“NOTES” in “Jewish Odesa”
NOTES
Preface
1. Leite 2017, ix.
2. Sapritsky-Nahum 2022.
3. Sapritsky-Nahum 2023.
4. Bringa 1995.
5. Tanny 2007.
Introduction
1. Throughout the manuscript I use the Ukrainian spelling of Odesa unless it appears differently in the original source. See the “Note on Transliteration and Translation” for more details.
2. A kippah is the skullcap worn by observant Jewish men.
3. Herlihy 1986, 241–43.
4. An example is the Bukharan Jewish younger generation, who no longer learn from the elders but are now teaching them (Cooper 2012, 195).
5. Wanner 1998.
6. In grassroots organizations like Migdal, the Jewish community center, and the Museum of the History of Odesa, Jews operated with the help of international Jewish organizations but also received funding from local donors for individual projects not covered by foreign grants. The Jewish Agency, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or the Joint), Chabad Lubavitch, and Tikva were among the main players that shaped Odesa’s Jewish spaces and offered funding for Jewish programs.
7. See Herlihy 1986 and Weinberg 1993.
8. Richardson 2008, 6; Cesarani 2002.
9. Benedict Anderson (1983) defined an “imagined community” as a group of people who will never know most of their fellow members as individuals, will never meet them or even hear of them, and yet the image of their community lives on in the mind of each member.
10. Richardson 2008, 5.
11. For an analysis of port culture among Jews, see Cesarani 2002.
12. Richardson 2004, 17; Skvirskaja 2010, 79.
13. Polese 2007.
14. Richardson 2008, 5.
15. Horowitz 2017, 40; Lecke and Sicher 2023, 2.
16. See Karakina 2007, 7.
17. Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro 1997, 289.
18. I am grateful to Zeev Volkov for pointing out this important distinction to me.
19. Tikva Children’s Home, n.d.
20. Mark Tolts (2018, 217) identifies the “core” Jewish population as those who identify themselves as Jews or, in the case of children, are identified as such by their parents. This group doesn’t include persons of Jewish origin who report another ethnicity in the census; the “enlarged” Jewish population, which includes household members of the core Jewish population; or the “Law of Return population,” which includes Jews, children and grandchildren of Jews, and their respective spouses (Institute for Jewish Policy Research, n.d.)
21. In the 2001 state census, 83 percent of Ukrainian Jews declared Russian as their primary language (State Statistics Committee of Ukraine 2003–2004).
22. Richardson 2008, 227n5. Further legislation passed in 2019 under President Petro Poroshenko gave special status to the Ukrainian language and made fluency in Ukrainian a requirement for civil servants, soldiers, doctors, and teachers. The new laws also required 90 percent of the content on television and films distributed to be in Ukrainian and at least 50 percent of books to be printed in the Ukrainian language. Computer software also must have a Ukrainian-language interface (Polityuk 2019).
23. Herlihy 2008, 79.
24. The main basis for establishing citizenship in Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union was the official registration of residency, a document called propiska. Other proofs of residency were also used, such as the testimony of witnesses who could assert that the person had permanently resided in Ukraine when the citizenship law came into force in November 1991 (Oxana Shevel, pers. comm., December 14, 2010). In other words, Ukrainian citizenship was extended to all who permanently resided in the territory of Ukraine at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union, irrespective of their family roots. Thus, most Jews and others in Odesa are citizens of Ukraine.
25. Polese and Wylegala 2008, 792.
26. Skvirskaja 2010, 79.
27. Dmitry Khavin’s film Quiet in Odessa demonstrates how for some Jewish activists, these loyalties changed places in the aftermath of the 2014 events.
28. Sylvester 2005, 5.
29. Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern 2016, 286.
30. It is difficult to establish exact numbers of congregants. Representatives of Tikvah claim to help more than three thousand men, women, and children through their community and education programs. Chabad Lubavitch cites comparable numbers but also claims twice as many for its newspaper subscribers. Congregants are often double-counted by many Jewish organizations, making it all the more difficult to establish reliable statistics.
31. Meir Dizengoff (1861–1936), the first mayor of Tel Aviv, lived in Odesa in the early 1880s and was active in the Hovevei Zion (Loving Zion) movement. Edmund Allenby, an English soldier and British imperial governor, was a prominent figure in the British conquest of Palestine.
32. Totally Jewish Travel, n.d.
33. Shabbat, the seventh day of the week, is the day of rest.
34. The Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, together with Hebrew University, had an ongoing research group and produced a conference in 2021 entitled “Cosmopolitanism in Urban Spaces: The Case of Odessa.”
35. Lecke 2021.
36. Sylvester 2005, 5, 14.
37. Lecke 2021.
38. Horowitz 2023, 100–101.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 114.
41. Sifneos 2018.
42. Humphrey 2012, 18–19.
43. Nathans 2002, 166.
44. Abbas 2000, 770.
45. Klier 2002, 175; Sylvester 2005, 13; Nathans 2002, 5.
46. Abbas 2000, 772; Cesarani 2002; Cesarani and Romain 2006; Cocco 2010; Sifneos 2018.
47. Lecke 2021.
48. Cohen 1992; Bhabha 1996; Malcomson 1998; Robbins 1998; Humphrey 2004.
49. Hannerz 1996, 103; Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2012, 2.
50. Abbas 2000, 771.
51. Mandel 2008, 47.
52. Ibid., 48.
53. Clifford 1998, 369.
54. Abbas 2000, 772.
55. Richardson 2004, 204.
56. Sicher 2023; Sifneos 2018.
57. Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2012.
58. Clifford 1992.
59. Mandel 2008, 48.
60. Humphrey 2012; King 2012.
61. Richardson 2008.
62. Mandel 2008, 47.
63. Aviv and Shneer 2005.
64. Wiesel 1966.
65. Golbert 2001a, 1. Edited volumes on Soviet and ex-Soviet Jewry, produced largely by Israeli and American social researchers (with limited contributions by Russian-speaking scholars), include Ro’i 1995; Lewin-Epstein, Ritterband, and Ro’i 1997; Ro’i and Beker 1991; Gitelman, Glants, and Goldman 2003; Gitelman and Ro’i 2007; and Ben-Rafael, Gorny, and Ro’i 2003. These books present a rather narrow picture of Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish reality and are heavily based on the sociological and statistical models of outside observers. Sociologist Larissa Remenick’s 2012 updated volume, Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration, and Conflict, tries to offset this by giving the perspective of a Russian Jewish sociologist whose research is based on participant observation. But Remenick’s work is not an ethnography of everyday life in a specific urban context—which is what this book presents.
66. A great deal of literature has been produced about ex-Soviet Jewish communities abroad: in the United States (Markowitz 1993; Gold 1997; Rittenband 1997; Hegner 2000, etc.), Israel (Golden 2002; Markowitz 1997; Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder 2002; Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007; Remennick 2002, etc.), Germany (Bodemann 2008; Bernstein 2005 [also Israel]; Baraulina 2005, etc.), and other destinations. Work on ex-Soviet Jews in countries of the FSU is still scarce and is so far dominated by survey methods and by archival and statistical data. See, for example, Brym and Ryvkina 1994; Ryvkina 2005; Brym 1997; Tolts 2007; DellaPergola 2007; Gitelman 1988, (1988) 2001; and Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro 1997.
67. Goluboff 2003, 3.
68. See Cooper 2012.
69. Waligorska 2013, 12.
70. Bringa 1995, xii–xiii.
71. See Steinberg and Wanner 2008, 11.
72. Morris 2012, 254.
73. Ibid.
74. Biale et al. 2018; Loewenthal 2020.
75. Danzger 1989, 3; Myers 2014, 2.
76. Hobsbawm 1983, 4.
77. Zelenina 2018, 251.
78. Renato Rosaldo (1989, 21) emphasizes that social analysis must now grapple with the realization that its objects of analysis are themselves analyzing subjects who critically interrogate ethnographers—their writings, their ethics, and their politics.
79. My research was funded by an American Councils for International Education Title VIII grant, which required an official affiliation with a local university.
80. This was a branch of Migdal that sponsored a group for non-Jewish families to attend classes at the center for a small fee. For Jewish families, these classes were subsidized by sponsors of the Joint and by local donors.
81. Goluboff’s 2003 synagogue study is predominantly based on the male informants with whom she interacted within and outside the synagogue, but I myself didn’t encounter such leniency among Odesa’s Orthodox congregants. It’s possible that the later timing of my own fieldwork (2005–7) compared to Goluboff’s (1995–96) indicates that the feasibility of such “transgressions” has declined.
82. Ries 1997, 2.
83. Ries 2000, ix.
84. Rosaldo 1989, 9.
1. Historical Background
1. Zipperstein 1999, 65.
2. Ibid.
3. Friedman 2013.
4. Petrovsky-Shtern 2009, 3.
5. Literature on Jews in the Russian Empire is extensive. Some key sources include Polonsky 2019; Polonsky 2013; Klier 1995; Veidlinger 2009; Rechtman 2021; Avrutin 2010; Nathans 2002; and Klier and Lambroza 1992. For books dedicated to Jewish experiences in the land of today’s Ukraine, see Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014 and Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern 2016, among others.
6. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 3.
7. Zipperstein 1999, 4; Bemporad 2013, 5. See also Nathans 2002 for a study of the Jews of St. Petersburg in late imperial Russia; Veidlinger 2000 for Moscow in the Soviet era; Goluboff 2003 for Moscow in the late 1990s; Meir 2010 and Khiterer 2017 for a study of Kyiv in its respective periods; and Kobrin 2010 for a study of Bialystok in the twentieth century.
8. Polonsky 2019, 3.
9. Markowitz 1993, 22.
10. Nathans 2002, 1.
11. Zipperstein 1999, 22.
12. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 2.
13. Polonsky 2019, 403.
14. Zipperstein 1999, 19.
15. Refuseniks were those who could not obtain exit visas in the Soviet period.
16. In her work on Jewish ex-Soviets abroad, Fran Markowitz (1995, 203) writes, “The majority of the people—at least those whom I interviewed during the mid- and late 1980s in New York, Israel, and Chicago—denied being modern-day Jewish heroes and stressed instead that they had really been striving for assimilation in the USSR and ultimately left when they—or their children—encountered insurmountable obstacles.”
17. See Slezkine 2004; Yurchak 2006; Kotkin 1995; Humphrey 2004; and Steinberg and Wanner 2008.
18. Kotkin 1995, 154.
19. Steinberg and Wanner 2008, 3.
20. Humphrey 2004, 146.
21. Yurchak 2006, 8.
22. Slezkine 2004.
23. Nathans 2002, 2–3.
24. See Baron (1964) 1987, 2; Pinkus 1988, 2; Dubnow 1916–20, 1:1–13.
25. Petrovsky-Shtern 2014, 6.
26. Pinkus 1988, 3.
27. Petrovsky-Shtern 2014, 6.
28. Shapira 2014, 69, 76.
29. Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern 2016, 24.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 29; Glaser 2015.
33. See Hanover 1983 for a Jewish account of the events and Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern 2016, 28–31, for a critique. Also see Glaser 2015 for a detailed description of the Khmelnytsky uprising from the vantage point of the Poles, Jews, Russians, and Ukrainians.
34. Polonsky 2013, 1.
35. In the first partition (1772), Russia annexed an area of Belarus, including Polotsk, Mogilev, and Vitebsk. In the second and third partitions (1793 and 1795), the Russian Empire incorporated almost the entire Grand Duchy of Lithuania, including major Jewish centers such as Minsk, Vilna, Grodno (today Hrodna), and Novogrudok and most of the right bank Ukraine, including Zhitomir, Bratslav, and Kamenets-Podolsky (Kamyanets-Podilsky) (Polonsky 2019, 322).
36. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 10. In addition to the large number of Jews, Catherine’s dominions came to include millions of Poles, Lithuanians, Baltic Germans, and Tatars, whose faiths and cultures also influenced the cultural environments of the Russian Empire (Baron [1964] 1987, 14).
37. Polonsky 2019, 323. In 1820, Jews constituted nearly 3.5 percent of the empire’s population of 46 million; by 1880, Jews made up 4.7 per cent of its total population of 86 million (ibid.).
38. Dubnow 1916–20, 1:261.
39. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 10–11; Baron (1964) 1987, 15–16. Under the Russian Empire, individuals who owned property worth more than 500 rubles could register as members of the merchant class, according to the following scale: the first guild, at least 10,000 rubles; the second guild, between 1,000 and 10,000; and the third guild, between 500 and 1,000. Those owning less than 500 rubles’ worth of property were registered as townsmen. Jewish merchants were granted the privilege of admission to the guilds in 1780 (Pinkus 1988, 12).
40. See Rogger 1986 for a fuller description.
41. Polonsky 2013, 76.
42. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky (2014, 11) point out that Russian authorities allowed Jews and other groups, including Old Believers, Muslims, and the Karaites, to administer themselves. The goal was to facilitate the incorporation of the borderland ethnicities into the monarchy.
43. Ibid.
44. Glaser 2012, xv, 4.
45. Pinkus 1988, 13.
46. For a fuller explanation of the restrictions passed during Catherine the Great’s rule, see Pinkus 1988, 13, and Baron (1964) 1987, 13–17.
47. Pinkus 1988, 13; Polonsky 2019, 336.
48. Polonsky 2019, 328, 336.
49. Polonsky 2013, 79, 80.
50. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 11–12.
51. Polonsky 2019, 354, 356, 357. Polonsky points out that it was “in Nicholas’s reign that the government began to intervene on a substantial scale in Jewish life, with the objective of ‘molding the Jews in ways consistent with the emperor’s overall aims and ideology’ and turning them into loyal subjects of the tsar by establishing direct state supervision of the life and religious activity of the Jewish community and eliminating the traditional mediators between the state and the Jews.” (356)
52. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 12. Men over eighteen served in the military for twenty-five years; younger recruits served in special cantonist battalions (army camp) until they were of age to transfer to the full service. While this legislation brought Jews into the military ranks of the Russian Empire and was implemented as part of the larger attempt to transform Jews into loyal Russian citizens, historians point out that religious freedom was disregarded during the time of service and conversion was openly encouraged, especially among the younger recruits who were taken to cantonist battalions. Some Jews were excluded from service, among them rabbis, members of the merchant estate, those educated in state-sponsored institutions, those in agricultural colonies, and, later, students from government-run Jewish schools (Polonsky 2019, 359). See Stanislawski 1983, 25, for a description of conversion in military service.
53. Nathans 2002, 4; Slezkine 2004, 105. All but 300,000 of Russia’s Jews resided within the Pale. Those outside included 60,000 Georgian and Mountain Jews living in the Caucasus and 50,000 residents of central Asia and Siberia. The rest were mainly concentrated in urban areas; they made up the majority of the population in the cities of Belarus and Lithuania, and about 30 percent of Ukraine’s city population (Gitelman [1988] 2001, 28–29; Nathans 2002, 4).
54. Zipperstein 1986, 13–14.
55. Ibid., 13.
56. Gitelman (1988) 2001, 8.
57. I am grateful to Marsha L. Rosenblit and Deborah Dash Moore for this point.
58. See Nathans 2002, 78–79.
59. Ibid., 45–79.
60. Polonsky 2013, 2.
61. Ibid.
62. Svirskii 1904, 169; quoted in Weinberg 1993, 9.
63. New Russia consisted of the provinces of Ekaterinoslav, Taurida, and Kherson (where Odesa is located), acquired by the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century. After 1828, New Russia also included Bessarabia (Weinberg 1993, 3).
64. Mazis 2004, 17.
65. Sifneos 2018, 99.
66. Herlihy 2018, 197.
67. Polonsky 2019, 326.
68. Skinner 1986, 209–11.
69. Zipperstein 1986, 32.
70. Herlihy 1986, 251; Rozenboim 2007, 33.
71. Ascherson 2007, 140. These statistics exclude bilingual Jews and others who spoke other languages.
72. Richardson 2004, 11. Imported goods were taxed at a much lower rate in Odesa than in other ports. As a result, it was cheaper to live in Odesa than anywhere else in Russia (Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 80).
73. Weinberg 1993, 2.
74. Ibid., 4. See Herlihy 1986, 215–22, for a detailed description of Odesa’s railroad and its effect on the local economy.
75. Zipperstein 1986, 39.
76. Sifneos 2018, 176.
77. For a detailed description of Jewish occupational ranks in Odesa, see Polishchuk 2002, 319–21.
78. Polonsky 2019, 177; Zipperstein 1986, 36.
79. Polonsky 2019, 177.
80. Zipperstein 1986, 39.
81. Rozenboim 2007, 34.
82. Mazis 2004, 25.
83. Polonsky 2019, 176.
84. Zipperstein 1986, 36–37.
85. This process of cultural transformation was not supported by all, nor was it without conflict. For example, Zipperstein (1986, 37) mentions a famous incident commonly cited by Odesan historians: In 1817, the city’s rabbi, Berish ben Yisrael Usher of Nemirov, was beaten on the street by several Jews who were unhappy with his stringent approach to the observance of ritual law. Zipperstein describes how “traditional Jews” were opposed to the Odesa school administered by the maskilim, citing an incident when rocks were thrown at the school’s students and teachers (48). In general, however, he characterized traditionalist opposition to Jewish reform as “muted” and “neutralized” (49).
86. Zipperstein 1986, 1.
87. Ibid., 37.
88. Ibid., 42; Polonsky 2019, 177.
89. Zipperstein 1986, 43; Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 91.
90. Kravtsov 2002.
91. Zipperstein 1986, 55.
92. Ibid., 65–66.
93. Ibid.
94. Mazis 2004, 27.
95. Rubinstein 2023, 140.
96. Zipperstein, n.d.; Sicher 2023.
97. Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 102.
98. Tanny 2007; Herlihy 1986, 240, 253.
99. Zipperstein 1986, 69.
100. Ibid., 131, 151.
101. Slezkine 2004, 124–25.
102. Ibid., 125.
103. Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 91; Zipperstein 1986, 75.
104. See Veidlinger 2009.
105. Klier 2002, 175.
106. Simhah Pinsker, Perets Smolenskin, and Eliyah Werbel wrote in Hebrew; Joachim Tarnopol, in French; and Osip Rabinovich, Menashe Margulis, and Il’ia Orshanskii, in Russian. Other distinguished intellectuals included Mark Wahltuch, who translated Pushkin from Russian to Italian in 1855, and Maria Saker, a liberal Jewish educator who became the first woman to be published in the Russian Jewish press, among others.
107. Petrovsky-Shtern 2023; Zabirko 2023.
108. Klier 2002, 175.
109. Zipperstein 1986, 74.
110. Slezkine 2004, 128, 136.
111. Polonsky 2013, 276.
112. I am grateful for Marsha Rozenblit and Deborah Dash Moore for highlighting this point.
113. Zipperstein, n.d.
114. Hrytsak and Susak 2003, 145.
115. Rozenboim 2007, 38. During the Soviet period, all but one of Odesa’s synagogues were closed down and used for various nonreligious purposes, such as gym facilities and storage (Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 70). The one that remained open didn’t have regular prayer, but according to my informants, it did provide services for the major holidays. The other synagogue buildings only returned to their original purpose after the fall of the USSR in 1991.
116. Klier 2002, 173.
117. S. Katz 1996, 26.
118. Zipperstein 1986, 64.
119. Ibid., 105.
120. Ibid., 104.
121. Ibid., 57.
122. Polonsky 2019, 177.
123. Ibid.
124. Gerasimov 2003.
125. In 1908, Jews owned all of the thirty brothels in Kherson province, most of them located in Odesa (Zipperstein, n.d.).
126. Herlihy 1986, 251. Weinberg (1993, 20) links the decline of Odesa to a number of short-term events, such as bad harvests, and long-term trends, including recession, unemployment, decline of the port facilities, competition, and the effects of the Russo-Japanese War, which cut off maritime and trade connections with the Far East (see also Herlihy 1986, 295–96).
127. Klier 1992–1994, 178.
128. Herlihy 1986, 253.
129. Ascherson 2007, 140.
130. Herlihy 2018, 56.
131. Ibid.
132. Herlihy 1986, 254.
133. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 17; Herlihy 1986, 299; Sifneos 2018, 176.
134. Humphrey 2012, 23.
135. Weinberg 1992, 248. These official statistics undoubtedly underestimate the damage. Other sources report much higher figures: Dmitri Neidhardt, governor of Odesa during the pogrom, documented 2,500 casualties; the Jewish newspaper Voskhod reported more than 800 deaths and several wounded; and local hospitals reported treating at least 600 individuals for injuries sustained during the violent attacks of the pogrom (ibid.).
136. Historian Robert Weinberg (1992) presented a combination of long-term and immediate factors behind the 1905 pogrom. Among the long-term factors that contributed to the conditions for anti-Jewish violence over time was the economic competition between Jews and others in the city, long-standing ethnic and religious antagonisms, the prominence of Jews in the commercial affairs of Odesa, and the mistreatment of Jews as manifested in discriminatory legislation passed by the central government. The immediate factors have to do with the general course of political developments in 1905 and the polarization of pro- and antigovernment forces, the role of civilian and government officials promoting an atmosphere conducive to a pogrom, and the visible position of Jews in the opposition against autocracy (ibid., 250). Discussing the contradictory character of the accusations and rumors, Caroline Humphrey (2012, 42) explains that Jews could be attacked as both representatives of the exploitative bourgeoisie and as revolutionary activists.
137. Herlihy 1986, 258.
138. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 18.
139. Gitelman (1988) 2001, 18.
140. For more on Jabotinsky’s life and time in Odesa, see Horowitz and Katsis 2016; Halkin 2019; Stanislawski 2001; and S. Katz 1996.
141. Oz 2004, 57; Misuk 2007, 52–54.
142. See Penter and Sablin 2020 and Guthier 1981, 175.
143. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 26.
144. Ibid., 27.
145. Petrovsky-Shtern and Polonsky 2014, 34.
146. Polonsky 2013, 275.
147. Guthier 1981, 166.
148. Petrovksy-Shtern and Polonsky 2019, 35.
149. Zipperstein, n.d.
150. Bemporad 2013, 5, 6.
151. Kotkin 1995, 356.
152. Bemporad 2013.
153. Ibid., 6.
154. For discussions of Soviet Yiddish popular culture, see Shternshis 2006 and Veidlinger 2000, 2009.
155. Polonsky 2019, 254.
156. Bemporad 2013, 176.
157. Slezkine 2004, 247.
158. Kulyk 2018, 123.
159. Hidden Jewish ancestry is common in many parts of the world. Stephan Feuchtwang (2007, 9) reveals a common thread in the history of Jewish assimilation in Germany, where even children of mixed marriages and Jews who had converted to Christianity were stigmatized.
160. Bemporad 2013, 5.
161. Manley 2009, 57.
162. The Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 classified anyone with at least three “full-Jewish grandparents” as a Jew, and grandparents were “fully Jewish” if they belonged to the Jewish religious community (Pegelow 2006, 44). But in Odesa, as S. Y. Borovoi (2001, 23) explains, the local Nazi administration drafted an explanatory note of who, for the purpose of extermination, was considered a Jew: anyone with a Jewish ancestor in the maternal or paternal line (not specifying the generation), regardless of their religious belonging, or anyone practicing Judaism.
163. Gesin 2003, 128, emphasis in original.
164. Inber 1981, 79.
165. Arad 2009, 240.
166. King 2011, 202.
167. Ibid.
168. Deletant 2008, 157; see also Gesin 2003, 129.
169. Borovoi 2001, 19.
170. Gesin 2003, 129.
171. Charles King (2011, 213–14) writes that the ghetto was hastily organized and initially made up of a neighborhood of houses and apartment buildings, not a walled enclosure, where some Odesans managed to visit and sneak food to their Jewish neighbors. But later, full confinement followed.
172. King 2011, 213.
173. See Inber 1981, 89–91. Yad Vashem has recognized 2,185 Righteous among the Nations from Ukraine (Brandon and Lower 2008, 14).
174. See Gesin 2003, 139–40.
175. Ibid., 133.
176. King 2011, 215.
177. See Gesin 2003, 131–32, 136–39, 181 for detailed descriptions of Bogdanovka, Akhmetchetka, and Domanevka. Also see Yad Vashem, n.d.
178. King 2011, 218.
179. Ibid., 211.
180. The Museum of the History of Odesa Jews provided these estimates for the Odesa region. Other estimates range between 100,000 and 250,000 (see Gidwitz 1997; Borovoi 2001; Inber 1981, 83). Dennis Deletant (2008, 157) estimates that between 130,000 and 170,000 local Ukrainian Jews were murdered or left to die of disease in the region.
181. Gesin 2003, 137.
182. Fisher 1969, 122–23. The literature on the Holocaust in Ukraine is an emerging field. See Brandon and Lower 2008. For in-depth analysis and detailed accounts of the Holocaust in the Odesa region, see, among others, Gesin 2003, 126–50; Ofer 1993; Inber 1981; Fisher 1969, 120–25; Litani 1967, 135–54; Arad 2009, 240–45; and Dusman 2001.
183. Gesin 2003, 143.
184. Ibid., 263.
185. Inber 1981, 81.
186. Kruglov 2008, 284.
187. Deletant 2008, 157.
188. Friedberg 1991, 15.
189. Markowitz 1993, 40.
190. In 1949, a campaign was unleashed to expel “cosmopolitans”—80 percent of whom were Jews—from the communist party and banish them from public and scientific life. As Joshua Rubenstein (2016, 61) points out, “to accuse someone of being a ‘cosmopolitan’ was a crude way of questioning their loyalty to Soviet culture.”
191. Rubenstein 2016, 85.
192. Gitelman (1988) 2001, 159.
193. Tanny 2011, 143.
194. Ibid.
195. Kotkin 1995, 154.
196. See also Friedberg 1991, 64–65.
197. Kotkin 1995, 155.
198. For more on the process of normalizing antisemitism, see Rapoport, Lomsky-Feder, and Hedider 2002.
199. Tanny 2011, 142. On Jewish life during the post-Stalin period (1953–1983) see, among others, Pinkus 1988.
200. Tanny 2011, 143.
201. Ibid.
202. Friedberg 1991, 1; see also Markowitz 1993.
203. Kotkin 1995, 216.
204. Richardson 2008, 4.
205. Richardson 2004, 42.
2. Remembering the Past and Making Sense of the Present
1. Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly (2012, 8) remind us that “we need to combine the study of memory and the analysis of tradition—those habits, institutions, practices and linguistic formulas that characterized Soviet society” and here they concur, anthropologists (and sociologists) in particular can help us understand the deeper levels of collective belonging. See also Halbwachs 1992. The list of works on collective memory is immense. Some important contributions include Connerton 1989 and Ricoeur 2006, among others. The literature on oral history is just as extensive. Among other titles, see Ballard et al. 2007 and Thompson 2000.
2. Veidlinger 2013, xxv. See Ab Imperio Syllabus, n.d. Other important texts that reflect on how historians have struggled with methods of obtaining access to the everyday lives of Soviet citizens include Bassin and Kelly 2012, Fitzpatrick 2000, Davies 1997, Kotkin 1995, and Kharkhordin 1999, among others.
3. Veidlinger 2013, xxvi.
4. Larson 2007, 80.
5. Cited in Sharpless 2007, 14.
6. Portelli 1997; Glaser and Strauss 1967; Larson 2007, 88.
7. See, for example, Wiesel 1966; Gitelman (1988) 2001. For Paul Ritterband (1997, 332), it was precisely the hostile atmosphere of the Soviet Union that intensified the sense of a Jewish self for many Soviet Jews.
8. Veidlinger 2013, xxii.
9. Grant 1995.
10. Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2002.
11. These images were supported in large part by Elie Weisel’s influential book Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry (1966), but also by memoirs and biographies, including those by Emil Draitser (2008), Natan Sharansky (1998), and Saul Borovoi (1993).
12. Zipperstein 1999, 77.
13. A mezuzah is a decorative case containing biblical verses on a piece of parchment, fixed outside the front door of many Jewish homes. A menorah is a nine-branched candelabrum used for Chanukah.
14. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (2000) describe how many Soviet women of that generation were reticent about personal matters, choosing instead to speak mainly about the public affairs of their time.
15. It was in that year, Viktor noted, that the Romanov family celebrated thirty years in power by granting amnesty to many deported “criminals,” allowing them to return home.
16. Goy is a derogatory term for a non-Jew.
17. Bemporad 2013, 10.
18. Veidlinger 2013, 155.
19. Ibid., 80; Shternshis 2006, 17.
20. Veidlinger 2013, 80.
21. Polonsky 2013, 292.
22. Gitelman 1972, cited in Markowitz 1993, 19.
23. Shternshis 2006, 16.
24. The adjective mestechkovye is also used colloquially to indicate people who are considered backward in their ways and thinking.
25. See Inna Leykin’s 2007 paper, which depicts narratives of achievement, pride, and victory still nurtured by Soviet war veterans in Israel.
26. Many elderly Jews emphasized a distinction between Soviet and Nazi antisemitism. They described Soviet antisemitism as state-sponsored discrimination against members of the Jewish nationality, which took the form of Jewish quotas in education and employment, anti-Jewish printed propaganda, the arbitrary refusal of travel and immigration visas, and unjust arrests and executions. Such policies began to appear in the USSR in the late 1930s and increased after World War II. Nazi antisemitism, on the other hand, was directed against anyone of Jewish descent and expressed in arbitrary acts of brutality, destruction, and mass extermination.
27. King 2011, 230.
28. Soviet propaganda often portrayed Jews as creatures with horns and other animal features, such as a tail. See Gitelman (1988) 2001, 218.
29. For theoretical, historical, and empirical discussion of the concept of intelligentsia, see Malia 1960; Gessen 1997; Markowitz 1993, 125–36; Patico 2005, 484, 486; and Lissak and Leshem 1995, 20–36.
30. Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder 2002, 233.
31. Writing about the shift in values in post-Soviet Russia, Jennifer Patico (2005, 484) describes the increasingly dominant role of money, rather than social contacts, in the everyday life of Saint Petersburg residents in the late 1990s.
32. Zvi Gitelman (1988, 441) also notes that most Jews in Ukraine look on Russian culture as “higher” and “less provincial” or less “peasant” than Ukrainian culture.
33. Professor of Russian Studies Terry Martin describes the Soviet resolutions passed in 1937, which “made the Russian language a mandatory subject in all schools, liquidated national districts and village soviets, liquidated all non-Russian schools in the Russian regions of the USSR, and increased the number of Russian newspapers in Ukraine” (Martin 2001, 428). He notes that the Russian language was promoted in public propaganda and “Ukrainian nationalists were once again accused of attempts to ‘divorce Ukrainian culture from fraternal Russian culture and orient the Ukrainian people on the capitalist west, on fascist Germany’” (ibid). In a series of newspaper articles written to promote the teaching of Russian language, this propaganda was visible. Martin gives the example of Uchitel’skaia gazeta for August 7, 1938, which states: “The great and mighty Russian language, the language of Lenin and Stalin, Pushkin and Gorky, Tolstoi and Belinskii, is profoundly dear to all citizens of the USSR, and is studied with love by children and adults . . . [which shows] the exclusive interest of all nationalities to study the language of the great Russian people, first among equals in the fraternity family of the peoples of the USSR” (Martin 2001, 428–29).
34. Other members of the intelligentsia, unlike Viktor and Olga, resisted the regime (see Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder 2002, 236, 240–41; Brym and Ryvkina 1994) and were highly critical of its institutions (Markowitz 1993).
35. It’s a well-known fact, which Elena herself confirmed, that Intourist always had a large number of KGB workers in its various headquarters and that they would usually accompany travelers from abroad as translators and guides.
36. A combination of party membership and education offered the main route to advancement in Soviet society, as Sheila Fitzpatrick (1999 [2000], 16) has explained.
37. See Patico (2005) for a discussion of post-Soviet changes in taste, consumption, and values.
38. Elena didn’t think that she herself “looked Jewish.” Tamar Rapoport and Edna Lomsky-Feder (2002, 239) point out that their Jewish informants “took it as self-evident that Jews have a typical appearance and body language, and they all dealt with the issue of how their appearance reveals or does not reveal their ethnic belonging.”
39. Today, leaders of Odesa’s religious communities have adopted this ideology of difference, but now they view it as a positive trait. For them, the old Soviet joke would go: “Of course he doesn’t drink! He’s Jewish!”
40. According to Jewish law (halakha), cremation is a great sin and highly condemned. In the Soviet Union, however, cremation was a common practice among Jews and others. Today, it’s still chosen by many citizens of the former Soviet Union, including Jews.
41. Zelenina 2012, 58.
42. The Purim festival commemorates the miraculous foiling of Haman’s plot to kill all the Jews of Persia.
43. Serving as an official consulate of the state of Israel in Odesa, the Israeli Cultural Center also functions as an educational and cultural facility for those interested in Israeli life and culture.
44. Zissels 1999, 301.
45. See Richardson (2005) for a detailed description of this group.
46. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (2003, 221), in her research on Jewish Christians in the former Soviet Union, writes that “many Jews in the Church are reluctant to identify themselves publicly for fear of discrimination from both Jews and Christians.” Deutsch Kornblatt also notes that “Jews [like Nina] who converted to Christianity and then arrived in Israel under the Law of Return have legal fears as well” (221 n2).
47. King 2011, 208.
48. In various periods, Odesa’s catacombs, tunnels carved in limestone, served as a “reliable sanctuary for the persecuted” (Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 120).
49. Veidlinger 2013, 241.
50. Manley 2009, 262.
51. Michael Stewart (2004, 570) makes similar observations about the survivors of the Roma community in Romania. Following their return from Nazi concentration camps, they remained silent so as to gain readmission to their homes, villages, and towns.
52. Fitzpatrick (1999) 2000, 84.
53. The Sokhnut is an Israeli organization operating in the former Soviet Union to educate Jews about Israel and assist them in making aliyah.
54. In Israel, Jewish immigrants can acquire citizenship within three months of their arrival, or once a person turns eighteen years of age. An immigrant visa is needed before officially applying for citizenship.
55. Zelenina 2012.
56. Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro 1997, 281.
57. Krupnik 1994, 141.
58. Gitelman (1988) 2001, 271; Ritterband 1997, 332, 336.
59. Senderovich 2022, 6.
60. Gitelman 2012, 22–23.
61. Senderovich 2022.
62. The Institute of Judaica in Kyiv has made an important contribution to the history of Soviet Jewish life by collecting the life stories of Jews born before World War II and producing an archive of almost six hundred interviews conducted for two projects: “Witnesses of the Jewish Century” and “The Jewish Destiny of Ukraine.”
63. Murav 2011, 9–11.
64. Gans 1956a.
65. Gans 1994, 579.
66. Markowitz 1993, 153.
67. Goluboff 2003, 6; see also Zelenina 2012, 2014; Golbert 2001a; and Cooper 1998, 2012. See Fran Markowitz’s book A Community in Spite of Itself (1993, 52) for a different argument; she proposes that the overlapping of Russian and Jewish identities became possible only for those who immigrated to Israel and the United States.
68. Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007, 66.
3. Jewish Revival
1. A sukkah is a ritual outdoor booth or hut where Jews take their meals and sometimes sleep during the holiday of Sukkot. A chanukiah is a nine-branched candelabrum lit for the Chanukah festival. Chabad congregations usually display large chanukiahs in central parts of their cities. In 2007, I saw a twenty-foot-tall chanukiah erected in Odesa’s most prominent square, above the Potemkin Steps.
2. Richardson 2008, 188.
3. City authorities, believing that Jewish buildings should belong in the Jewish community, offered the Brody Synagogue to the Chabad congregation. According to the secretary of Chabad congregation, however, no one in the city wanted the building, recognizing that it would take millions of dollars to bring it back to life. In my earlier interviews with Yulia Gris, the rabbi of the Shirat ha-Yam Progressive Jewish Congregation of Odesa, the story was, yet again, rather different. In her view, the strong political relationship between Chabad and local authorities played a role in the mayor’s decision to return the building to Chabad. Nothing has been done since the building was handed over in 2016, as the state archives are still looking for new premises and currently have no plans for a move.
4. See Richardson 2008, 240 n18, for similar conclusions.
5. Gruber 2014, 335–36.
6. Klier 2002, 175.
7. Cited in Herlihy 2018, 62.
8. Zipperstein 1986.
9. Magocsi and Petrovsky-Shtern 2016, 283.
10. Ibid., 284.
11. Bassin and Kelly 2012, 9.
12. Ibid., 12.
13. Ibid., 7.
14. Ibid.
15. Hann and the “Civil Religion” Group 2006, 2. In Marxist-Leninist ideology, religion was the “opiate of the people,” regarded as an irrational and potentially dangerous superstition. During the Soviet period, as Hann explains, “proselytizing and religious education in schools were prohibited and any display of religious commitment could prejudice not only one’s own job but also the position and prospects of a wide circle of relatives and friends” (ibid.).
16. Golbert 2001b, 713.
17. See Friedman and Chernin 1999; Altshuler 2005.
18. Estimates for Odesa’s Jewish population in 1989 range from sixty-five thousand to eighty thousand. See the introduction to this volume.
19. See Dragadze 1993, 146–56, for a discussion of the “domestication” of religious practice in the USSR.
20. Gidwitz 1997.
21. Chabad Lubavitch is a movement in Hasidism that is also thought of as a philosophy and an organization. The name Chabad is an acronym for hokhmah (wisdom), binah (comprehension), and daa’t (knowledge). Lubavitch is the name of the town in White Russia where the movement was based. Today, the main headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch is in Crown Heights, New York, in the United States. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh rabbi, started a worldwide outreach movement to bring Jews back to Judaism. As part of this mission, he dispatched thousands of emissaries (schlihim) around the world. More than 3,800 emissary couples are stationed in forty-five US states and sixty-one foreign countries (Fishkoff 2003, 10). Particularly in the FSU, Chabad has become a dominant Jewish voice, “shaping the future of this newly emerging Jewish community in a way they have done nowhere else” (ibid., 8).
22. While a number of Israeli families have remained in Odesa since the first days of the community’s operation, most stay only two to four years.
23. The Glavnaya (Main) synagogue was initially known as Beit Knesset Ha-Gadol. The original one-story building constructed in 1795 or 1796, was reconstructed in 1840 after a fire and eventually replaced in 1859 by a new two-story edifice in the Florentine style with Romanesque elements designed by the Italian Odesa architect Francesco Morandi. In 1899, the building was once again reconstructed to the current structure (Zipperstein 1986, 57; Gubar and Rozenboim 2003, 67).
24. The Tikva Odesa Children’s Home was set up in 1996 to serve the city’s needy and homeless Jewish children. It’s sometimes referred to as an orphanage, but some of the children have parents who are simply unable to care for them (see Fishkoff 2004a). In 2001, the synagogue and the children’s home were combined into Tikva Or Sameach. Today, Tikva Odesa remains the main sponsor of the Tikva Or Sameach congregation, attracting Jewish philanthropists in the United States, Israel, Britain, and elsewhere who raise funds for its operation.
25. According to the organization’s website, nearly 1,200 children benefit from the schools, homes, and university programs offered by Tikva. But I found the number of regular attendees at the synagogue to be significantly lower than the 1,000 mentioned by one employee of the congregation. The Friday night services I attended drew between thirty and fifty women and between sixty and eighty men. Holiday celebrations attracted greater numbers, including visiting Israeli families. For the Sukkot celebration I attended in 2006, nearly 350 guests were present.
26. Tikva Children’s Home, n.d.
27. Bemporad 2013, 20. Litvaks—who followed a tradition of Jewish Orthodox practice that originated in Vilna, the capital of the Lithuanian Grand Duchy until 1791 and a hub of Jewish eastern Europe—were historically identified with highly intellectual Talmud study. Although the term Litvak technically means a Jew from Lithuania, it also includes Jews from Belarus and others who followed the Lithuanian tradition. The term has come to mean someone who is Orthodox but not Hasidic. Litvaks are frequently characterized as being more rationalist, dogmatic, and authoritarian than other branches of Ashkenazi Jewry. The movement is often closely linked to the teachings of Rabbi Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman of Vilnius (1720–97), known as the Vilna Gaon, who strongly opposed the development of Hasidism in eastern Europe. Opponents of Hasidim were called Mitnagdim (Bridger 1976, 192).
28. Hasidism (piety) is a Jewish religious movement that originated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the mid-eighteenth century. The name refers to not only the traditional virtues of piety espoused by the movement but also a new ethos of ecstatic joy and a new social structure: the court of rebbes (in Hebrew tzaddikim [righteous men]), and their followers, the Hasidim (formally meaning “pious men” but also “disciples”). Drawing on earlier texts of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and other magical traditions, the tzaddikim were seen as intercessors between their followers and God, focusing primarily on prayer rather than study, as was previously believed to be the case in traditional Orthodox circles. Rather than withdrawal, they emphasized simcha (joy) and divine immanence, God’s presence throughout the material world. Hasidism was more than an intellectual movement, it was also focused on bodily practices (praying, storytelling, singing, dancing, and eating, among other things). David Biale et al. (2018) argue that the physicality of Hasidism played a major role in transforming it from an elite movement to a popular one. The founder of Hasidism, Israel Baal Shem Tov, known as the Besht, “started to preach a living faith in which the ordinary individual found comfort and a way to approach God” (Bridger 1976, 191). The movement aimed at bringing Judaism to every person, whatever their level of education and literacy. In contrast to older forms of Orthodoxy, which were text-centered and academic, Hasidism emphasizes personal piety, mysticism, and good deeds (mitzvoth) judged as individual merits. Ohr Avner is a philanthropic foundation established in 1992 by Lev Leviev, an Israeli billionaire of Bukhari Jewish background.
29. I occasionally saw women wearing nontraditional attire that some would consider inappropriate, such as trousers or revealing shirts or skirts, and families driving to service on Shabbat. When I asked about this, one of my interlocutors said, “Wolf just closes his eyes to this.” Perhaps Rabbi Wolf extended an open invitation for any Jew in the city to attend his services and feel welcome in his congregation, regardless of their level of observance or type of dress. This could also explain why some violations of traditional Shabbat practices were accepted.
30. Chabad Odesa, n.d.
31. Davidzon 2021, 9–10.
32. Each chief rabbi is designated as such by a municipal department that has issued certificates and stamps (Gidwitz 1997). A number of local Jews were disturbed by the fact that Wolf, the Chabad rabbi, drove an expensive car. I heard two young students discussing this: one boy claimed that the car was a present to the rabbi from one of his sponsors, and his friend responded, “Yes, I know those types of gifts. Our rabbi [in Kherson, a neighboring city] also receives them.”
33. Zipperstein 1986, 57.
34. Shneer 2007.
35. Ibid.
36. Zelenina 2018, 257.
37. See also Fishkoff 2004b.
38. See Polonsky 2013, 438–39.
39. “Floaters” were sometimes referred to as “prostitutes” for receiving benefits at both congregations.
40. See the websites of Tikva Children’s Home (www.tikvaodessa.org) and Chabad Odesa (www.chabad.odessa.ua).
41. Other scholars of religious movements in the FSU have pointed out that with Christian and Islamic movements, the financial and material rewards attached to conversions are a factor in religious affiliation (Pelkmans 2006a, 36).
42. Caldwell 2005, 20, 22.
43. Odesa’s Jews also receive aid from a number of nonreligious organizations, funded mainly by the JDC. I would guess that any Odesans of non-Jewish descent who forged their documents did so not to explore Jewish life but rather to gain access to all that’s been offered to Jews by international Jewish organizations and donors. See Caldwell 2008 for a discussion of comparable Christian-based welfare in the former Soviet Union.
44. Similar attitudes are expressed toward ethnic Greeks and Germans in the FSU who have privileges tied to European citizenship, which many ex-Soviet citizens can’t obtain (Eftihia Voutira, pers. comm., November 6, 2010).
45. Kotkin 1995, 152.
46. Chlenov 1994, 133. In the Russian language, children of mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) origin were referred to as polukrovok (male) or polukrovka (female), which literally translates as “half-blood.”
47. Gidwitz 2001, 4. Zvi Gitelman (2009, 258) notes that in 1988, 48 percent of Soviet Jewish women and 58 percent of Jewish men had married non-Jews. By 1996, the frequency of mixed marriages in Ukraine was 81.6 percent for Jewish men and 73.7 percent for Jewish women. In the Soviet Union, as Gitelman (ibid., 257) explains, interethnic marriages were presented in the media and the arts as a sign of progressiveness. On intermarriage among Soviet Jewry, see Altshuler 1998, 7, and Tolts 1992.
48. Of course, intermarriage, mixed ancestry, and the incidence of nonhalakhic Jews are widespread phenomena and not specific to Odesa. In the United States, for instance, the intermarriage rate recorded from 2005 to 2013 by the Pew Research Center is 58 percent (Sasson et al. 2017, 104). Reform Judaism welcomes the children of mixed marriages and the non-Jewish spouses of affiliated Jewry, even where the mother is not Jewish; in regarding them as Jews, it departs from the halakha.
49. Andrew Buckser presents a comparable scenario in Denmark, writing that “some members [of the Jewish community], following Orthodox guidelines, insist that only the children of Jewish mothers or formal converts count as true Jews; some others, noting the prevalence of intermarriage, include children of Jewish fathers as well; and still others recognize self-identification, rather than descent, as the proper criterion for Jewishness. . . . Some of these viewpoints have greater official standing than others—the Orthodox rabbi, for example, has the final word on official membership in the Community” (Buckser 1999, 194). High rates of intermarriage in Odesa and the legacy of Soviet nationality policy (which recognized a person as a Jew through either the maternal or paternal line) complicate boundaries of Jewish membership. The Reform approach to the question of who is a Jew opens the possibility of claiming Jewish identification through either line of descent. The open-door policy practiced by Temple Emanu-El, captured in the slogan posted on its original website, clearly relays a message of inclusivity for potential congregants: “If you are a Jew—come to us! If you are not quite a Jew—come to us!! If you have not yet decided who you are—come to us!!!” (the original website http://www.emanu-el.od.ua is no longer active).
50. Cooper 1998, 2012.
51. Ibid.
52. Such decisions, as Cooper notes, were influenced both by the notion that Islam, the major religion in central Asia, is transmitted through patrilineal lines of descent and by the fact that local Uzbeks follow patrilocal residential patterns.
53. Cooper 1998, 34.
54. In an earlier study of an immigrant enclave of Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach, New York, Fran Markowitz describes cases where boys were denied the bris procedure (circumcision) as a result of genealogical tracking conducted by American rabbis. She writes, “Boys who had considered themselves Jewish, and were considered Jewish in their native country, were told that they are, in fact, not Jews because of intermarriage a generation or two ago” (Markowitz 1993, 159). With compassion for these newly arrived immigrants and an evident distaste for the attitude of the rabbis who “were happy to have caught forgeries,” Markowitz considers these cases truly upsetting, “leaving Soviet Jews with ambivalent feelings about their Jewish identity” (pers. comm., April 2004).
55. Cooper 2012, 192.
56. In the former Soviet Union, the Orthodox conversion process usually takes one to two years and entails strict observance of the Jewish commandments and learning an array of subjects such as Jewish history, the Hebrew language, prayers, rituals, and the Jewish calendar. For men, the process also involves circumcision. As conversion isn’t an aim of the Jewish religion, rabbis initially discourage aspiring converts in order to test their sincerity and often deny applicants for having the wrong motives (wanting to marry a Jewish partner, for example, isn’t considered adequate). Potential converts are also made aware that even after giur they may never be accepted as true Jews, since religious leaders are constantly challenging one another on the legitimacy of conversions. Adding to the sense of anxiety, in 2008 Israel limited its list of rabbis whose giur certificate is accepted as legitimate to those who work with state-run religious authorities, rejecting any private conversion (see Newman 2018). Odesa’s Reform congregation also offered conversion classes, but few members of the congregation took advantage of the giur option, possibly because they already felt included without the formality of conversion. Yulia didn’t insist on strict observance or try to discourage potential converts. While I was in Odesa, she used weekly study groups to teach interested individuals about Judaism within the framework of Reform ideology.
57. I don’t mean to imply that only Jews were hired by Jewish organizations. In fact, many non-Jews worked in circles of Jewish activity (for example, at the Israeli Cultural Center, Museum of the History of Odesa Jews, and Migdal).
58. Kessel 2000, 10.
59. The Sokhnut is an international body representing the World Zionist Organization. Its purpose is to assist and encourage Jews worldwide to help develop and settle Israel. See Encyclopaedia Britannica 2023.
60. The Law of Return 1950 (section 1) simply states: “Every Jew has the right to immigrate to the country” of Israel, leaving the word “Jew” undefined. In 1970, the Law of Return was amended to recognize as a Jew, for purposes of immigration, any person who was born of a Jewish mother or who has converted to Judaism (whether through an Orthodox or other process isn’t specified) and is not a member of another religion. The amended law also grants the right to immigrate to the children and grandchildren of a Jew; the non-Jewish spouses of Jews; the non-Jewish spouses of children of Jews; and the non-Jewish spouses of non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews. “The purpose of this amendment is to ensure the unity of families, where intermarriage had occurred; it does not apply to persons who had been Jews and had voluntarily changed their religion.” However, applications for immigration can be refused on other grounds, such as criminality, health, or national security. All immigrants admitted under the Law of Return are normally granted Israeli citizenship. Jewish Agency for Israel, n.d.
61. Levin 2021, 370–71.
62. Voutira 2006, 380, emphasis in the original.
63. Ibid., 393.
64. Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007, 3. Many immigrants from the former Soviet Union aren’t considered Jewish in halakhic terms. Concerns about excessive numbers of “non-Jewish Russians” have been expressed by Israeli politicians, members of the religious beit din (rabbinic law court), and some ordinary Israeli citizens. They see the 1970 amendments to the Law of Return and nationality law as flawed legislation that’s too broad in its parameters, especially in the consequent granting of citizenship. Negative stereotypes of Russian Jews as alcoholics, Mafiosi, prostitutes, and even Bolsheviks (see Lemish 2000) circulate endlessly in informal and formal settings of the Israeli media, press, and national dialogue (Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007, 5).
65. According to the Ministry of Absorption of Immigration in Israel, only 93 people immigrated to Israel from Odesa in 2006, compared to 6,703 in 1990 and 3,294 in 1991 (data emailed to me upon request by the Information Sector of the former Soviet Union Office of the Jewish Agency for Israel). Between 1989 and 1998, 770,000 people immigrated to Israel from the entire FSU. Between 1999 and 2016, the number of Jews and their relatives who emigrated from the FSU to Israel was estimated at 297,700 (Tolts 2018, 11).
66. “Repatriates” in the context of aliyah are treated differently than refugees and “are expected to integrate rapidly and easily due to their common ethnic and cultural roots” (Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007, 1). Yet the assumption that Jews would integrate more easily in Israel than in other destinations has been challenged by empirical studies showing that Jews coming to Israel often experience many of the same issues as Jews immigrating to other countries (Shuval and Leshem 1998; Voutira 2006).
67. The JCC offers a wide range of services, resources, and recreational programs for Jewish people of all ages and backgrounds. JCC members enjoy the benefits of Hebrew classes, lectures, films, athletic programs, and—most important—opportunities to communicate and interact with other Jews. See Aviv and Shneer 2005 (164–71) for a description of the JCC’s goals, functions, and history in the United States.
68. Golbert 2001b, 713, 715.
69. Bauman 2001, 506.
70. Broz 2009, 24. Broz describes adherents of Buddhism in Altai (southwest Siberia) who adopted a revivalist stance; they “emphasize the cultural proximity [referring to Mongolia and Tuva] and historical influence of Buddhism” on Altaian culture as they “claim to be dusting down a well-preserved Altaian tradition rather than proposing something new.”
71. Bauman 2001, 506.
72. For further explanation of the word “Moriah,” see Harris 2006.
73. Richardson 2008, 189.
74. Levin 2021.
75. Polonsky 2013, 437.
76. Hasidism (specifically Chabad) and the Litvak movement have undergone tremendous change through the last two centuries and have few remaining links to their earlier representatives in the city.
77. See YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, n.d. While Hasidic tzaddikim (righteous religious leaders) did visit Odesa periodically and had a following there, nineteenth-century Orthodox leaders acknowledged the general indifference to religion among the city’s Jews; indeed, they “claimed that the fires of Gehenna burned seven miles around Odessa” (Klier 2002, 173; also Zipperstein 1986, 104–05).
78. Horowitz 2003, 124.
79. Pelkmans 2009, 2.
4. From Evrei to Iudei
1. Sapritsky-Nahum 2015.
2. Bauman 2001, 503.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 506.
5. Ibid.
6. Gitelman 2009, 1. Cynthia A. Baker’s 2017 book Jew offers an extensive historical analysis of this binary.
7. Deutsch Kornblatt 2003, 214.
8. Gitelman 2003, 50.
9. Leite 2017, 18.
10. Richardson 2006, 21 n10.
11. Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro 2003, 73.
12. Zelenina 2018, 251–52.
13. Pelkmans 2006a, 2006b, 34.
14. Pelkmans 2006b, 34.
15. Danzger 1989, 27.
16. Webber 1994b, 84.
17. Cooper 2012, xii.
18. Mathijs Pelkmans, pers. comm., January 21, 2022.
19. Ukraïner 2019.
20. A minyan is a quorum of ten men required for public prayer.
21. Eduard Gurvitz, Odesa’s mayor at the time of my fieldwork, was generally shy about expressing any religious affiliation; he rarely spoke publicly of himself as a Jew. In 2008, however, he took part in a public celebration at the Chabad synagogue to honor the circumcision of his newborn son. The event was widely reported in the local press (see Runyan 2008).
22. Ba’al teshuvah, which means “master of return,” is used to describe Jews who embrace Orthodox Judaism on their own initiative and often later in life, in contrast to Jews born and raised in Orthodox environments. The concept is most popular in the United States and Israel. See Danzger 1989 for an in-depth description of the contemporary revival of Orthodox Judaism in the United States.
23. Golbert 2001a, 209.
24. The bar mitzvah (for a boy) and bat mitzvah (for a girl) are ceremonies to celebrate the “coming of age” of young boys and girls and their willingness to accept the commandments that God requires of adult men and women.
25. A chuppah is a canopy under which the bride and groom stand during the wedding ceremony; it’s symbolic of their shared future home. The term is also used to describe the wedding ceremony as a whole.
26. Yurchak 2006, 103, 109.
27. Paxson 2005, 53.
28. The ritual of the first haircut at age three, which dates back to the sixteenth century, has a number of explanations. Some scholars believe that it is related to the law in the Bible that states that one is not allowed to eat fruit from a tree during the first years after it’s been planted. Thus, comparing human life to the life of a tree, waiting three years to cut a child’s hair is like waiting three years to pick a tree’s fruit, suggesting that the child will eventually grow tall like a tree and produce the fruit of knowledge, mitzvoth, and a family of his own. In the Hasidic tradition, this ceremony marks the transition in his education. The child’s sidelocks are left intact, which signifies his first mitzvah. From this point on, a child is often taught to wear a kippah and tzitzit.
29. Beitar is a Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky, based on principles of self-respect, military training, and defending Jewish life and property against antisemitic outbreaks.
30. Videos, pictures, and stories of other Jewish or mixed (Jewish and non-Jewish) wedding celebrations show a combination of Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and Soviet traditions in the ceremonies and receptions. Parents who weren’t observant themselves often encouraged their sons and daughters who wanted a Jewish ceremony to include elements of Russian, Ukrainian, or Soviet customs that would be familiar to the guests; this even happened in some cases where the parents were observant. The concern was to have a ceremony that wouldn’t seem “foreign” to those unfamiliar with Jewish wedding rituals. A friend from Odesa had an Orthodox wedding ceremony in Dnepropetrovsk, the groom’s hometown; the dinner reception included the Russian tradition of family toasts and the Russian toast, Gor’ko (bitter), which signals the bride and groom to please their guests with a public kiss. Both Russian and Ukrainian dishes were served.
31. Khametz refers to products made from any of five grains (wheat, barley, spelt, rye, or oats) that have gone through the process of fermentation; these are prohibited during Pesach.
32. Golbert 2001a, 210.
33. Although I never attended a burial ceremony in Odesa, I spoke with a number of local Jews about practices for the deceased, including cremation, preparation for burial, the actual ceremony, and the later markers of remembrance.
34. Religious leaders and teachers at religious schools cited the same phenomenon when describing the limitations of their role in students’ lives. An emissary from Israel said, “Many children faced the difficult task of living a religious life outside their schools, as their parents are not observant Jews—or in many cases are not Jewish.”
35. During my interviews, other followers of the Chabad congregation also mentioned the discomfort of walking into a Christian church.
36. Masha said that Odesa Jews who were baptized knew one another, and on Russian Orthodox holidays, they were often absent from activities in school and Migdal. Surveys conducted in 1992 and again in 1997 show that the number of Jews in Ukraine who found Christianity to be the “most attractive” faith rose from 10.7 percent in 1992 to 15.5 percent in 1997 (Gitelman 2003, 195, 201–02; see also Deutsch Kornblatt 2003, 209–23).
37. According to Orthodox religious practice, swimming is allowed only on beaches segregated by sex.
38. Horowitz 2020, 222.
39. King 2011, 156–57.
40. Lecke 2012, 233.
41. Ibid., 330, 455.
42. Horowitz 2020, 226.
43. In many cases, younger members of this group participated at a higher level because they had more free time. University students and young adults were less active as they were concentrating on their studies, careers, or other realms of self-development.
44. Richardson 2006, 21 n10.
45. A survey conducted in 2003 by Pankov showed that 51 percent of respondents considered themselves believers, 32 percent could not answer, and 17 percent considered themselves nonbelievers. In 1995, the comparable figures were 51 percent believers, 19 percent difficulty deciding, and 28 percent nonbelievers. While the proportion of believers identifying themselves as members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church increased from 28 percent (in 1995) to 46 percent (in 2003), the numbers remained unchanged for adherents of Greek Catholicism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, and other religions (each at 1 percent of the sample). Cited in Richardson 2006, 21 n10.
46. Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro 2003, 74.
47. Zissels 1999, 303.
48. Norman Solomon (1994, 97) describes meeting a group of young Jews in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in 1982 who had recently acquired tefillin and were praying according to the Orthodox requirements. His doubts about whether they were thus “returning to their roots” arose from the fact that the boys had been instructed about the rituals by a visiting Orthodox Jew, not by older Jewish residents of their native city; the boys feared that the latter had forgotten the “authentic” ways. This example makes Solomon wonder, “So in what sense were the young Jews of Leningrad returning to their roots? Certainly not in a sense of reclaiming the way of life of their grandparents or great-grandparents, but rather in fear of their altered standards” (87).
5. Asymmetric Cultural Encounters
1. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 61.
2. In Hebrew, tzedakah means righteousness, fairness, or justice. The root of the word, tzedek, implies that “social welfare is viewed as an economic and social justice matter and Tzedakah, giving, is part of Tzedek justice” (Shadmi 2019, 124).
3. Shadmi 2019, 125.
4. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 57.
5. Stirrat and Henkel 1997, 66.
6. To avoid confusion, I use the acronym UJC/JFNA to mark this change when necessary. Although the old UJC website has since shut down, I’ve kept some citations from it as they relate to the timing of the mission described here.
7. Douglas 1990, viii.
8. Ibid., ix.
9. Stirrat and Henkel 1997, 69.
10. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 57.
11. Poppendieck 1998.
12. Leite 2017, 177.
13. Kugelmass 1994; Leite 2017, 187.
14. Lehrer 2013, 57.
15. Leite 2017, 183.
16. Allahyari 2000; Craig 2005.
17. Caldwell 2008.
18. Shadmi 2019, 125.
19. Lehrer 2013, 57.
20. Feldman 2008, xviii, 20, 26.
21. Stirrat and Henkel 1997, 67.
22. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 52.
23. Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar’s address to sponsors of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS, printed in 2000.
24. Cited in Caldwell 2008, 199.
25. ORT was founded in Russia in 1880 to develop employable skills for Russia’s impoverished Jews. In Russian, ORT is an acronym for Obshestvo Remeslennogo i zemledelchskogo Truda, meaning Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor. In the early 1990s, ORT began to support training programs in Jewish schools (World ORT, n.d.). ORT runs its own school in Odesa and provides computers and computer training programs to other Jewish schools in the city.
26. Poppendieck 1998, 185.
27. This description refers to the large fundraising missions conducted by nonprofit organizations. Smaller group and individual trips to the city rely on a wider range of resources and have other reasons for visiting. I met visiting Jews who had found resources through their synagogue, a travel agency, Jewish genealogy websites, friends who had previously visited the city, or local publications purchased abroad. They presumably experienced a somewhat different view of Odesa.
28. Leit 2017, 185.
29. In this context, “program” refers to particular projects designed to fulfill specified social needs.
30. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 56. Ruth Ellen Gruber (2002) describes the phenomenon of Jewish tourism and suggests that places and people are often presented (and even distorted) to suit specific organizational and individual needs.
31. Picturing Jews in the FSU, the old UJC website read, “Around the world, we help the needy and nurture Jewish life” (Jewish Federations of North America, n.d.-b), and the Joint’s website spelled out, “We provide aid to vulnerable Jews” (JDC, n.d.).
32. Aviv and Shneer (2005, 52) describe diaspora business as “a broad institutional and organizational terrain that complicates the difference between home and abroad, centers and peripheries, in a shifting, increasingly compressed global world of capital, people, ideas, and national borders.”
33. Taglit, also known as Birthright Israel, is a not-for-profit educational organization that sponsors free ten-day heritage trips to Israel for young adults (aged 18–32) of Jewish heritage.
34. See Jewish Federations of North America, n.d.-a.
35. See Jewish Federations of North America, n.d.-b.
36. O’Brien 1986, 128.
37. Ibid.
38. Others who worked in the Sokhnut programs called the organization’s tactics “brainwashing.” Based on their stories and those of others, I suspect that Olga wasn’t typical—or perhaps her declaration was influenced by her role in the UJC/Sokhnut mission.
39. Markowitz 1993, 139. In the field, I often heard the term professional Jew in reference to Jews who worked for Jewish organizations, received work-related benefits, and treated their Jewishness as an attribute of their profession.
40. Waligorska 2013, 1–2; Halkowsky 2003.
41. Shayduk 2007, 3, 6.
42. Zvi Gitelman (2009, 248) also notes in his discussion of Jewishness in Russia and Ukraine that “Jewish” as a category “is based on biological descent and an ineffable feeling of belonging.”
43. In surveys conducted in 1992 and 1997 by the Jewish Research Center and the Russian Academy of Sciences, respectively, “being proud of one’s nationality” was the most frequent response to the question “What is the most important thing required of a person in order to be considered a genuine Jew?” (Gitelman 2009, 249).
44. Shadmi 2019, 125; Leite 2017, 181–82.
45. Leite describes a similar phenomenon among Marrano community members in a “rote performance,” receiving group after group of tourists who start to “blur into one another” (2017, 177).
46. Pelkmans 2007, 892.
47. Ibid.
48. Gruber 2002, 132.
49. Migdal staff told me that documents are checked to assess which students can apply to programs in Israel (one of four grandparents must be Jewish), who can have a bar/bat mitzvah at the synagogue (the participant’s mother must be Jewish), and so on.
50. Utesov 2006, 11. Leonid Utesov traveled around the Pale as an entertainer, combining comedy and improvised music. Writing about Utesov, Jarrod Tanny (2011) notes that “combining humorous lyrics and the celebrated chaos, crime and debauchery of old Odessa with the melodies and the wailing fiddles and clarinets of klezmer music, Utesov brought the Odessa Myth to the Soviet stage.”
51. Gruber 2002, 145.
52. “Righteous gentiles” refers to gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust.
53. Leite 2017, 194–200.
54. Ibid., 22.
55. Ibid., 17.
56. Shadmi 2019, 124–25.
57. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 52.
58. Three memorials commemorate Jewish suffering during the wartime occupation of Odesa. Two are located close to each other. The more recent one (erected in 2004) depicts six life-size figures of naked Jews standing on what appears to be the edge of a cliff (symbolically the cliff of death). Below the terrified figures, a large inscription spells out “HOLOCAUST” in English, with “never again” underneath in smaller characters, in Russian, Ukrainian, and Hebrew. Another plaque says, in Russian, “We will never forget, we will never forgive.” An earlier memorial, built in 1994, marks the starting point of the “Road to Death”: in 1941, this was where the remaining Jews were assembled to be deported into Romanian-administered camps and ghettos in the Berezovka region, in Transnistria. The third memorial takes the form of a tall, semioval black stone with a hollowed-out Star of David. The inscription reads, in Ukrainian and Hebrew, “In the memory of Jewish victims who were burned and shot, 1941–1944.” In 2009, the city’s Holocaust Museum opened, an initiative of Odesa’s Association of Jewish Ghetto Survivors Union. I’m grateful to Michael Rashkovetsky and Nusya Verhovskaya for detailed descriptions of the Holocaust memorials and museum.
59. Hannerz 1996, 105.
60. Golbert 2001a, 14.
61. Ibid., 146.
62. Lehrer 2013, 4.
63. Koposov 2018, 183. For a discussion of Holocaust remembrance linked to Babyn Yar, see, among others, Aleksandre Burakovskiy 2011; Hrynevych and Magosci 2016; and Dreyer 2018.
64. Sokol 2022, 197.
65. Ibid.
66. Tabarovsky 2018.
67. Babyn Yar is a ravine in a Kyiv oblast where the Nazis carried out a series of massacres during World War II. In one notorious mass killing, 33,771 Jews were executed in a single operation on September 29–30, 1941. It’s estimated that more than 100,000 victims were murdered there, including Soviet POWs, communists, Roma people, Ukrainian nationalists, and civilian hostages.
68. The project’s original funders were Victor Pinchuk, Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, and Pavel Fuks. All but Pinchuk had ties to Russia, which became an issue amid deteriorating Russian-Ukrainian relations and later the war. Holocaust Encyclopedia, n.d.
69. See the original of the letter at “Museum ‘Babyn Yar’: An Open Letter of Warning from Ukrainian Historians,” 2017.
70. See Himka 2021.
71. Cited in Sokol 2022, 195.
72. As far as I’m aware, no public commemoration of Babyn Yar takes place in Odesa, but Richardson (2008, 62) notes that the topic is now included in the history curriculum of Odesa’s public schools and is taught under the subject of the Holocaust.
73. I’m grateful to Mathijs Pelkmans for drawing my attention to the inverted aspect of this performance.
74. Lehrer 2013, 4.
75. Finkelstein 2000.
76. Findling 1999, 1; quoted in Aviv and Shneer 2005, 61.
77. Gitelman (1994, 140) gives a number of explanations for the fact that in the Soviet Union, “the Holocaust was not portrayed as a unique, separate phenomenon.” He wrote that the Jewish population was “unable to press for broader and deeper treatment of the Holocaust.” In addition, “no other country in the West lost as many non-Jewish citizens as did the Soviets,” and thus elsewhere “the fate of Jews stands in sharper contrast to that of their co-nationals or coreligionists than it does in the USSR.” Finally, “the Soviet authorities had explicitly political reasons for playing down the Holocaust.” In the Soviet view, Gitelman explains, “the Holocaust was an integral part of a larger phenomenon—the deliberate murder of civilians—which was said to be a natural consequence of racist fascism, which is, in turn, the logical culmination of capitalism.”
78. Regarding the Holocaust as a topic of study in Odesa’s public schools in the early 2000s, Tanya Richardson (2008, 62) wrote, “although silence no longer enveloped the event, there was certainly a ‘hush.’”
79. Gitelman 1994, 141.
80. Brandon and Lower 2008.
81. Ibid., 2.
82. Himka 2021, 15.
83. Employees of the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews give lectures in the public schools on the subject of the Holocaust. Their talks prompt Jewish and non-Jewish students alike to visit the museum and to write papers on related themes. The museum director told me that one lecturer runs a private bus tour around “Jewish Odessa” for the winner of the best project (Michael Rashkovetsky, pers. comm., December 12, 2010, and more recently Nusya Verhovskaya, pers. comm., January 27, 2021).
84. Golbert (2001a, 146 n77) presents other examples of American Jewish youth trips that tie the narrative of the Holocaust to the presence of the Jewish state. Organizers of some Jewish missions take participants to visit Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and then escort them to Israel (also see Gruber 2002, 149).
85. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 52.
86. Faier and Rofel 2014, 363.
87. Caldwell 2004; Patico 2002; Wanner 2003.
88. Chervyakov, Gitelman, and Shapiro 2003, 72; see also Caldwell 2008, 192, for a more recent confirmation of the same phenomenon.
89. Funding for projects directed by the Sokhnut and UJC was cut back in light of the economic crisis that began in 2007–8, thus reducing the influence of those groups in the region. It is not yet clear whether the philanthropic efforts of local well-to-do Jews (some of them returnees) will change these dynamics, either in terms of financial dependency or in terms of outside cultural influences, particularly in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
6. “Jewish Is a Mode of Transportation”
1. Gitelman 1997, 25.
2. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 29.
3. Chlenov 1994, 127.
4. Part of this material focused on returnees was published in Sapritsky-Nahum 2016, 2018.
5. Gitelman 1997, 23.
6. Ibid.
7. Gitelman 1997, 25; Zipperstein 1986, 20; Dubnow 1918, 2:373.
8. See, for example, Frankel 1981, 50.
9. Gitelman 1997.
10. Lewin-Epstein 1997, 3.
11. Siegel 1998, 3; Brym and Ryvkina 1994, 71–72.
12. See Golbert 2001a, 347 n228, for a detailed description of Ukraine’s procedure for revoking the citizenship of emigrants leaving for Israel, the United States, or Germany.
13. Markowitz (1993) notes that “because one lost one’s citizenship after submitting this application—and one’s job as well—and because one never knew when or if the request to emigrate would be granted, submission of emigration documents was terrifying indeed” (265–66).
14. Tolts 2004, 58; Tolts 2020, 324.
15. Brym and Ryvkina 1994, 15; Gitelman 1997, 2.
16. Tolts 2004, 58; Tolts 2020, 324.
17. The most common reasons given for refusal of exit visas were possession of state secrets, state interest, unfulfilled military service, and the lack of any close relatives in Israel. The number of refuseniks—Soviet Jewish citizens denied exit visas—had surpassed eleven thousand by 1986 (Siegel 1998, 7, 63).
18. Tolts 2020, 324.
19. Rosenberg 2015.
20. Brym and Ryvkina 1994. Yehuda Dominitz (1997) and Fran Markowitz (1993, 265–67) offer close analyses of this “dropout phenomenon” among Jewish migrants from the USSR.
21. Gitelman 1997, 29; 1988, 444.
22. Markowitz (1993, 1) notes that about fifty thousand Soviet Jews settled in the greater New York City area between 1972 and 1984. As she explains, “The Council of Jewish Federations devised a plan to resettle Soviet Jews throughout the US in accordance with the proportion of Jews in each region. Thus, New York City, with about 45 percent of the nation’s Jewish population, was allotted 45 percent of Soviet émigrés, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago” (267). Writing in August 1991, she noted that since 1987, “the Soviet immigrant population of New York has almost doubled” (263).
23. DellaPergola 2002.
24. Polonsky 2013, 425.
25. Tolts 2007, 293; see also Polonsky 2013, 425.
26. Lebedeva 2001, 49. In Lebedova’s survey of Jewish migrants in the 1990s, 65–72 percent of respondents offered this as one of the main reasons for their departure.
27. Polonsky 2013, 437.
28. Brym and Ryvkina 1994, 74; Gitelman 1997, 30. The 1989 change in US immigration law was carried out under pressure from the Israeli state, whose interests clearly lay in directing the large flow of Soviet Jews to Israel (Siegel 1998, 20). A number of my interlocutors speculated about Israel’s involvement in US immigration laws. Similar conclusions were documented by Larisa Fialkova and Nina Yelenevskaya (2007, 45) during interviews conducted in Israel. They write, “Most of our interviewees admitted that they had planned to immigrate to America and eventually landed in Israel only because ‘America had closed down.’”
29. According to Robert Brym and Rozalina Ryvkina (1994, 74), in September 1989, 97 percent of Soviet Jewish emigrants chose not to go to Israel. After the October 1989 US restrictions on immigration, the proportion fell to about 20 percent and remained at that level until 1991.
30. Belensky and Skolnik 1998, 30.
31. Misha Belensky and Jonathan Skolnik (1998, 30) note that although the West German government only started officially granting refugee status to Soviet Jews in 1991, including those arriving via Israel, Jews from the Soviet Union had been immigrating to Germany since 1989 and even before that. In the 1970s and 1980s, about 3,000 Jews arrived in West Germany. In the first few years after the implementation of Germany’s 1991 Contingency Refugee Act, “about 200,000 Russian Jews migrated to Germany.” But the law was amended in 2005 to “seriously restrict Russian Jews’ admission into Germany” (Schoeps and Glöckner 2008, 144). The amendments introduced a points system for immigration and established other requirements for citizenship. The current position is that Germany openly welcomes Russian Jews who are young, skilled, and knowledgeable in the German language and who offer potential contributions to German society. But victims of Nazi persecution are still exempt from residency and other requirements for naturalization as German citizens.
32. Tolts 2020, 325.
33. Cited in Gozman 1997, 406.
34. This is reflected in the slogan of the International World Odesit Club: “Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, and Moldovans! What else do you have but Odessa? Especially in your soul? She is your Mother!”
35. Victoria Hegner (2000, 5) documents the strong pull of family ties for elderly Russian Jews in Chicago, many of whom say that their sole reason for emigration was to follow their children (and not be left alone).
36. While I was in Odesa, I didn’t meet or hear of anyone leaving for the United States or Germany. Besides Elena and Konstantin, I knew of only two others who immigrated to Israel while I was doing fieldwork. In my later visits, however, a number of the youth I knew were on Israeli study-abroad programs; I also met young people who had permanently relocated to Israel following an Israeli partner. Gosha, cited previously, was able to get a work contract as an IT specialist and moved to Israel in the way he had hoped.
37. According to statistics from the Israeli Ministry of Absorption of Immigration, 20,447 Jews and their families arrived from Odesa between 1989 and 2006.
38. From “New Promised Land for Russian Israelis: Canada,” Jewish Russian Telegraph, February 2002, http://www.jrtelegraph.com/2007/02/new_promised_la.html (link no longer active).
39. A survey conducted by Brym and Ryvkina (1994, 80–81) indicated that 31 percent of respondents in Moscow, Kyiv, and Minsk who were planning to emigrate chose countries other than Israel because they felt that they would find it too difficult to live in an atmosphere of Jewish culture or to learn Hebrew.
40. Golbert 2001a, 378.
41. Ibid., 339.
42. See also Markowitz 1997.
43. Statistics provided by the Israeli Consulate in Odesa in 2007.
44. See Sapritsky-Nahum 2013.
45. “About fifty thousand Jewish former emigrants to Israel have returned to Russia since 2001. Over the same period, only about thirty thousand Russian Jews have left for Israel” (Osipovich 2004, 36, quoted in Aviv and Shneer 2005, 49).
46. Newsru.co.il. n.d. A smaller survey of more than one hundred Russian Israelis (residing either in Israel or elsewhere abroad) conducted by Evgenyi Finkel (2004, 327) on LiveJournal indicated that 20 percent of his respondents have left Israel: of those, 27 percent returned to their countries of origin; 24 percent left for the United States; 23 percent for Europe; 14 percent for Canada; and 7 percent for Australia. Another 25 percent of Finkel’s respondents who have not left Israel have entertained the idea of doing so.
47. Khanin 2021.
48. Tolts 2009, 9.
49. Citizens of Ukraine need a visa for most destinations outside the FSU, and obtaining these can be time-consuming and costly. Israeli citizenship facilitates less restricted travel and an easier visa application process for travel worldwide. Former citizens of Ukraine are allowed to go back to Ukraine on their Israeli travel passports without a visa. Recent legislation allows certain foreigners to travel to Ukraine without a visa for a duration of three months: citizens of the FSU, the United States, and the European Union, including ex-Ukrainians who have acquired citizenship in these countries. But the rules can be manipulated. I met Odesan migrants who’d managed to retain their Ukrainian passports after acquiring citizenship abroad, and they commonly exchanged one passport for another at the airport.
50. Author’s notes from Russian-Speaking Jewry in the Global Perspective: Power, Politics and Community conference, Bar Ilan University, Israel, October 17–19, 2006; Finkel 2004.
51. Ash 2004; Tolts 2009, 15.
52. Gold 2004, 445.
53. See Friedgut 2007, 266. Extensive lists of articles dealing with ex-Soviet Jewish remigration from Israel to the FSU were posted on the following sites but are no longer available: http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/080404_return.shtml; http://www.jewishla.org/federationinforcus/html/apr05_jfishel.html; http://www.nysun.com/article14147. An article on returnees from the US was posted at http://www.businessweek.com/1997/25/b353252.html but is no longer available.
54. See, for example, “Return of the Jews: For Decades the Story of Russia’s Jews Has Been One of Fear and Flight to Israel. Now Many Are Coming Home,” Newsweek International, August 9, 2004; and “Once Desperate to Leave, Now Jews Are Returning to Russia, Land of Opportunity,” The Times, April 28, 2005.
55. Cited in Osipovich 2004, 1.
56. Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2005; article no longer appears on the site.
57. During my earlier fieldwork, in 2005–7, Odesa was home to a number of Russian-speaking Israelis who had come to study medicine and other professions. In the synagogue, a number of religious families were also Israeli returnees, who had come back with the specific goal of aiding Odesa’s Jewish community in religious education and practice. Most worked in the Jewish schools and other educational institutions. Sokhnut also sponsored Russian-speaking Israelis who usually held one- to two-year posts as counselors and educators for Jewish youth.
58. Nor were they all returning from the same country: many came from Israel, a smaller percentage from Germany, and a few from the United States. This pattern may be explained by the fact that “migration to the USA and Germany usually entails inter-generational families, rather than individual Jewish youth and young couples, as is frequently the case with Israel” (Golbert 2001a, 347). Also explaining the low frequency of returns from the United States are the greater distance and the cost of travel. While visits from Germany are very common, permanent returns are less frequent. Belensky and Skolnik (1998, 37) document that 92 percent of ex-Soviet Jews living in Germany have traveled back to their hometowns, compared with 9 percent of those living in the United States and 19 percent of those living in Israel. They provide no data on permanent returns from Germany to the FSU.
59. Returning Odesans didn’t form any sort of organized network or community, unlike other major economic hubs of the FSU with larger communities of Israeli returnees, such as an estimated 50,000–60,000 in Moscow (Friedgut 2007, 266). Official statistics on return migrants are vague. Russian and Ukrainian authorities track return migrants based on their registration with the local passport office when they resume residence status in their country. According to these calculations, provided by Mark Tolts (2007, 297), in 2004 immigration compared to emigration was 37 percent in Russia and 30 percent in Ukraine. However, these statistics are of limited value since a number of returnees don’t officially register with state authorities. Also, statistics provided by the Israeli government identify returnees as such only once they have remained outside Israel for more than one year, and thus “transmigrants” are excluded. Therefore, these statistics wouldn’t account for the many Russian-speaking Israelis who frequently travel back to Israel for personal and work-related reasons.
60. Nina speculated that the pogrom rumors were spread by state representatives and others interested in seizing the property and belongings left behind by Jews who emigrated. She also hinted that Zionists working in the city were involved. At the same time, she acknowledged that local Jews themselves feared that instability in Ukraine might result in anti-Jewish sentiment, with Jews scapegoated for the troubles of the state. I met other families in Israel who spoke of similar rumors in Kyiv.
61. For similar accounts, see Siegel 1998, 92–99.
62. Another returnee, Oleg, had a comparable religious experience in Israel, where he realized the importance of having God in his life through his interaction with the Russian Orthodox Church. He was baptized when he returned to Odesa, and he recently had his son baptized. Oleg had returned traumatized, having survived a terrorist attack in Israel and losing a close friend.
63. In contemporary Ukraine, as in the rest of the FSU, citizens have two passports: an internal passport that’s used for all domestic affairs and a travel passport for crossing international borders. Today, citizens of the Ukrainian state aren’t legally permitted to hold dual citizenship. In general, citizenship was an issue mainly for people of the middle generations and older, who were concerned about having a propiska, which guarantees state benefits and authorizes renting and buying property.
64. Kostya would later return to Israel for another trial run in early 2007, even though he didn’t yet have any specific prospects there. Kostya, and others who struggled to build a life in Odesa upon their return, did end up moving to Israel and staying there. Indeed, Israel was regarded as yet another fresh start for cases of unsuccessful returns, especially in cases of divorce or unsuccessful business ventures.
65. Long and Oxfeld 2004, 10.
66. Gmelch 2004, 213.
67. See Morris and Polese 2016.
68. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin (2020, 96) describes a similar phenomenon in Austria among the Austrian-Russian-Jewish “business elite,” or what he calls “reciprocal migrants.” These individuals engage in repeated business trips between the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Europe while their families live in Austria.
69. Stefansson 2004, 4.
70. As it happens, the teacher involved, Maya, had cited the same conversation when telling me that Israel wouldn’t be her preferred place to raise her son, due to the vast gap between secular and religious culture.
71. Voutira 2006, 380, emphasis in original.
72. Safran 1991, 84; Levy and Weingrod 2005, 4.
73. Tye 2001, 3; Gruen 2002; Wettstein 2002, 2.
74. Boyarin and Boyarin 1993.
75. Aviv and Shneer 2005, 22; Voutira 2006, 380; Clifford 1994, 1997; Markowitz and Stefansson 2004; Levy and Weingrod 2005.
76. Cohen 2008, 2; see also Lavie and Swedenburg 1996.
77. Gitelman 2016, 15. Tanya Richardson (2008, 213) argues that in fact, the “cultivation and power of local senses of place” witnessed among Odesans is not unique to Odesa and can be observed elsewhere in Ukraine.
78. See, among others, Boyarin and Boyarin 1993; Aviv and Shneer 2005.
79. For the Russian case, see Siegel 1998; Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2007.
80. Yerida is translated from Hebrew as “descent”; it refers to the “stigmatized path of Israelis who descend from the promised land into the Diaspora” (Gold 2004, 445). Emigrants from Israel are thus referred to as yordim.
81. Gershenson and Shneer 2011, 141.
82. Brah 1996, 183.
83. Stefansson 2004, 186.
84. Mandel 1990, 160.
85. Clifford 1997, 249.
86. Feuchtwang 2004, 7; Rapport and Overing 2007, 176.
7. Odesa
1. Richardson 2004, 3.
2. Tanya Richardson (2008, 115) describes how literary scholars have written about Isaac Babel’s Moldovanka or Babel’s Odesa, suggesting how the neighborhood at the heart of Babel’s Odessa Stories has come to stand in for the whole of the place.
3. Tanny 2011, 17. Tanny notes that at the turn of the twentieth century, Warsaw was 33 percent Jewish, Vilnius had a Jewish population that made up more than 40 percent of its inhabitants, Minsk was 52 percent Jewish, Kishinev was 46 percent Jewish, and Odesa 33 percent Jewish.
4. Wirth (1928) 1998, 19.
5. Ramer 2008.
6. Herzfeld 2005.
7. I use the term “Jewish stereotype” as a shorthand way of referring to the idea of Odesa as a Jewish city. There have been many ways of giving context to Odesa’s Jewishness, but what I’m emphasizing is the sheer assertion of Odesa’s Jewishness and the role this plays in establishing Odesa as a distinctive, special, and “other” place. This, in turn, is highly bound up with the Odesa myth.
8. Richardson, 2008, 197.
9. Horowitz 2017, 39–40.
10. Today, the city’s religious landscape is dominated by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC)–Moscow Patriarchate, with more than fifty communities and thirty churches (Richardson 2006, 219). Other Christian denominations include UOC–Kyiv Patriarchate, Russian Orthodox Church, Armenian Apostolic Church, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, and Protestant communities. One leader of the Muslim population, Imam Sheikh Usam, indicated that “there are some 40,000 Muslims in Odessa,” a number that includes “Ukrainian citizens, permanent residents, students, and businessmen” (cited in Richardson 2006, 220).
11. Herlihy 2008; Bilaniuk 2005. Patricia Herlihy (2008, 20) noted that by the mid-2000s, 80 percent of the schools in Ukraine had changed the language of instruction from Russian to Ukrainian. A similar trend is also seen in university settings, where Ukrainian has been declared the official language of instruction and examination.
12. Glaser 2023, 302.
13. Richardson 2008, 198–99.
14. Lecke and Sicher 2023, 2.
15. Stanton 2012, 19.
16. Glaser 2023, 286.
17. Lecke 2012, 329.
18. Richardson 2004, 14.
19. Sicher 2023, 219.
20. Stanton 2003, 120.
21. Tanny 2008, 403; emphasis in original.
22. Tanny 2011, 3.
23. Tanny 2008, 404.
24. Other places have been portrayed as a “fabled city of thieves” (such as New Orleans and Shanghai), but Odesa alone “has been imagined as a judeokleptocracy, a city overrun and controlled by Jewish gangsters and swindlers” (Tanny 2008, 1). In the same passage, Tanny also writes that Odesa’s “brand of humor,” its “wit and irony,” was “brought to the city from the shtetls of Eastern Europe,” where it found a “new home” and “became the dominant mode for articulating the Odessa myth.”
25. Gubar and Herlihy 2009, 139.
26. Naidorf 2001, 330; quoted in Richardson 2004, 14. Jarrod Tanny (2007, 2) emphasizes that the myth of Odesa “had been developing since the city’s founding in 1794.” Moreover, he notes that the “passing of its golden age” was already “noted and mourned as early as the mid-nineteenth century . . . [and that] since then, successive generations of myth-makers have posited their own endings for old Odessa” (2).
27. Stanton 2003, 123.
28. Stanton, 2012, 3–4.
29. Glaser, n.d.
30. Tanny 2008, 2.
31. Safran 2002, 256; Stanton 2003, 122; Tanny 2008, 2.
32. Tanny 2008, 2.
33. Babel 2002, 71.
34. Ozick 2002, 12.
35. Tanny 2007, 14.
36. Pinkham 2014, 180–82.
37. Ibid., 181–82.
38. Glaser and Ilchuk 2022.
39. Kiva 2019.
40. Glaser 2023, 290.
41. See Glaser and Ilchuk 2022; Khersonsky and Khersonsky 2022.
42. Mignolo 2000; Glaser 2023.
43. Kiva 2019.
44. Benya and Zubrik, n.d.
45. Mikhail Zhvanetsky is the founder and director of the International World Odesit Club. In Levitin’s (2005, 30–35) article “Ya Odessit” (I am an Odessan), he equates many of Odesa’s distinctive qualities with the characteristics of Jews.
46. Tanny 2006, 24.
47. See, for example: Odesit, n.d.; Odesaglobe, n.d.; Ta Odesa, n.d.; Migdal 2014.
48. JGuideEurope, n.d.
49. Ibid.
50. Berger 2012.
51. Greig 2018.
52. ILTV 2019.
53. Skvirskaja 2010, 79.
54. Ibid.
55. Gruber 2014, 336.
56. Ibid., 340–41.
57. Ibid., 341.
58. Waligorska 2013, 7.
59. Tanny 2011, 155.
60. Ibid.
61. Davidzon 2011.
62. Pinto 1996.
63. Brauch et al. 2008; Lipphardt, Brauch, and Nocke 2008, 182.
64. Gruber 2014; Waligorska 2013.
65. Kotushenko 2007, 5.
66. Doroshevich (1895) 2007; reprinted in Kotushenko 2007, 7.
67. Savchenko 1996, 146; cited in Rothstein 2001, 784.
68. Rothstein 2001, 781.
69. Ibid., 782. Other languages such as Ukrainian, Polish, and Greek also penetrated the Russian used by Odesans, but Robert Rothstein (2001, 783) views these as less influential than Yiddish. He also notes that just as Odesan Russian is sui generis, so too is Odesan Yiddish. He points out that the Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language (1961) has a specific entry for odeser yidish (Odesan Yiddish), which it describes as “full of Russian words” (cited in Rothstein 2001, 786).
70. Polese 2023, 253.
71. Rothstein 2001, 782.
72. Tanny 2007, 3.
73. Polese 2023, 254.
74. Rothstein 2001, 782.
75. On a number of occasions, Jewish Odesans expressed a reluctance to see Jews involved in local politics, believing it could contribute to the rise of antisemitism. “Jews should stay away from power,” one Odesan stated. “No matter how much good [Odesa’s current mayor] Gurvitz does for the city, he will always be viewed from the side of the ‘fifth line of his passport,’ giving reason for anti-Semitic manipulation from the side of various structures and political parties” (http://www.migdal.ru/forum/18408, but link no longer active). In chapter 2, I discuss the concerns of elderly Jews who see the rise in antisemitism as a consequence of Jewish visibility; their view aligns with the claim made by Louis Wirth ([1928] 1998, 289): “when he [a Jew] is no longer seen, anti-Semitism declines.”
76. Cooper 2012, 192.
77. Maya was referring to non-Orthodox Jewish organizations, which accept children of mixed families and have some non-Jewish participants, as well as the inclusive “Tolerance Program” organized for non-Jewish children by Mazl Tov, the early childhood development center.
78. ILTV 2019.
79. See “Eager Ukrainian Tests Hillel’s Limits: He May Be Christian, but He’s Addicted to Jewish Life,” http://www.jewishaz.com/issue/printstory.mv?051202+ukrainian; see also Shayduk 2007.
80. Patlatuk 2021.
81. Kartsev 2001, 175; quoted in Tanny 2007, 14. Emil Dreitser (2003, 93) also states that Odesa as a “living city” is no longer in Odesa but rather in “the southernmost protuberance of Brooklyn,” or Brighton Beach—otherwise known as “Little Odessa.”
82. Skvirskaja 2010, 76.
83. Humphrey 2004, 146; Steinberg and Wanner 2008, 3; Yurchak 2006, 8.
84. Richardson 2008, 108.
85. Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 496.
86. Richardson 2004, 21.
87. Ibid.
88. Cited by V. Serduchenko, http://www.pereplet.ru/kandit/156.html (site no longer active).
89. Rashkovetsky 2007, 3. Rashkovetsky moved to Israel in the mid-2010s, when his son needed emergency surgery that couldn’t be performed in Odesa.
90. Ibid., 3–6.
91. Karakina (2007, 13) notes that Jewish tombstones found by archaeologists in Odesa confirm that Jews lived in the area long before the city was founded.
92. Dreitser 2003, 92–93.
93. Ruble 2008, 39.
94. See Glazer and Moynihan (1963) 1970 and Ramer 2008 for comparisons.
95. Herzfeld 2005, 208.
96. King 2011, 281.
97. Skvirskaja 2010, 79.
98. Polese et al. 2019, 272; see also Herlihy 2018, 78.
99. Polese et al. 2019, 272; Polese 2023.
100. Herlihy 2018, 76.
101. Polese 2023, 254–55.
102. Sapritsky-Nahum forthcoming.
103. Polese 2023, 80.
104. Ibid., 75.
105. Herlihy 2008, 19–20.
106. Solomon 2022.
107. Pinkham 2014, 180.
108. UNESCO 2023.
109. Herzfeld 2005, 205.
110. Karakina 2007, 7.
111. Ramer 2008, 4. Michael Herzfeld’s (2005, 3; emphasis added) concept of “cultural intimacy” is only partially applicable here. While it captures the ways in which stereotypes are often put to use in power struggles, his emphasis on “those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment” doesn’t pertain to Jewishness for Odesans today.
Conclusion
1. See Dumskaya, 1, 2022 and also Religious Information Service of Ukraine 2022.
2. Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Lavie and Swedenburg 1996.
3. Mann 2012, 1.
4. Herlihy 2018, 80.
5. For example, the Genesis Philanthropy Group (GPG) was established by a Ukrainian-born, Russian-speaking Jewish businessman and philanthropist, Mikhail Fridman, who holds Ukrainian, Israeli, and Russian citizenship and now lives in London. GPG’s goal is nothing less than to “strengthen [the] Jewish identity of Russian-speaking Jews worldwide.” Likewise, Limmud FSU, a branch of the UK organization Limmud (from the Hebrew word “to learn”), aims to “bring together and empower Jews of all ages” in revitalizing Jewish communities and culture. Its 2019 meeting in Odesa celebrated the centennial of the ship Ruslan’s departure from Odesa carrying some six hundred settlers and dozens of Jewish cultural figures to then British-administered Palestine, where they sought to shape the intellectual life of the burgeoning Zionist movement (see Limmud FSU 2019). The act of highlighting Odesa’s role in the Zionist project—and the role of Russian-speaking Jewish pioneers more broadly—offers Odesa’s Jews a language and identity with which to transcend local, regional, and geopolitical conflicts, should they choose to do so.
6. See Chabad Odesa n.d. Yiddishkeit literally means “Jewishness” or a “Jewish way of life.” The term is traditionally used by religious Yiddish-speaking Jews of eastern and central Europe to describe the “Jewish essence.” See Wikipedia 2023.
7. A guide at the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews told me, “I use the words ‘revival’ [vozvrozhdenie] and ‘renaissance’ when I give my tours of Jewish Odesa. It’s especially fitting when you’re explaining contemporary Jewish life in the context of Soviet days and the Holocaust and making a link to today. Not every visitor understands this, but Jewish visitors from abroad do.”
8. Steinberg and Wanner 2008, 17.
9. Slava Kapulkin, interview by the author, February 14, 2021.
10. See Sapritsky-Nahum 2016; 2018.
11. Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2012.
12. Sapritsky-Nahum 2023.
13. Ramer 2008, 4.
14. Ruble 2008.
15. Skvirskaja 2010, 88.
16. Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2012, 1.
17. Skvirskaja and Humphrey 2007.
18. Tolerance is a deeply ingrained part of the city’s influential myth, but the pogroms, events of World War II, and more recent instances of antisemitism are also part of Odesa’s reality. These can’t be ignored when examining local notions of coexistence and sociality. The intolerance shown by local Jews and others to newly arrived migrants also reveals the limits of tolerance in the city.
19. Ramer and Ruble 2008.
20. Ibid., 5.
21. Skvirskaja 2010.
22. Collaborative organizations such as the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter work to develop a “shared historical narrative” of Jewish-Ukrainian relations through dialogue with scholars and experts in the field.
23. See Glaser and Veidlinger 2022.
24. Deeb 2006, 21.
25. Zelenina 2018, 254.
26. Patlatuk 2021.
27. Ibid.
28. Rabbi Wolf once told me, “Following a very old Jewish tradition, Jews in Odessa now come to the rabbi as they once used to for all questions in life.”
29. Petrovsky-Shtern 2009.
30. Luehrmann 2011, 1; Deeb 2006, 4.
31. Webber 1994b, 74.
Epilogue
1. For discussions on the Odesa fire, see Carey 2017, 86–91; Pomerantsev 2019, 129–33; and Amos 2015.
2. See also Richardson 2014, and Dmitriy Khavin’s film, Quiet in Odessa.
3. Portnikov 2017, 16–17.
4. Tracy 2014.
5. Zhurzhenko 2014.
6. Levchuk 2022.
7. Kulyk 2023.
8. Beitar, the Zionist youth movement mentioned in chapter 4, became a popular Jewish organization across the FSU. Thus many young Jews I met in Odesa participated in Beitar camps and were exposed to the Zionist ideology embedded in the core of Beitar’s activity.
9. Higgins 2014.
10. Pfeffer 2014.
11. Liphshiz 2014.
12. Ibid.
13. Cohen 2014.
14. Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, n.d.
15. Margolin 2019.
16. See Higgins 2019.
17. Onuch and Hale 2022, 23–24.
18. Richardson 2019, 264.
19. Ibid.
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