish life in Odesa, there’s no question that the investments of international Jewish organizations have greatly raised the profile of religious observance and knowledge. Creating new institutions spreads religious values to the larger Jewish community, fuels philanthropic efforts, and thus brings in many Jews from abroad—both the tourists attracted by online advertisements selling Odesa as a Jewish destination and the philanthropists who weave Odesa into their understanding of an expanding Jewish world.

The Complexities of Odesa’s Jewish Revival

Claims that Jewish life in Odesa had undergone a “revival” after the fall of communism suggest a past neatly recovered and triumphantly restored, as if the Soviet period had been cleanly swept aside. Chabad’s website, for example, proclaims, “Jewish community activities are increasing day after day. Many new people come back to their roots, the heritage of their lost ancestors. They taste the sweet fruits of Yiddishkeit and learn more and more about the great culture and traditions of their people.”⁶ In the second decade after Ukraine’s independence, Jewish life in Odesa is partly the product of those newly constituted religious institutions and the recently established organizations that have helped cultivate vivid signs of Jewish life throughout the city.⁷

In connecting Odesa’s Jewry to a history of the Jewish people, Chabad’s message and others like it portray a continuity between Odesa and the Jewish people that is bound by a common history, culture, and the traditions of Judaism. Such messages gloss over the more pragmatic reasons for Jews to turn to organized Jewish life, the multidirectional commitments to observance (including abandonment), and the diversity of Jewish traditions and people, presented previously as a singular entity. And thus, as I’ve tried to show in this book, understanding this Jewish “revival” means asking, What is being revived, and what is being created, and why? On what basis? By whom, and for whom?

My findings reveal the complexity embedded in the common assumption that within postsocialist societies, “a widening spectrum of individuals and organizations are looking to the sacred” and that religious affiliation is generally on the rise.⁸ In fact, many individuals in post-Soviet settings weren’t initially drawn to religious affiliation for the sake of the “sacred,” even if this later became important to them. Within the affiliated community, and all the more outside it, Jews challenged one another on their motives for religious membership. Indeed, there were many reasons that brought Jews to organized Jewish life and to religion—and, as in the case of Nina and others, the reasons weren’t always in the canon of Judaism.

It might be said that the young people turning to Judaism as religious practice and adopting a form of Zionist zeal are seeking out versions of prerevolutionary Jewish life. But we’ve seen that their motivation is often to explore the links to Jewish Odesa through the new institutions that emerged in the post-Soviet context. When young people joined a religious community, there was no certainty that they would remain adherent or keep following its practices. In fact, the religious “transformations” I witnessed in Odesa were far from complete: they were frequently multidirectional, sometimes fraught, and often shaped by ambivalence.

For those who do sustain their religious life, Jewish Odesa is now largely Orthodox. Community membership is thus mainly divided between the Litvak and Chabad congregations. Despite their different approaches, both groups agree that the Reform congregation “doesn’t have the same vision of Judaism as the Orthodox movement.”⁹ The handover of the original Brody Reform Synagogue building to Chabad Lubavitch in 2016 proved to the Reform rabbi that Chabad’s clout in Odesa (and in many other key former Soviet Union cities) is unassailable and will ultimately dominate the realm of Jewish authority.

The religious revivals led by Christians and Muslims in the former Soviet states are open to all and seeking converts, but Odesa’s Jewish leaders have largely followed the strict criteria based on halakha that regulates access and recognition. These criteria are sometimes at odds with the previous markers of Jewish identification, whether specified by the state or culturally adopted. The Litvak and Chabad Orthodox congregations both grew larger; other Jewish congregations did as well, albeit more slowly. Since my initial departure from Odesa in 2007, I kept in touch with friends there, and I saw many of them become more observant of religious commandments and more engaged in organized Jewish life during my subsequent visits in 2014 and 2019. Several religious Jewish women started to dress more modestly and cover their hair. Those who’d already worn discreet head coverings moved on to wigs. Some of the men grew beards or sidelocks and adopted religious garments; some families suspended travel on Shabbat and abandoned habits like eating pork. In other words, as more Jews actively identified themselves as Jews, they did so through the strictures of Judaism. New congregations also formed, including a conservative Jewish congregation. It will be interesting to see how its presence might shift the polarized and politicized relations of the existing Jewish congregations, though I suspect that the more established Orthodox communities will continue to dominate.

Many of the stories in this book reveal radically different paths taken to reach those multiple forms of Jewish self-identification—ranging from a familiar immersion in Zionism to religiosity and to a secularism carried over from the Soviet period. Chapters 4 and 6 map out how families and friends of different orientations negotiated these paths of identification. In the same chapters, I highlight the contingent, partial, and sometimes impermanent nature of the decision to become an iudei, a migrant, a Zionist, an Israeli, or an otherwise affiliated Jew. In practice, such categories weren’t strictly defined: they were often merged with other meaningful orientations, or contorted and compromised to accommodate an individual’s life.

The experiences of returnees and transmigrants added another dimension to the development of the various Jewish identities, communities, and spaces between home and diaspora that are all elements of this “revival.”¹⁰ My ethnography thus adds to the existing critiques of the binary home/diaspora model, showing how Jews said to be living “in the diaspora” actually experience their locale as their home, and extend this sentiment to other territories of belonging where family and friends reside, or with which they connect on the basis of language, culture, and familial, entrepreneurial, and professional networks. In this way, although Israel was one of the countries to which Odesan Jews expressed an attachment, they thought of it in terms of personal relations. For many of the Jews I met during my initial fieldwork, Israel wasn’t a place they intended to return to, either bodily or metaphorically, but as living conditions deteriorated during the war, it became a real home to many who made aliyah.

Russia’s 2022 invasion has created yet another seismic shift in identification with place. The political conditions have driven more Jews to look to Israel as an escape, even if many others have chosen to evacuate to neighboring countries, including Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Moldova. Certainly, many hope to return to Odesa eventually, but the future effects of these wartime evacuations remain profoundly uncertain.

Jewishness and Contested Cosmopolitanism

One key theme in this book is the way a discourse of Odesa as a cosmopolitan and Jewish city has shaped the identity politics among Odesa’s Jewry and continues to inform their ideas about the city, their views on events unfolding in the region, and their vision of their future. I have sought to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of different people’s engagement with this discourse. I found that Jewish Odesans were experiencing multiple cosmopolitanisms that called up different historical dimensions of the city’s multicultural and ethnically diverse past, as well as links to the wider world through the networks shaped by transnational organizations, tourism, and philanthropy.

It’s too early to predict the full outcome of the current conflict, but we can see that Ukrainian-Jewish solidarity speaks of a still newer cosmopolitan state of mind for both groups. The ability to move beyond the painful episodes of Ukrainian-Jewish history exhibits the “capacity for openness and appreciation for others” described as a defining feature of cosmopolitanism by Caroline Humphrey and Vera Skvirskaja.¹¹ For the most part, Jews in Ukraine have pledged their loyalty to the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian language as a stance against Russian aggression, but in taking this stand, they haven’t abandoned their native Russian tongue—and many haven’t abandoned friends from Russia who support them, either. The entanglements of Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish heritage and culture are messy but real and need further research, especially in light of the current war.

Ukrainian Jewry who support the Ukrainian nation and feel an attachment to the state demonstrate a shift away from the extremely negative image of right-wing nationalist groups with antisemitic rhetoric and ideology to an all-inclusive model of Ukrainian nationalism—one defined by cosmopolitan values and virtues. Posting pictures of themselves in prayer on Facebook under the heading “An ordinary Monday of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in Odessa” (written in Russian), four young Jewish Odesans mocked Putin’s claims that Ukraine is run by fascists—as well as the idea that either Jews or Russian speakers were persecuted groups in Ukraine. This post demonstrates their open practice of Judaism and their belonging in Ukraine. It also articulates a number of important points about identity politics, representing another layer of reality beyond the implicit binary of Russians versus Ukrainians, Jews versus Ukrainians, and Jew versus Jew that’s visible in the popular press and alive in public perceptions. In fact, young Jews in Odesa feel free to identify themselves as Jews and as Ukrainians in any way they choose, without a noticeable contradiction linked to Soviet definitions of ethnicity or history. They are not reined back by historical memory or Russia’s propaganda; in fact, they mock them with humor.¹²

We can say that the cosmopolitanisms Jews brought to Odesa are now connected with the idea of a plural Ukraine. Of course, the solidarity expressed for Ukraine has also fragmented many family units, friendships, and other collectives that are divided by individuals’ stances on the war and by the stigma and hatred toward all things Russian. Diversity, as we know, does not always allow and compel the awareness of the cultural “other,” nor does it guarantee peaceful relations.¹³ This layer of reality also hinders lived cosmopolitanism in a major way and potentially threatens the “urbanity” described by Blair Ruble.¹⁴

The stark separation of politics from everyday life that Odesa maintained for much of its history has also been compromised since the Maidan protests and now the war with Russia. Ethnic, political, and religious conflicts have revealed the limits of Odesa’s long-standing myth of peaceful, apolitical coexistence. But even before the collapse of Russian and Ukrainian ties, Skvirskaja, describing the city in 2006, stated that “indifference, rather than engagement with difference” appears to be the “new mode of co-residence and coexistence in Odessa.”¹⁵ Comparing Odesa with other great cities, from Bukhara to Venice, Humphrey and Skvirskaja describe it as “post-cosmopolitan.” They recognize that the inhabitants of Odesa and other comparable cities harbor “a sense that something precious has been lost, or sidelined, and that other less generous relations have taken its place.”¹⁶ In the view of these authors, the older diasporas that once defined the city—Greek, Jewish, and German—have passed from Odesa, while communities of new migrants from the rural hinterland and from Turkey, China, Chechnya, and other countries haven’t blended into the larger social milieu.¹⁷ I suggest that rather than thinking of urban cosmopolitanisms as beginning and ending in Odesa, we must think of cosmopolitanism as an ongoing, evolving process of contested interpretations.

For example, as we saw in chapter 7, many would agree that “Old Odessa” had already been eroded by an outflow of the city’s Jews and the development of a Jewish community that was drawing stricter boundaries for membership based on Orthodox Jewish doctrine. This process, in the eyes of some older generations of Jewish Odesans, altered the engagement and exposure of Jews with others. To the younger generations, however, it was these processes that were opening the city to the wider Jewish world. This generational difference in outlook on the very idea of a cosmopolitan Odesa is why I believe that Jewishness still has a strong metonymic relationship to Odesa. Jews still stand for all the groups that the city has absorbed with tolerance throughout its history, however idealized this vision of Odesa may be.¹⁸ And because the metonym is an idealized projection, the city’s Jewishness doesn’t entirely depend on the actual number of Jews residing there. Of course, a myth of tolerance and a cosmopolitan ethos aren’t indestructible, and the actual practices and understandings of Jewishness and cosmopolitanism among Odesan Jewry are bound to be in flux.

This recalls the view put forth by historian Samuel Ramer and author and academic Blair Ruble in their collection Place, Identity and Urban Culture: Odesa and New Orleans.¹⁹ They describe the unique qualities exhibited through the interaction of place and diversity in these two cities, both historically and today. For instance, Ruble emphasizes the specific qualities of Odesa and New Orleans as “model” cities for displaying multiculturalism in their streets—both are “urbane” insofar as they offer up the space and the pervasive willingness of their residents to engage with and accept the other. The authors point out that the mix of ethnicities, religions, and foreigners is facilitated by the layouts of both cities: pedestrian streets, parks and public squares, plentiful access to diverse cuisines, and colorful architecture. In each city, writes Ramer, the members of any one group may feel their minority status less acutely than they would in rural areas, and the distinctive sense of urban identity enhances the residents’ sense of their personal identity as “special” and “significant.”²⁰ Odesa’s historical modes of coexistence are threatened, Ruble notes, by the homogenization that comes from Ukrainian nation building.

While Ruble is correct that homogenization of any kind threatens Odesa’s lived cosmopolitanism, it’s important to make a distinction. Ukraine’s government policies after the Orange Revolution of 2004 were designed to create a coherent pan-national Ukrainian identity, and some Odesans saw aspects of these policies as “an attack on the city’s cosmopolitan orientation and linguistic aesthetics.”²¹ But other Odesans welcomed them. And while language politics remained at the core of the argument voiced by Russian-speaking Odesans against Ukrainization, the same individuals accepted and supported other aspects of Ukrainian nationalism, including reorienting the country’s geopolitical allegiances toward the West and away from Russia.

In different circumstances, the ethnic and religious boundaries observed in Odesa in the mid-2000s were fluid, and at times the categories of “Russian,” “Russian-speaking,” “Jewish,” “Ukrainian,” and even “Christian” merged. That was especially true in the powerful narrative of what it meant to be “Odessan” and thus “cosmopolitan,” as well as in the context of ethnically and religiously mixed and bilingual families and of Jews like Nina, who saw themselves as ethnically Jewish but practiced a Christian faith. At the time of my fieldwork, Jewish identity was also entwined with those legacies of Soviet ideology and the meanings embedded in being “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” or “Odessan.”

Complicating matters further, even though Odesan Jews were still very much tied to the larger Russian-speaking world, some were also becoming Ukrainian: learning Ukrainian history, literature, and culture; learning and using the Ukrainian language; and developing an affinity with Ukraine that they might have not experienced before. Various Jewish and Ukrainian organizations worked to build a dialogue and establish ties between Jews and Ukrainians. It was all part of their effort to overcome the aspect of Jewish history in Ukraine that’s defined by pogroms and the Holocaust, and to learn about other dimensions of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.²² These developments and conversations are extremely important for Ukrainians and Jews in the country as well as those in diaspora communities. They address historical traumas, facilitate healing, and teach new generations of Ukrainians and Jews about their shared history. They also break through the stereotyped image of Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators and antisemites, which has been spread in recent Russian propaganda and also remains alive in the perception of some Jews in and outside of Ukraine. Equally troubling for others is the remaking of historical narratives that overlook antisemitic atrocities. An honest conversation focused on a collaboration to see the past for all that it was, and also to make a distinction between then and now, is vital for developing a healthy and fruitful future for Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Discussing the historical parallels between Jews and Ukrainians, Amelia Glaser reminds us that we cannot pretend these groups have always gotten along. We need to see their history for all that it was: moments of solidarity but also periods of competition, scapegoating, and even competitive victimhood and betrayal.²³ We cannot collapse all time frames for a homogeneous picture of one sort or another. It’s important to acknowledge the contradictions, changes, continuities, and developments that have always shaped Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

While ethnic, civil, and linguistic differences have become more politicized, Odesa’s Jews find themselves as Russian-speaking and, increasingly, Ukrainian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, transcending many boundaries of separation. It wouldn’t be surprising, then, for various threats of homogenization to stimulate the continuation of Odesa’s discourse of cosmopolitanism, and for that discourse to become a means to subvert and resist the imposition of a strictly limited national and religious identity. In the context of war, the city’s Jewishness, Ukrainianness, and cosmopolitan mix of the two are also powerful tools of resistance against the prevailing dominance of Russian imperialism.

The fight to maintain Odesa’s designation as a Jewish place is, by extension, a battle for a historically constituted, if now weakened, process of cosmopolitanism—an antinationalistic ethos, international and open. It’s hard not to think that if the leaders of national and religious movements in Odesa would adopt these sentiments and incorporate them into their visions of the city as a whole, they might achieve a greater level of integration, understanding, and prosperity for their own institutions.

Transforming Traditions

The decline of Jewish tradition in the Soviet Union had multiple causes: the destruction of religious institutions because of secularization, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, emigration, postwar grassroot antisemitism, and state antisemitic repression. As mentioned in the first two chapters of this book, some Jews voluntarily gave up their “traditions” as a way to “elevate” themselves above the shtetl. But when new Jewish traditions—Israeli, Litvak, Chabad, and others—were adopted, what remained of an old system of meaning was infused with new symbolism and differing ideologies, visions, and moralities. The negotiations and contestations seen in Odesa’s Jewish community are thus connected to larger processes of transformation that are visible across the former Soviet states.

Ethnic, religious, and national identities created new systems of meaning and were pitted against existing rubrics of moral standing, solidarity, and material wealth derived from the specific history of Soviet socialization. For the younger generations, life in the Soviet Union is but a faint memory or legend of the past, but for older Odesan Jews, it remains a key element of their identity—the ideological bedrock for how they perceive the cultural and political dynamics of their city postindependence. These generational divides fuel debates about authenticity that reveal the entanglements of secularism and religiosity, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, modernity and traditionalism, and the larger question of what it means to be a Jew. Indeed, different Jewish voices in Odesa appropriate, uphold, and challenge current developments in living Jewish practices as authentic, necessary, important, and progressive. The bottom-up approach to analyzing the religious revival in Odesa has offered us the perspective of members of different Jewish communities being involved at a local level. In the end, the discourse of community members and other unaffiliated local Jews—alongside the visions of Jewish leaders—paints a detailed and panoramic picture of the transformations seen at individual, familial, and community levels, inclusive of the contradictions, gaps, inconsistencies, and paradoxes of daily life.

Jewish practices and discourse in Odesa, like those Lara Deeb describes among practicing Muslims in Lebanon, “have been variously interpreted, debated, and authorized through its history.”²⁴ In contrast with Deeb’s example, however, a “break in continuity” occurred under Soviet rule, and thus it’s questionable how much we can speak of continuation of practice. To establish their authority, Jewish religious leaders have constructed and presented “a community and a tradition . . . as unchanging and invariant.”²⁵ The “social and cultural constructionism” observed by Galina Zelenina in the context of the Chabad movement in Moscow resonates with Odesa in many ways. Above all, it exemplifies the notion of an “invented tradition” extended to an “imagined community” of local Jewry.

The taxi driver we met in the introduction assumed that the observant families crossing the street near the synagogue were tourists, based on their black religious dress and head coverings. In other words, public religiosity still seems out of place to some, while for many others, these symbols have been normalized and institutionalized, becoming an integral part of contemporary Odesa. Although most leaders of religious institutions in Ukraine are foreign, Odesan Jews are starting to assume important roles in their community. As the Chabad rebbetzin Chaya Wolf said, “It used to be that all the teachers in the Jewish schools came from Israel, but now graduates of our own Jewish schools are coming back to teach here.” Three local kolel graduates who received their rabbinic qualifications in Israel served as rabbis in Odesa before the war.²⁶

In fact, Chaya’s own case also demonstrates the complexity of the relations that religious emissaries build in the places they move to “on assignment” but come to regard as home. Born in Israel, Chaya has now spent more than half her life in Odesa. Although she speaks Russian with a heavy Israeli accent, she identifies with Odesa as the birthplace of her mother. Chaya’s parents immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, but she grew up knowing little of their history or native tongue. Linking her role in Odesa with her family heritage, she sees it as her mission to repair a world that was broken for the Jews of her parents’ generation. Her father was fired from his job and imprisoned after Stalin’s death for practicing Judaism; today, Chaya is advancing Jewish practice as the norm. She admits that her mother can’t believe how much attitudes have changed toward Jews or how much freedom Jews now enjoy in Odesa.²⁷ Along with her husband and other Israeli families, Chaya has helped integrate many traditional Jewish practices, such as kashrut, mikvah, chuppah, Brit Milah, Shabbat, and Jewish burial, as well as less obvious practices like seeking a rabbi’s advice.²⁸

While some elderly Odesan Jews believe that the return of these old traditions is undoing the “modernization” of the Soviet project, which took Jews out of their peripheral religious communities and brought them into the center of modern society, Rabbi Wolf and other religious emissaries view their work as the complete opposite: modernizing the secular. Indeed, many observant Jews involved in organized Jewish life see themselves as both modern and religious. Perhaps for those elderly Jews like Viktor and Olga, the creation of a Ukrainian Jewry linked to Judaism and Ukraine is undermining modernization on multiple levels. As Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern reminds us, the dominant view perpetuated by Russian-oriented Jews was that Russia stood for Jewish modernization, whereas Ukraine, nicknamed Little Russia, did not.²⁹

These sentiments aren’t specific to Odesa or to Judaism. Sonja Luehrmann notes that religious revivals challenge the predictions of modernization theory, and Lara Deeb, writing about pious Shi’i Muslim women, points out that “public religiosities have emerged across the globe . . . [and] have contributed to the collapse of the notion that religion and modernity are incompatible.”³⁰ Although Deeb’s examples include “Christian fundamentalists” and “ultra-orthodox Jews,” I think her statement can be applied to the larger insurgence of religion in public life due to many religious organizations, not just the ultra-orthodox or fundamentalists.

Throughout Jewish history, “there has been a constant redrawing of the cultural boundaries as a consequence of migrations, persecutions, and other fluctuations in Jewish social and economic fortunes.”³¹ Transformation in everyday religion, culture, communal life, and the representation of Jews isn’t specific to Odesa or to the present day. It is part of Jewish history. In this book, however, I have strived to show those transformations and their dynamics through the perspectives of discrete lives. I saw individuals change their opinions, affiliations, attachments, and reasoning with regard to their own Jewish identifications and those of others. And of course, changes came in other, unavoidable ways as well. Most of my dearest elderly friends have passed away since the time of my fieldwork, and with them, their memories, stories, and experiences of Jewish life are gone as well.

Odesa is blessed with citizens who love the city and care deeply about its past. Before the outbreak of the war, two of my friends, a tour guide of Jewish Ukraine based in Tel Aviv and another young historian based in Odesa, were working with the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews on an online collection of memoirs and life histories of Soviet Odesans, one of the many heritage projects halted by the war. Once published, these oral histories, collected across the globe, will open the eyes of the world to a new layer of Soviet Jewish experiences and help us contextualize what it has meant to be Jewish in Odesa and what it means today.

History is one means by which Odesans have defended their Jewish values, progressive thinking, connections to the intelligentsia, unique humor and wit, and the openness, that Odesa has extended to Jews—and to people of all nations. In the more than thirty years since Ukraine’s independence, Odesa has lost many of its Jewish residents. It has also recovered many of its Jewish spaces, welcomed new Jews and Jewish organizations, adopted new Jewish practices, and built a network of connections with world Jewry. Throughout these transformations, the city has retained its reputation as a unique place for Jews. It remains a powerful frame of belonging for Jewish Odesans at home and abroad. Here Jewishness doesn’t stand in isolation from other practices, associations, or parameters of urban identity: Jewish institutions and community structures are tied into the local, national, and international geopolitical realms. Odesan Jews, especially the younger generations, see themselves as part of Ukraine’s Jewish experience and larger world Jewish affairs in a way their parents and grandparents never did.

Odesa’s Jewish features and lived cosmopolitanisms have changed throughout its days and continue their kaleidoscopic recombinations amid the new conditions of the war. Such changes give rise to new notions of what it means to be a Jew from Odesa, notions that will be formed, tested, and contested and then interwoven in the social imagination of the city. It is this complex but ongoing process of negotiating identities and traditions that defines Odesa as a Jewish and cosmopolitan space.