5

Asymmetric Cultural Encounters

Jewish Philanthropy Missions and Revival on Display

During perestroika, Jews from the United States, Europe, and Israel began traveling to the Soviet Union. They were driven by a desire to learn family genealogies, to support aid projects organized by local Jewish communities, and to satisfy their curiosity by visiting both places and sites associated with their ancestors. Thus Jewish “heritage tourism” in the region began, and after the opening of the FSU, it intensified greatly.¹ The diaspora project—reclaiming a lost Jewish dimension in regions that had been closed off for generations—initiated a culture industry of museums, memorials, cultural centers, and other modes of exhibiting Jewish life.

The US and European congregations and organizations that sent philanthropists to the FSU did so following the Jewish commandment of tzedakah—the responsibility to give aid to those who need it, enacting a Jewish call to fix or repair the world (tikkun olam).² In this case, they mostly fell in line with the narrative that emphasized the need to revive Jewish life after the long period of communist repression. Indeed, for many Jewish philanthropists of Ashkenazi descent, making a charitable gift and connecting to their heritage and core Jewish values were combined: “Tzedakah has two aspects: one with the hand and one with the heart.”³ But their gifts were also doubled in terms of translating the experiences with new Jewish sites abroad into aiding Jewish communities at home, such as helping the elderly and giving tzedakah to less fortunate members of the Jewish family.⁴

The philanthropic missions that developed alongside the thriving Jewish heritage tourism (individuals seeking their “roots”) profoundly affected Jews in these states. Foreign finance came to underwrite Jewish activity in Odesa and to dominate the institutions that shaped the social reproduction of Jewish life there. As we’ll see, such financing has not been even and steady, leaving the local projects initially sponsored by international charities obligated to achieve greater financial independence.

In addition to the question of funding, there was the cultural encounter of foreigners and locals. The Jewish explorers searching for a lost past, and the organizations seeking to structure a Jewish revival, came to a place like Odesa looking for signs of their donations at work and evidence of Jewish life and living Judaism. In this dynamic, the local Jews would appear before the missions to “act out” their Jewishness and performatively express gratitude for the donations received from abroad. Put another way, when donations flowed in from outside, “the free gift is transformed into a heavily conditional gift when it reaches the ultimate recipient” and “there are in practice symbolic forms of reciprocity.”⁵ Even if local Jews occasionally joked about being the “poor relatives” of visiting Jews, they resented hearing others describe their presumed status in this way.

This chapter analyzes the encounters of philanthropists with Jewish recipients of aid and focuses on the cultural performances organized to greet foreign guests and their responses in turn. I concentrate on one of the largest donor events I followed over three days in July 2006, a philanthropic mission of the United Jewish Communities (UJC)—renamed in 2009 as the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA)—that brought nearly two hundred Jewish donors from the United States to Odesa.⁶ Most were middle- and upper-class Ashkenazi men and women ranging from middle-aged to elderly. By analyzing the tensions generated by the interplay of international donors and the Jews of Odesa, I’m seeking to engage the larger question of how differences in understandings of Jewish identity—in mentality, observance, values, and social status—manifested when foreign donors met with local Jews, creating what I call “asymmetric encounters.”

In these encounters, we see how modes of Jewish outreach projects clearly relate to what anthropologist Mary Douglas, writing about Marcel Mauss’s famous notion of the gift, describes as the wounding effects that reside within the virtue of charity.⁷ As Douglas says, nothing is given for free, since “gift cycles engage persons in permanent commitments that articulate the dominant institutions.”⁸ Anthropologists Roderick Stirrat and Heiko Henkel draw parallels between Mauss’s concept of the gift and the moral underpinnings of development NGOs, claiming that while “the gift is given in a way that attempts to deny difference and assert identity between the rich giver and the poor receiver, a gift in practice reinforces or even reinvents these differences.”⁹ In the minimal and often performative interactions between Jewish donors and the Jews of Odesa who receive their donations, the unequal dynamics of power and influence demonstrated the painful side of charity.

What Is a Mission?

A Jewish mission can be seen as a form of Jewish tourism and heritage travel, insofar as it “offers its participants an emotional promise to renew their spirituality, their Jewish identity and their sense of place in a hostile world.”¹⁰ Organizers of Jewish outreach projects engage travelers on two levels. On the one hand, they presented the projects as a means of securing a bright and meaningful future for an afflicted Jewish population abroad. On the other hand, they designed the projects to be personally gratifying for those taking part. Philanthropists derived a heightened sense of “satisfaction,” along with an elevated sense of moral achievement, from the accomplished mission of salvation.¹¹ As Naomi Leite points out through her research of tourism around Portuguese Morranos, behind the idea of traveling to meet “lost” or “isolated” Jews is a “pervasive presumption that it is good for Jews around the world to be in touch with one another,” reinforcing the idea of a “Jewish peoplehood” who are seemingly interconnected and must aid one another.¹²

For the participants, Jewish missions abroad are as much about reflecting on the self as about seeing others. Describing the meaning of missions with regard to memorial tours in Poland, cultural anthropologist Jack Kugelmass suggests that the term is laden with a “time out of time” quality, a sense of liminality that visitors experience as they participate in activities they might avoid in everyday life, like eating kosher food, attending religious services, and so on.¹³ Anthropologist Erica Lehrer, writing about Jewish trips to Poland, describes mission as a mindset, with “a single-minded pursuit of a particular experience” that is “advertised as a chance to make a difference, have a spiritual awakening, or undergo a life-changing experience.”¹⁴ Whereas the Poland that Lehrer describes is constructed by the organizers of mission tours as an anti-Jewish place, the organizers for tours in Odesa cast the city as a relic of a historically Jewish place and, frame the Jews there as extended kin—but kin in need of support, aid and rescue.

On the Odesa mission tour I attended, guides repeatedly asked visiting Jews to put themselves in the place of their “less fortunate brothers and sisters” or to imagine the faces of local Jews—strangers—as if they were the visitors’ own parents who came from Odesa or somewhere similar. Like Leite’s outreach activists who presents the Marranos they meet as “long-lost kin,” organizers of mission tours in Odesa reinforce the idea of a Jewish “family.”¹⁵ Other scholars of charity and philanthropy have pointed out how the process of giving serves to benefit the giver, allowing volunteers and aid workers to re-create themselves as more virtuous and spiritual persons.¹⁶ Indeed, anthropologist Melissa Caldwell believes that the givers are the main beneficiaries of faith-based charitable activity.¹⁷ Judaism similarly teaches its followers that “donors benefit from tzedakah as much or more than the poor recipients.”¹⁸ These missions, similar to those Lehrer observes in Poland, attempted to “transform communal ideology into embodied reality” and create “group memory.”¹⁹ But anthropologist Jackie Feldman, describing Israeli youth tours to Poland, reminds us that we need to see different layers of Jewish tourism and make a distinction between the workings of the organizers and the sincere, real, and deep sentiments of tour participants, who are often in “creative search of personal identity.”²⁰

Travel to Odesa is imbued with narratives of the past and visions of the future that are often far from everyday reality and historical facts. The concept of “the mission” clearly depicts the purposefulness of an interaction in which the philanthropists and the international organization hold “expert knowledge.”²¹ Although we’re used to thinking of missions as a religious and historically Christian phenomenon, the nature of the mission I witnessed is on the one hand different, as both groups involved are of the same religion (Jewish), but on the other hand similar, in that one group (the missionaries) seeks to elevate the other’s religious status for the well-being of the community and universal values of religious freedom.

Aviv and Shneer conclude that such encounters are “less about sustaining already existing connections and memories between individuals and communities” in the visited destination than they are about “inventing new relationships” between visiting Jews and other Jewish people and places.²² In a brochure of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) printed in Russia in 2000, one can see Aviv and Shneer’s observations clearly:

Our Generation has witnessed a miracle from G-d: With the fall of the Iron Curtain, Jews were given the right to leave the Soviet Union and, most importantly, the Jews who remained were finally free to learn about and practice what was so dear and important to them: their tradition. Today, we must celebrate this miracle by helping Russian Jews to become proud of who they are. This is the biggest challenge facing Russian Jewry today.

The former Soviet Union is the only region in the world where poverty is both material and spiritual. Hundreds of thousands of Jews are so poor they cannot even put bread on their tables and take care of their basic needs. At the same time, the lack of fundamental Jewish knowledge has deprived many Soviet Jews of their history, culture, and tradition. Let us not miss this opportunity to give these people a chance. The Soviet authorities once denied them their Jewishness. Now it is in our hands.

We must do all we can. Let our people know and let our people live!²³

The invented relationships described in this chapter use Odesa as a historical stage set for travelers seeking a meaningful Jewish experience—a place for creating new relationships on the basis of shared symbols of Jewish commonality (such as the Hebrew language, prayer, Israel, memory of the Holocaust, and Jewish traditions) and on the basis of a sentiment of belonging, experienced most profoundly by Jews of Ashkenazi descent. In these encounters, we see that even if those commonalties do coincide with local circumstances, “the fact that there are shared values does not necessarily mean that there is sameness,” as sociologist Janet Poppendieck points out in her work on voluntarism in the United States.²⁴

The philanthropic missions of the UJC/JFNA gave only select members—often those whose donations met a certain threshold—a firsthand experience of the impact of their donations and fundraising. They would get to meet local branch representatives of international partner organizations like the Sokhnut, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or the Joint), or the Association for the Promotion of Skilled Trades (World ORT). More importantly, they were offered the chance to meet people who directly benefited from the programs administered by those organizations.²⁵

According to the old UJC website, these missions offered donors a “heightened appreciation and connection to their Jewish identity.” The goal of such a voyage was to cultivate experiences “imbued with meaning” as participants got a chance to visit with “members of their extended Jewish family and to come face to face with the shared heritage, traditions, and values that unite all Jewish people.” The UJC website promised that travelers would come away with a new understanding of “where they’ve been and a vision of where they are headed.” The site encouraged participants to “plant seeds for Jewish renaissance and renewal” and to “ensure the Jewish community never waivers on its commitment to provide human services.” These trips would make Jews “feel good for doing good.”²⁶

Such missions were much welcomed by city authorities, who considered visits by foreign delegations to be an important part of Odesa’s development at the time. The city made special arrangements to save these arriving donors from the usual travel hassles, offering them speedy transfer through passport control at the airport and luxury buses for transport around the city. Working with these Jewish missions was also a high priority for organizers of Odesa’s local Jewish institutions because the resulting donations, pledges of future support, and expanded sponsor lists helped sustain them.²⁷

Figure 5.1. Children at the Tikva kindergarten demonstrate their knowledge of Shabbat to American visitors. Photo by author.

The missions were relatively short, lasting only two or three days with “fleeting encounters” similar to those Leite observes.²⁸ To guarantee that they ran smoothly, top representatives from the organization’s operations team would fly in from the United States and Israel to guide the donors, taking them to observe the daily operations of the programs supported by their donations. Each group had about fifteen to twenty donors, and they were kept on a tight schedule. Local personnel were briefed on what the donors would want to see in the fifteen to thirty minutes they had to visit a facility and witness the program and its participants.²⁹

These introductions to Jewish life in Odesa were undeniably theatrical. Certainly, Jewish life was on display—exhibited, narrated, and subsequently filtered through the ideals and perceptions of the visitors who served as an audience on the move. The Jewish organizations that were involved in these missions to Odesa concentrated their efforts on “designing, promoting and implementing programs with specific educational objectives based on the different ideologies and goals of organizational sponsors.”³⁰ To strengthen their call for donations, the organizations created brochures, videos, and other materials that presented the image of Jewish Odesa as a place and a people in need. Stories and pictures of local Jews were carefully chosen to encourage giving based on specific project goal. Reports and pledge cards would often feature a black-and-white “before” picture of a needy child or a desolate Jewish place and an “after” picture of generated change in color.³¹

Each organization sought to exhibit a part of Jewish Odesa that was supported by its sponsored activities and to demonstrate these activities’ efficacy at facilitating Jewish growth. This is what Aviv and Shneer called “diaspora business.”³² In this way, the complex richness of daily Jewish life in Odesa was stripped away in the interest of giving a local performance that reflected the international audiences’ interests. For example, on a mission I attended with the Tikva Or Sameach Orthodox congregation, the donors followed a mapped tour of the city that omitted the presence of the other Orthodox (Chabad) congregation and the Reform community altogether. On another mission organized by Tikva, I saw visitors attend a performance at a religious kindergarten, where a four-year-old “couple” demonstrated their knowledge of Shabbat. The children set the table with the requisite objects, pretended to light Shabbat candles, and recited the appropriate prayers. Conversely, with Israeli-sponsored programs, children most often demonstrate their skill in speaking Hebrew and show their attachment to the “Jewish homeland” by reciting songs and sharing their stories of Taglit.³³

My Odesa interlocutors told me these events aroused diverse, sometimes conflicting, feelings—from joy and excitement, to boredom, and frustration. In what follows, I try to contextualize these sentiments by concentrating on that July 2006 mission led by the UJC.

The UJC: Background and Structure

The United Jewish Communities (UJC)—again, renamed the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) in 2009—is an American Jewish umbrella organization representing 146 Jewish Federations and 300 independent Jewish communities across North America. Although the organization is also involved in advocacy work and lobbying, its core function remains raising and distributing funds “for social welfare, social services and educational needs.”³⁴ As part of its outreach programs, UJC/JFNA protects and enhances the well-being of Jews in seventy countries through partnerships with the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut), the Joint, and World ORT.³⁵

As an international organization, UJC focuses on serving the needs of Jews around the world, particularly where their lives as Jews are threatened. The motto of the Joint, its partner organization, is “Jews in need should be helped and should be helped to live as Jews.”³⁶ UJC stated its commitment “to the principle that Jews should be helped to remain in countries of their birth rather than to immigrate to Israel.”³⁷ The organization began to fund programs in Odesa in 1990, when it established an overseas partnership with the Odesa offices of the Joint and the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut). UJC described these groups as “the driving forces in developing re-emerging Jewish communities” in the FSU.

The UJC sponsors programs that provide relief and rescue and support religious observance (of all Jewish denominations), Jewish education, and Jewish culture and welfare to enrich Jewish life in Odesa. While most UJC-sponsored programs in Odesa at the time of my research were run by local Jewry, operational and budgetary concerns were handled primarily by its US representatives. As a result, UJC officials in Odesa felt that budget allocations were “not always well related to local needs.” But participants in Jewish activities and organizers of various projects partly blamed those local officials for the misdirection of aid, saying funds were diverted for administrative or personal use.

Alternatively, programs run by the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut) in Odesa and elsewhere in the world are based on the assumption that “Israel stands at the heart of the Jewish future.” The Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) initiatives in Odesa were, until recently, primarily focused on promoting aliyah. After emigration slowed from Odesa and the rest of the post-Soviet territory, the organization expanded its mission to strengthening the bonds of local Jews to their “homeland” by means of Zionist education and short-term study-abroad and internship programs, mostly focused on youth. These initiatives continue to support the ideology that Israel is the center of Jewish awareness, though most of the Jews who have become involved have chosen not to live there.

In Odesa, programs by the Joint and the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) received most of their aid from the UJC, so their organizers devoted much attention to the missions of UJC members. Each year, the UJC would select one city where donors and activists could convene to take part in Jewish development projects firsthand, learn about fundraising and goal achievement, and improve their skills as philanthropists. During the time of my fieldwork, Odesa was selected as the destination for the UJC Annual Campaign Chairs and Directors Mission. As an English-speaking academic residing in Odesa, I was asked to brief the delegation on Odesa’s Jewish history. This gave me the chance to follow the mission over its entire three-day stay in 2006, from July 10 to 12, observing and informally interviewing the participants.

Rehearsed Stories and “Professional Jews”

On the first day of the mission, fundraising workshops were held at the hotel. A welcome dinner featured speeches by the organizers and remarks about Odesa’s Jewish history delivered by the city’s Jewish mayor. On the second day, the UJC visitors separated into small groups to be escorted around Odesa by representatives of the Joint and the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) while also learning about their initiatives. I was invited to join a group supervised by Shira, an energetic American Israeli woman in her forties who worked for the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut). With her was Olga Samburenko, then twenty-two and living in Israel; she was one of six Odesan natives paid by the organization to take part in the visit. Olga’s travel expenses from Israel were covered in return for her role in a session called “My Odesa through the Sunglasses of an Israeli,” set up to personalize the concept of aliyah. While showing our group “her Odesa,” Olga repeatedly expressed her gratitude to UJC donors for helping her change her life by relocating to Israel.

When members of the delegation boarded the bus in the morning, each received a card describing Olga’s story. Olga stood at the front of the bus and recounted the important details of her life. Born to a Jewish father and a Russian mother, she grew up in what she called an “international family”: “We ate matzoh on Pesach, but I also went to church every Sunday with my mother.” She explained that her decision to live “as a Jew” came directly from her participation in the Jewish Agency for Israel’s (Sokhnut’s) summer camp. She first heard about the program through a friend, and because she was considered a potential oleh (emigrant to Israel), her application was accepted. Her parents saw the camp as an opportunity for a nice “free vacation” and didn’t initially object. Olga described the camp as an “injection of Jewishness.” She spoke of her joy in meeting interesting people who “spoke the same language” and of feeling like “part of the Jewish family.” On her return, she told her parents that she now considered herself Jewish and that she was no longer comfortable attending church with her mother. “My parents were shocked,” she told the group. “They didn’t know what had gotten into me.” She continued to participate in the Sokhnut programs, at times hiding it from her parents, and returned to camp annually, later becoming a counselor.

Olga was careful to say that she didn’t encourage her campers to go to Israel but that she did indicate it was an option.³⁸ She herself was prompted to move to Israel by her evolving role in the Jewish Agency for Israel’s (Sokhnut’s) programs and a personal relationship with an Odesan-native Israeli she met at one of the summer camps. Her plan to emigrate, she told them, was disrupted when her parents moved to Germany, and as she was a teenager at that time, she had to go with them. At this point, Shira noticed that some UJC visitors looked surprised. She interrupted Olga’s narrative to clarify why some ex-Soviet Jews chose to migrate to Germany rather than “returning” to Israel. “They don’t have as bad an association with the country [Germany], because in the Soviet Union they were never educated about the Holocaust.” Shira also pointed out the higher social benefits in Germany and the advantages of being part of the European Union. Olga didn’t volunteer her family’s motivations for the move; however, she later told me that her mother had suffered a stroke, so access to “good medical care” had been a key reason for leaving Odesa. After two years in Germany, Olga immigrated to Israel; at the time of our meeting, she lived in Eilat with the man she’d met at the Jewish camp.

Shira presented Olga’s story as one that embodied the promise of the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut’s) programs. It was through the organization’s camp that Olga had recognized her Jewish connection and adopted it as her permanent identity. Moreover, Olga had educated others in turn and had then made the ultimate decision to live in Israel, setting the Zionist example of a “good Jew.” Where Olga cast her parents’ move as pragmatic, Shira gave Olga’s story the plot of escaping a “hostile” Germany to find life in Israel—a touching example of aliyah. Shira emphasized how the Sokhnut’s efforts to “reconnect Jews to their homeland” allowed people to leave the alienating, repressive atmosphere of Odesa, and that Olga’s story illustrated such a path.

But the story Olga told me later, away from the group, was much different. She and her partner had faced problems in Israel: Olga wasn’t recognized as Jewish by the halakha because her mother wasn’t Jewish. This meant they couldn’t marry in Israel and had to travel to Cyprus for a civil ceremony that would be recognized in Israel. Olga’s decision to remain in Israel struck me as rather more provisional than what she had presented to the group. “For now, we’re in Israel,” she said, “and then we’ll see.” She added, “Odessa is very nice to visit, but with my parents abroad I feel that I don’t have much left here anymore. . . . For now, Israel works for us.”

When speaking directly with the UJC visitors, Olga placed Israel at the center of her Jewish identification. As a paid representative of the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut), the Zionist organization that had sponsored her travel back to Odesa, Olga told the personal story her audience expected to hear—minimizing or passing over her struggles, her failure to be recognized as a Jew, and her doubts about living in the “homeland.” While she no doubt felt a connection to the time she had invested in the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut), her professed feeling of obligation to the Jewish state and to those who had helped her emigrate was more of a performance than a reflection of her complex and confounding reality.

Mendy, introduced in the last chapter, was another participant in the “My Odesa through the Sunglasses of an Israeli” sessions. After the program ended, he and several others stayed on in Odesa to see family and friends. He explained that all the Odesan contributors were chosen because they could be counted on to relay the message of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s (Sokhnut’s) mission and answer any questions in the “right” fashion. These were the skills of what Mendy called “professional Jews.”³⁹ He admitted that he himself had treated this as an opportunity to return home on a paid trip, stay in a nice hotel, and hang out with friends—an attitude he assumed all the participants shared. The terms professional Jews or Jews by profession used by the historian and writer Henryk Halkowsky are discussed in Magdalena Waligorska’s ethnography of the klezmer music revival in Poland and Germany. They refer to non-Jews spearheading Jewish revival in places with little or no Jewish life.⁴⁰ Mendy’s reference to “professional Jews” comes closer to anthropologist Olesya Shayduk’s reference to Jews who “begin to position themselves as Jews” through their role in Jewish organizations or Jewish study-abroad programs rather than through their family upbringing.⁴¹

“Inappropriate” Narratives of Jewish Life

Next on the visitors’ schedule was a visit with Olga’s family. Since her parents were in Germany, Olga had arranged for us to meet her mother-in-law, Marina. A tall woman with short black hair and light hazel eyes, Marina was born in Moldova in 1950 and had relocated to Odesa with her husband and two children in 1983. The Soviet state gave them a small apartment on the outskirts of the city, and she started working as a baker at a small pastry shop, where she was still working when we met.

Marina was uncomfortable revealing her small apartment to foreign guests, so the meeting took place in a courtyard café near her home. Unlike Olga, who had prepared her talk, Marina appeared to be unsure what people wanted to hear. In addition to being unrehearsed, her story was further constrained by having to rely on Olga’s translation. Still, the group was eager to hear about her family’s experience during the Holocaust and Jewish life during Soviet rule. Marina’s story focused on her father’s struggles in the Soviet army while fighting the Romanian troops and her mother’s fears during their evacuation to the Caucasus. She described how both parents were traumatized by the distance and uncertainty that separated them. When asked how she knew she was Jewish, Marina’s response was simple: “I was born Jewish.”

While Marina had been talking, the audience members had been leaning forward in their seats at the café, clearly expecting a longer tale of hidden Jewish activity or the pain felt for the lost world of Jewish traditions. At this response, they looked bewildered. For her part, Marina seemed uncertain how to explain “being Jewish in the Soviet Union,” since to her, Jewishness was just a biological given. Feeling pressured to speak more, she elaborated, “I never paid attention to who was Jewish in Odessa; it’s a Jewish city. . . . I never felt out of place or belittled because I was a Jew, and I can’t say I ever experienced antisemitism. Everyone lived peacefully, and that’s all that mattered.” It is true that most Soviet Jews saw their Jewishness as an intrinsic component of who they were—one was “born Jewish.”⁴² But, their view of Jewish life in the FSU being shaped by Western stereotypes, the audience, mostly women, sat back in confused silence until one asked about Marina’s participation in the Jewish organizations the mission was there to support. “I was never involved in Jewish organizations here or elsewhere,” she said bluntly. “To be honest, I don’t know anything about them. I always had my work, my home, and my children. Just work, home, and children.”

During a pause, Shira pivoted and asked Olga to tell the group about her encounters with antisemitism. After Olga talked about being called a zhidovka in school, the UJC visitors again tried to place Marina’s Jewishness within their own sense of what the identity entailed. They asked whether Marina’s parents had ever done things that were “secretly Jewish,” for as they understood it, anti-Jewish sentiment and persecution had been part of every Jew’s life in the Soviet Union. “Did you light candles on Shabbat without being told what it was?” one woman asked. “Or maybe have a Jewish meal cooked by your mother?” “Matzo on Passover?” someone else asked. “Do you remember anything Jewish from your childhood?” a man from the back called out. After Olga translated these questions, Marina took a minute to think. Finally, she said she did recall the presence of matzoh at home. Olga announced this to the group with evident satisfaction.

One woman asked Marina why her son had decided to move to Israel. Marina answered without hesitation, “He met a girl at a Jewish camp, and they decided to move there together to try living on their own.” Marina was referring not to Olga but to a previous relationship that had originally taken her son overseas. Her heavy breathing and tearful eyes made it clear that Marina worried about her son being so far from his family, especially during times of military operations in Israel. She added, “I only have one daughter here, and she recently got engaged, so soon I will have a son.” A visitor asked whether her daughter’s fiancé was Jewish. “He is not,” she responded, “but he knows she is Jewish, and he’s not bothered by it.” In Marina’s view, the fiancé’s willingness to marry a Jewish woman spoke to his good character, while the fact that her daughter had revealed her Jewish roots made it clear she was proud of her family history and thus a good Jew.⁴³ Although Marina recognized Odesa’s openness to Jews, her statements acknowledged that she knew marrying a Jew constituted another level of proximity in the city. A woman in the group then asked what had changed in Marina’s life since the fall of the USSR. Again, the answer was unexpected. “Everything got a lot worse,” she said. “Prices are higher and everything is much more expensive today.”

Figure 5.2. UJC guests thanking Marina with a gift. Photo by author.

Again seeking to center the conversation on what mattered to her, Marina laid out photos of her children on the table. She admitted she missed her son profoundly, but she had no plans to move to Israel. She affirmed that her life is in Odesa; starting anew would be too difficult at her age. Shira spoke up to praise Marina for her strength and her support for Israel, on the basis of her son’s aliyah. The women in the group saw Marina’s story as that of a woman who’d lived a hard life as a Jew and was now having trouble “opening up” about her past. “We’re grateful she even let us interview her,” one woman said. “It can’t be easy to think about everything she’s lived through.”

To my mind, Marina’s heartaches came not from her Jewishness but from her struggles as a woman working long hours in a low-paying job, missing her children, and dealing with all the changes involved in living in independent Ukraine. Marina presented her Jewishness as unproblematic; she said she’d always lived in cities where being Jewish was “part of the norm.” From the visitors’ perspective, however, Marina remained a “case unreached by outreach”—neither affiliated with nor drawn to organized Jewish life. Shira used Marina’s story as a call for outreach and intervention. Marina’s self-understanding was seen as inadequate. Shira told the group that many Jews still needed help to “remember their Jewishness, their connection to the Jewish people and their homeland.” Since Marina herself hadn’t voiced any pressing need to live her life in a more Jewish manner, I wondered what truly justified these initiatives. If we take tzedakah as being “need oriented,” where “you are commanded to give according to the need of the other,” we might ask why volunteers on philanthropic missions are so keen to elevate the Jewishness of those who don’t wish to follow that path, seeing them as a homogeneous group.⁴⁴

Praise and Humiliation

We continued with Olga to the main office of the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut), which Shira called “the heartbeat of the young generation.” Having attended previous events there, I was struck by how different it appeared on this day. There were twice as many participants and personnel as I’d seen before. A few of the students I knew told me they’d been asked to come and show support. For this, they were treated to a nice lunch at the synagogue. Besides the usual displays of Israeli posters, plaques naming distinguished donors, large images of the Hebrew alphabet, and pictures of Odesans in Israel, there were blue and white balloons and banners welcoming UJC donors to Odesa.

Small groups of donors attended fifteen-minute sessions to learn about the various programs sponsored by the UJC, such as Hebrew language classes, study-abroad programs, a student club, contemporary dance classes, and a Jewish choir. The sessions were held in classrooms where the visitors met local participants and got a glimpse of Jewish life in Odesa. My group was invited to join past and future participants of Na’ale, a study-abroad program that takes youth under sixteen to Israel for a year; the aim is that their parents will follow by making aliyah.

Inside the Na’ale room, some twenty young people sat facing the guests. The students all wore “I love Israel” pins, and most looked exhausted from receiving group after group for the previous sessions.⁴⁵ Two of them were asked to speak Hebrew to demonstrate the language skills they’d learned in Israel. Two others who hadn’t yet made the trip stood up to thank their sponsors for the opportunity that awaited them. Beaming like the proud mother of well-behaved children, Shira asked the sponsors to give the students a round of applause. At the end of the session, she announced to the donors that this year, UJC money had bought these students brand-new backpacks decorated with the UJC and the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) logos. “These students won’t have to live through the embarrassment of carrying their books in plastic bags. Next school year, they’ll have these wonderful backpacks, just like the rest of the Israelis.”

Figure 5.3. Shira introduces local youth to her delegation. Photo by author.

To me, these young people didn’t look economically deprived. I remembered a complaint once made by an Odesan friend: “Americans turn us into a third-world population.” Carrying books in a plastic bag wasn’t seen as unusual in Odesa, even among those who had other types of bags. Shira’s comment struck me as condescending, but no one questioned the sponsored gifts of kindness. While it’s common for Jewish missions to bring gifts, it sends an implicit message that local Jews are underprivileged. One might also question Shira’s description of Odesa’s Jewish youth as the “future of Israel.” Most of the young people present planned to make a life in Odesa, not Israel, though they were willing to take advantage of free travel abroad. Most I met were happy to return home to Odesa and didn’t entertain the idea of permanent emigration. When the economic situation worsened in Ukraine, or when young Jewish Odesans felt they wanted to try living independently and grow from living abroad, those programs allowed them the possibility to try.

Figure 5.4. UJC guests taking pictures of Migdal participants. Photo by author.

Figure 5.5. Migdal participants in traditional Ukrainian and Jewish dress pose for pictures as they welcome UJC guests. Photo by author.

“Community Is Not a Given”: Remapping the Contours of a Community

The rest of the tour was led by Rebecca, the Joint representative. She described her organization’s role as providing the local Jewish population with basic social services and a sense of community. “In this part of the world,” Rebecca declared, “community is not a given.” When she led us to the entrance of the Migdal center, we saw four members dressed in Ukrainian embroidered shirts and Jewish attire that resembled Hasidic clothing of the late nineteenth century. It was the stuff of theater: traditional Ukrainian dress and what one might call costumes straight out of Fiddler on the Roof.

In his study of Kyrgyzstan, Mathijs Pelkmans describes a similar process of “folklorization” during church celebrations and fundraising events in Bishkek. There, dancers wear “traditional” costume while performing to traditional music played on a komuz (a string instrument like a lute).⁴⁶ For Pelkmans, “these displays had little significance in social life.”⁴⁷ In Odesa, Jewish youth often reflected on how they felt about playing an expected role that had little or nothing to do with their lives. They were thus closer to Ruth Ellen Gruber’s observation of a similar phenomenon in Krakow: Jews treated as museum pieces, there to be seen and photographed as relics of a Jewish past and living signifiers of a revived Jewish present.⁴⁸

Playing their roles, the Migdal volunteers welcomed the UJC sponsors by offering them Ukrainian vodka and the braided challah bread made for Shabbat meals and Jewish holidays. Unlike the images of Israel and other Zionist markers of Jewish identification seen on the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) visit, here the main display was the local Jewish culture—overacted, as if in a reenactment of some imagined Jewish shtetl.

Migdal was founded in the late Soviet period as the Jewish Theater Migdal Or. Its purpose was to educate Odesans about Jewish history, both local and biblical, and to raise awareness among locals and visitors about Jewish life in the city. Membership applicants are asked for papers proving their ethnic background, but the center has an open-door policy for visitors. A number of non-Jews work there and participate in its programs, use the library and computer lab, attend the school of Jewish art, and even learn Yiddish and Hebrew songs as well as Jewish dances.⁴⁹ Migdal also houses the city’s first Jewish museum (located at a different address under the name the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews), with a wall dedicated to local Jewish heroes. Recall that the center is located inside the old butchers’ synagogue officially owned by Chabad; when the current Chabad synagogue was being renovated in the 1990s, Migdal served as a prayer house.

All along Migdal’s corridors, we saw proud moments in Odesa’s Jewish history displayed in handcrafted posters, collages, postcards, letters, and old photographs. Its two floors were decorated with gifts from sister communities in Baltimore and Haifa. Unlike the religious education centers, in Migdal you would not see pictures of Anne Frank, unnamed Jewish Holocaust survivors, or other iconic images of Jewish history. Instead, the stories on display are rooted in Odesa.

During our visit to Migdal, the UJC sponsors saw children’s dance troupes, a chess class, and classes in Jewish art. A group of Jewish ghetto survivors welcomed us with a song. As in the Sokhnut visit, all these activities were arranged so the guests could actively participate. Many Migdal members were there to represent the center’s daily life. Clearly, the directors had made an effort to show the center as a lively place of Jewish activity. From their comments and smiling faces, I could tell that the UJC sponsors were highly entertained and touched by the level of enthusiasm and activity inside Migdal’s walls. Many of the participants were proud to accept the visitors’ praise and welcomed the brief exchange of ideas, opinions, and histories, which they described as “valuable.” The young people generally appreciated the curiosity of these foreign Jews and were glad for the chance to practice their English, since some served as translators. As for the UJC guests, while they complimented Migdal’s programs, they couldn’t help but remark on the state of the building: chipped walls, decrepit bathrooms, and faded theater furniture stacked along the dim hallways. I wasn’t the only one to notice their stares and whispered asides.

Later, while discussing the “mission day,” my friend Gosha told me, “I don’t understand these Americans. They come here as if they were coming to the zoo. I hear them talking about our lives as if it was a scary movie. Personally, it really irritates me.” Gosha recalled how he used to be excited to see visiting Jewish groups—he, too, liked the opportunity to practice his English. But he remembered a number of incidents when, speaking with donors on missions, he and they would be talking at cross purposes on the subject of Jewish identity. “When they ask if I’m Ukrainian, I say, ‘No, I’m Jewish.’ They say, ‘No, that’s your religion. What is your nationality?’ I explain that I’m not religious, I don’t believe in God, but I’m Jewish by my nationality [ethnicity].”

In a conversation with my friend Diana, who also felt uncomfortable about the pity directed toward Odesa’s Jews, she suggested that groups should spend a day outside the city, so the sponsors could understand that Odesans are living in comparative luxury. “There are places that really need help,” she told me. “Odessa is flourishing compared to them.” On the whole, Diana was proud to say she lived in Odesa and not just another city in Ukraine. In her view, living in Odesa was a “privilege” she was happy to have been born into. As the famous Odesan comedian and musician Leonid Utesov used to say, “I was born in Odessa. You think I’m bragging? But it’s really true. Many people would like to have been born in Odessa, but not everyone could.”⁵⁰

Philanthropy was a relatively new concept to most Odesans I met during my first visit to Odesa. As ex-Soviet Jewry became wealthier and more exposed to Western society, where philanthropy is widely practiced, they could, in practical terms, connect more with the idea of making donations for meaningful projects and supporting causes they valued. During the early phase of my fieldwork, I occasionally heard Odesan Jews describe visiting donors, who were mostly from North America, as “funny” and “naive” for the way they reacted to the local scene. In most cases, local Jews felt that visitors couldn’t relate to Odesa because they only viewed it through the prism of their own experience. Sveta, a woman in her late thirties, told me:

We simply don’t get their mentality. I know some of them are here to see where their money goes, but I feel that a lot of them just come to see Jewish life in a third-world country. Sometimes, they bring things that are sentimental to them but have no value: something made by the hands of a child, that has traveled miles on an airplane and at times arrives broken. . . . Mostly they bring us cookies and sweets, sometimes even bags of diapers that have already been opened. Perhaps in Soviet days people found these gifts precious, but today things are different. But they don’t see the change. They still treat us like Soviet subjects, deprived of basic needs.

I confess that initially, I found it hard to accept such comments. Having worked many years for nonprofit organizations, where fundraising never came easy, I was sympathetic to these sponsors who wanted to make Odesa a better place. When I shared these feelings with my respondents, their reactions were mixed. Some understood the donors’ intentions and actions and appreciated their investment in Jewish futures; others even described Odesan Jews as spoiled by the system. On numerous occasions, I heard from Israeli teachers who explained that Jews in this part of the world expect to receive benefits, because that is the only model of Jewish community they know through continuous foreign support. Still other respondents saw the development of Jewish institutions and missions as problematic but necessary for sustaining Jewish life in the city. Gruber describes a similar attitude expressed by a Jewish activist in the Czech Republic, who said that while “we hate” the commercialization of Jewish places brought on by the international travel of foreign Jews, “it enables us to live.”⁵¹

Over time, I started to understand how Odesan Jews struggled with the way these missions imposed various Jewish scenarios and ideologies that had no grounding in their own self-image. Among other things, their sincere pride in being citizens of Odesa was wounded when Jewish visitors failed to recognize their reasons for such pride or couldn’t understand their reasons against emigration or aliyah, seeing them instead as being “frozen in [Soviet] time.”

Imagined Community and Jewish Kin

The next stop on the group’s tour was Gmilus Hesed, one of UJC’s earliest programs in Odesa, set up to provide for elderly Jews and “righteous gentiles.”⁵² At the time of our tour, this program cared for more than eight thousand retired Jews and military veterans in the region. We entered through the courtyard, where Arkady, the newly appointed director, asked everyone to gather in a circle. “What you’re about to see is not in any way rehearsed,” he declared. “This is a typical day in the lives of our people.” While everyone waited outside the door in suspense, Rebecca, the UJC organizer, addressed the group: “Your parents were fortunate enough to leave these parts of the world to make a better life in America. But you must remember, not everyone was given that chance. These Jews were not as fortunate as our families, who got to start their lives elsewhere. As you walk through the building, think about how these could be your parents if they hadn’t left for America.” Unlike the encounters of Portuguese Marranos and visiting Jews, where the language of kin is focused on “brothers and sisters” or “cousins,” the UJC mission presented Odesa’s elderly Jews as “parents” of American visitors. But in both cases, the framework of relatedness sent a strong message about the obligation of care for one another as a “family.”⁵³

The UJC sponsors then entered the old, run-down building, ready to see the programs that were said to be “operating as usual.” At the entrance, Arkady pointed to a small folding table that held two types of food packages available to elderly Jews. The guests listened to a brief description of the various services provided and then proceeded to the main room, which had a small stage. Visitors and staff members sat down at several round tables, with a young translator at each. They all listened as the music coordinator, Nadya, played the piano while the Gmilus Hesed choir sang some Yiddish tunes. The American guests clapped and danced to the popular Yiddish melodies performed in their honor. Some even sang along, saying they remembered the songs from their parents’ generation. The “tantalizing tension between familiar and exotic” that Leite describes and other anthropologists of Jewish tourism have picked up was clearly part of this encounter between the UJC mission and Odesa’s elderly Jews.⁵⁴ That day, the UJC sponsors reflected on the points of commonality and difference between the two groups. But the elderly Jews I spoke with saw little in common with their audience, a distance perhaps heightened by their inability to communicate fluently with one another. Yiddish served as the link, but it wasn’t a language that either group could converse in fluently.

Figure 5.6. The Gmilus Hesed choir sings for the UJC mission. Photo by author.

The excursion to Gmilus Hesed stood out on that day’s itinerary because it made the UJC sponsors recall their family history and prompted discussions about the idea of a more encompassing “Jewish family.” Through her example of Jewish tours of the Marranos in Portugal, anthropologist Naomi Leite reminds us that “the description of the Jewish people as a ‘family’ is commonplace among Jews worldwide, likely stemming from centuries of liturgical emphasis on collective descent from the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs and the many holidays memorializing trials and triumphs of earlier generations.”⁵⁵ Since many of the visitors were of Ashkenazi descent, the faces of Odesa’s elder Jewry may well have evoked memories of their own relatives. However, Rebecca’s effort to create an image of “relatives” who had been unable to immigrate to America denied the very real fact that these Jews had not failed to escape—instead, they had forged their own life histories, experiences, and attachments in Odesa. This distortion made the encounter between the American Jewish activists and Odesa’s elderly Jews a kind of role play—one where the locals didn’t get to tell their own stories but rather, by their sheer presence and performance, fulfilled an image already set by the organizers of the philanthropy tour to raise more money for those in need.

When done effectively, Jewish commentators explain, “tzedakah requires the donor to share his or her compassion and empathy along with money.”⁵⁶ No doubt this tactic was thought to be useful in connecting visiting Jews to Odesa—a place unfamiliar to them—to boost their philanthropic efforts and their commitment to social justice and responsibility. As anthropologist Stephan Feuchtwang pointed out to me, the process of personalizing through identification is a common tactic in fundraising. It’s part of a remembrance system deployed in other memorials where, for instance, a visitor is given a specific person’s life to follow as a means of learning about a particular event and raising funds for a specific cause. Indeed, the UJC guests were deeply moved by their visit to Gmilus Hesed and expressed their support in terms of their obligation to Jews less fortunate.

Aviv and Shneer note that similar tours of eastern Europe “work to strengthen the allegiances and solidarity among Jews from different countries . . . to create a sense of a global nationhood.”⁵⁷ Specifically, in the case of the Soviet Union, one must not forget the history of human rights activity led by Western Jewry to “Let My People Go.” This movement raised an awareness among American Jews, among others, that Jews in this part of the world need saving. Visiting those who did not go is another asymmetry in the encounter of philanthropists and the people they support. Afterward, on the bus, Rebecca asked the visitors to tell their communities back home about the people they’d met—to help extend fundraising efforts for Odesa’s Gmilus Hesed and other institutions.

Asymmetries of Encounter

As discussed in chapter 3, Odesa’s new Jewish community center (JCC) Beit Grand met with much ambivalence from the local Jewish population upon its formation. But the facility built and furnished through donations provided by sponsors of the UJC was, of course, a main attraction during the mission. The UJC’s organizers called it “the future of Odesa’s Jewish community” and presented it as a clear sign of improvement in the local standard of living. Delegates had just seen the shabby facilities at Migdal and Gmilus Hesed, so the new JCC gave them a powerful “before and after” experience—another common fundraising tactic built into the mission.

Inside Beit Grand, guests walked through large spaces with clean, white, plastered walls, perhaps imagining the places they’d visited earlier rehoused inside such a facility—one that certainly resembled their impressive Jewish community centers back home. American donors would find it normal that the organizations housed inside the space were asked to pay rent and thus needed to pass these costs on by raising participation fees. But Odesan Jews struggled with this new concept of becoming a “self-reliant group.” Most of them did not donate to Jewish causes in their city. A number of well-to-do Odesan Jews had started to engage in local fundraising and charity, but their donations were small compared to those of the large international Jewish organizations. At this point, Odesan Jews were far from altering the local dependence on foreign funding and authority. The dominant mood was one of resistance to the self-reliance model, even as the impositions of that model—organizations that received outside funding should be moving to financial self-sufficiency—were growing stronger. As one of my interlocutors explained, “Here, unlike the West, Jews don’t buy seats at their synagogues as a way of donating to their house of worship.” In Odesa, she said, “Jews don’t give to the rabbi; the rabbi gives to the Jews.”

Figure 5.7. A mission delegation tours the new Jewish Community Campus, Beit Grand. Photo by author.

The aid organizations initially told Odesan Jews that they were receiving donations because they were Jewish. When the same authorities later tried to charge rents and participation fees, many were dismayed. The city’s Jewish activists were concerned about being dependent on foreign leadership, but they didn’t want to cut off foreign funds. When I asked Rebecca about the organizations being charged rent for use of the Beit Grand premises, she attributed the problem to program leaders’ inability to consider the aid they received as just initial funding; instead, they expected permanent support for their operations. Rebecca had no concrete suggestions for resolving the financial issues created by this attitude.

The fact that the Beit Grand project was seeking to bring various organizations and programs sponsored by the Joint together under one roof also presented dilemmas. Because the organizations competed with one another—for funding, for Jewish participants, and for recognition—many were affected by internal politics. They didn’t see themselves as sharing a common line of thought and being part of the same “community.” As the Chabad school student Vika (introduced in the previous chapter) put it, referring to Migdal’s current space, “At least here, nobody tells us what to do, and we don’t feel like we’re running a business and working under a landlord.” For Vika and other Migdal staff, the pressures of digging up funds and relying on foreign representatives and agendas weighed against the upside of being located in a clean, modern space. The old Migdal building wasn’t just the site of their activities; it was also a piece of the city’s history, something that wasn’t found in Beit Grand’s freshly painted walls.

Memory and the Holocaust

The third day of the mission started in a somber mood. Across from the birch tree alley dedicated to righteous gentiles, and in front of one of the city’s main Holocaust memorials, a crowd of nearly three hundred gathered to pay their respects to Odesa’s victims of the Holocaust.⁵⁸ The event brought the American visitors together with representatives from most of the Jewish institutions that received funds raised through UJC initiatives, including children from the Chabad school, members of the Hillel Jewish youth club, Migdal members, local Holocaust survivors, and the Chabad rabbi, Avraham Wolf. He was the first to address the gathering, speaking briefly in Russian and then making the rest of his remarks in English. After Rabbi Wolf, a UJC guest delivered a short Holocaust-themed speech; the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) choir sang Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikvah”; and attendees recited the mourner’s kaddish (prayer for the dead). Then everyone stood in silence as six Holocaust survivors, each paired with a teenaged Odesan, lit six torches in memory of the six million Jews who had been murdered. To conclude the ceremony, UJC sponsors placed small stones on a chalk inscription that spelled out the word “Remember.” Some of the guests hugged; most said little.

The ceremony had emphasized the UJC mission’s involvement in honoring local victims of the Holocaust, and Rabbi Wolf acknowledged the UJC for its work in rebuilding Jewish Odesa after the catastrophe. But apart from the UJC donor’s short speech, little Odesan history was presented at this event. The Holocaust survivors themselves were asked only to light the six torches, not to address the group. For the most part, these survivors were reduced to being bystanders at an event dedicated to their experiences. As anthropologist Ulf Hannerz notes, the position of the tourist—as distinct from the cosmopolitan, who belongs to a place, in some ways—is typically defined as being limited to the role of spectator.⁵⁹ And yet during the ceremony, members of the UJC mission were given a stage on which to act out the ritual of Holocaust remembrance, all according to the universalized model of Jewish tragedy and solidarity: the Jewish prayer, the Israeli anthem, the lighting of six torches, and the imperative to remember.

Figure 5.8. Mission participants at the Holocaust memorial ceremony. Photo by author.

Rebecca Golbert described a similar formula in Kyiv, at the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) workshop on Holocaust Remembrance Day. There, the group was asked to re-create the setting of the Warsaw ghetto, the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Anne Frank’s room, but specifically Ukrainian experiences were given little time. “An evocation of the ghetto and camp experiences rather than transmission of historical knowledge appeared to be the aim,” Golbert concludes.⁶⁰ She notes that even though Ukraine certainly “had its share of ghettos and camps,” it was the iconic sites of Poland and the Netherlands that were used to stand in for all places and memories in this thematizing of the Holocaust—itself a “generic model of Jewish suffering.”⁶¹ Poland, in particular, Erica Lehrer writes, has become an “epicenter of Holocaust abomination.”⁶²

A lot has changed on the level of memorialization in Ukraine since the time of Golbert’s research, but according to scholar of Eastern European Studies and writer Nikolay Koposov, “attempts to develop the memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine has been the least successful in Eastern Europe to date.”⁶³ Besides the general struggle between the particular and the universal that is visible in other places when memorializing the Holocaust, and the Soviet approach to seeing Jewish deaths in World War II through the prism of Soviet losses, in Ukraine the memorializing process was also tainted by the internal politics of victimhood between Jews, Ukrainians, and others.⁶⁴ In 2016, when President Petro Poroshenko and a group of Ukrainian and foreign leaders met on the site of Babyn Yar to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the massacre, the Israeli American journalist Sam Sokol noted that the memorial was submerged in national politics—Ukrainians and Jews taking part in “a game of victimhood.”⁶⁵

A dozen monuments to the various groups that died at Babyn Yar, including Jews, Ukrainian nationals, children, Roma, and others, manage to capture a piece of the tragic events that unfolded on this site but don’t convey the significance of the larger events that the Babyn Yar deaths represent.⁶⁶ Several attempts to commemorate Babyn Yar in contemporary Ukraine have failed, including the proposed Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center that was scheduled to go up in 2021 (the eightieth anniversary of the massacre).⁶⁷ Such failures are due to the internal politics of memory, ideological and practical issues, disputes about founders and funders, and, later, Russia’s war in Ukraine.⁶⁸ Some Ukrainian historians were troubled that Babyn Yar would only be linked to the Holocaust and, as such, would only honor the Jewish and Roma victims, leaving out Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet prisoners, and others. They published a letter in March 2017 that stated: “We consider it a mistake to associate Babyn Yar only with the history of the Holocaust while ignoring other victims and other dramatic moments of its history. . . . This approach would only exacerbate the memory wars that have for many years been going on in the territory of Babyn Yar.”⁶⁹ Others were troubled by the effort to assert a moral equivalence between Jews and others and found it offensive and incomparable to commemorate Jews and Ukrainian nationals together, given the history of collaboration of some members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.⁷⁰ And some Ukrainian Jewish activists and historians saw the proposed Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar as a “paternalistic” project that highlighted the foreign origins of its backers, arguing that Babyn Yar is only partially about the Holocaust.⁷¹

For the Jewish youth in Kyiv whom Golbert describes, Babyn Yar represented one of the most commemorated and grieved-over events in Ukrainian Jewish history. But most of my interlocutors (including the elderly Jews) focused their Holocaust discussion on the Romanian Nazi occupation of Odesa and the horrific death of Jews in the ghettos and camps nearby.⁷² Those were the memories displaced by the UJC mission ceremony, which didn’t elaborate on the history of Jews during the Romanian occupation or commemorate days significant to local survivors, such as April 10, the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Odesa in 1944.

Enacting a ritual purported to be about memory reinforced the idea of a “shared history” and a sense of “oneness” established on a foundation of Jewish pain. As with Golbert’s example, the UJC ceremony ironed out most of the particularities of place. The guests I spoke with said they felt a rush of emotion, but they’d learned little of what Jews in Odesa endured during World War II. The donors’ performance and the survivors’ spectatorship represent other aspects of the asymmetrical encounters that philanthropy missions represent. At this particular event, the stories of local Jews blended into the larger memory of the Jewish Holocaust, and the donors themselves became central to the narrative.⁷³ Lehrer notes that “descriptions of European Jewish life have tended to reflect the concerns and identity categories of American or Israeli Jewry rather than the lived realities of local Jews.”⁷⁴ Though this ceremony took place in Ukraine, it was focused on a more recognized remembrance of the Holocaust rather than the specific experiences of survivors.

Responses varied among the locals who attended the Odesa commemoration. Daniel, a historian in his early thirties, remarked that the event was just another chapter in “the Holocaust industry,” echoing the title of a book by political scientist and activist, Norman Finkelstein.⁷⁵ A week later, when Daniel and I shared a train ride to Crimea, the topic turned to the people he called the “mitzvah [good deed] American Jews.” Referring to the Holocaust memorial ceremony, he said,

Why did they [the organizers] need to bring children there, the elderly, and create all the commotion around people’s personal lives, which these Americans couldn’t relate to during this fake ceremony? I was very grateful to the rabbi, as he was the only one who said a few words in Russian to the crowd. Why didn’t they have anyone translating the speeches to the people for whom it truly matters? I know, it’s a mitzvah, but really most of the [Odessan] people aren’t starving, they’re not dying, and they don’t need this huge Jewish cultural center they built. Why travel all this way to see how we live to feel sorry for us?

Daniel was upset that a local person hadn’t been asked to speak to the crowd of Americans about Jewish Odesa. “Why give the task of describing Odesa’s history to Rabbi Wolf, who’s almost as foreign to the city as the visitors themselves? And why were you asked to give a welcome speech to this delegation, and not a local historian?” he asked me, point-blank.

Most of the young Jewish participants probably didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, nor would they have shared Daniel’s critique. If they were involved with Jewish programs, they knew that the ceremony presented the Holocaust in a way that was similar to how it was done in many of those Jewish education programs and camps. These young people would have been able to follow the kaddish prayer and to recognize the occasion as one appropriate for the Israeli national anthem. In their minds, they would have had some vision of what they were being asked to “remember.”

And what of the older participants, particularly those who had personally lived through the atrocities of the Nazi occupation? What do they make of such forms of remembrance in Odesa? The answer is perhaps not as straightforward as it might appear. In “the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, many survivors simply wanted to forget and move on with their lives, while imploring the next generation to remember.”⁷⁶ Moreover, the Soviet Union pushed an official state narrative of the Great Patriotic War—reinforced by Soviet media—that made no distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish suffering.⁷⁷ Furthermore, in many cases, at least prior to the death of Stalin, the Soviet state treated concentration camp survivors as “enemies of the state.” For Jews who were old enough to have experienced the Holocaust period, the focus on forgetting could be profound.

Going against the grain of such pressures, many Odesan Jews who had seen the horrors of World War II did make a distinction between the experiences of the city’s Jewish residents and those of others. Family stories shared privately with children and grandchildren spread knowledge of the killing of Jews; of their deportation, suffering, and imprisonment; and of those who survived. Elderly local Jews, like Nina (seen in chapter 2), also learned of the wider history of the Holocaust beyond Ukraine, thanks to global projects organized by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center and Museum. Nina’s family story was recorded by Yad Vashem and included in publications on the theme of Nazi imprisonment. Other survivors, such as Nina’s sister and mother, treated the subject with deep silence. Some, like Viktor (also in chapter 2), concentrated on other Jewish realities during the war, such as fighting in the Soviet Army, defeating the Nazis, and individual acts of bravery. Even members of the same family adopted different strategies for living with the past.

Exploration, research, and ways of commemorating the Holocaust are relatively new and evolving projects in Odesa, Ukraine, and across the FSU.⁷⁸ Political scientist and scholar of Russian and Ukrainian Jewry Zvi Gitelman points out that “the word holocaust does not appear in Soviet literature; only in recent years have words such as ‘catastrophe,’ ‘annihilation’ (unichtozhenie), or ‘kholokaust’ (transliterated from English) been used.”⁷⁹ As historians Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower point out, Ukraine was an ensemble of disparate territories partitioned among several neighboring powers from the mid-thirteenth century until the mid-twentieth.⁸⁰ For more than two generations, scholars and others discussed the Holocaust through the lens of the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, or Hungary, because the Holocaust in Galicia is technically part of the Holocaust in Poland, the Holocaust in Transnistria is part of the Holocaust in Romania, and the Holocaust in Transcarpathia is part of the Holocaust in Hungary.⁸¹ In more recent years, the politics of memory have also shaped issues such as nationalist collaboration in the Holocaust.⁸²

In Odesa, not a single book on the subject was published prior to Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Another decade passed before the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews mounted a permanent exhibition of Holocaust-related materials. A Holocaust conference held in 2006 served as an important platform for Odesa’s intelligentsia to address the devastating history of the occupation. On June 22, 2009, the anniversary of the day Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Holocaust Museum officially opened in Odesa. A satellite of the Regional Association of Jewish Ghetto Survivors, the museum is dedicated to victims of fascism and former prisoners of the ghetto and concentration camps. Research initiatives focused on the Holocaust were led by Odesa’s expert on the subject, Leonid Dusman, and a cadre of young and middle-aged Odesan Jews, along with several survivors.⁸³

In another step forward, the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews started its own YouTube channel in 2020 and in its first year posted more than a hundred short videos about Odesa’s Jewish history, including the Holocaust. Meanwhile, former prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps were meeting regularly at Migdal for dance classes offered by the center’s teachers. These gatherings were mostly social, celebrating birthdays and other personal events. But Migdal also organized public memorial ceremonies, and the center receives and administers—on behalf of the individual recipients—monetary compensation from the German government. Through these various routes, the subject of the Holocaust was slowly entering the public discourse, allowing for the memory, analysis, and commemoration of Jewish suffering, loss, and trauma in and around Odesa, and acknowledging the forms of Jewish survival and life that followed the war.

The UJC mission was not an event that contributed to that public discourse. After the Holocaust ceremony ended, the visitors were asked to imagine a bright Jewish future, and to think about the new generation of Jews they were connecting to Jewish life through their kind donations. The Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) summer camp would be their last stop before the mission flew to Israel.⁸⁴ The contrast between events—the Holocaust remembrance ceremony, followed by a meeting at the camp with young supporters of Israel, and then departure for Israel—reinforced “the traditional notion of diaspora and homeland” observed by Aviv and Shneer in other tours of eastern Europe and Israel that position Israel as “the center of Jewish life, and Eastern Europe as the center of Jewish death.”⁸⁵

Figure 5.9. Sokhnut campers pose with UJC participants holding balloons in Israel’s national colors. Photo by author.

As the mission’s visit to Odesa ended at the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) camp, UJC members were paired with local youth and gathered for a group photograph to be used in future UJC publications. Everyone received matching T-shirts and blue and white balloons; on the count of three, they all released the balloons and Israel’s national colors rose into the Odesa sky.

Conclusion

The coordination exhibited in that symbolic balloon send-off and the mission’s approaching flight to Israel was obviously not representative of the entire UJC visit to Odesa. The full three-day stay was indicative of many of the missions that became an element of the city’s fabric. But as this chapter has illustrated, the foreign organizers who sought to draw Odesa’s Jewish population into a greater, imagined Jewish community also perpetuated a system of inequality and division through the array of asymmetrical encounters.

I want to stress that such encounters are not merely awkward interpersonal interactions between strangers. They are illustrative in that they expose the differences in donors’ and recipients’ perceptions, priorities, understanding, and identification as Jews from different parts of the world. Those differences point to the unequally positioned stakes in their relationships, whose dynamics produce new cultural meanings, categories, objects, and identities.⁸⁶

The divides between the international missions and the Jews of Odesa were sometimes subtle, sometimes stark. What ran through all the performances of Jewish identity, however, was the sheer fact that being “donated to” made a number of Odesan Jews feel they were seen as less than. Mission organizers tended to imagine a Jewish population that shared the traits, history, customs, and culture of the donors from abroad, while positioning that population’s members as victims of Soviet oppression and dire economic conditions, and thus, in need of saving. This left little to no room for any details of the actual lives of Jews living in Odesa. Their role was reduced to providing quaint “local color” to motivate more donations and a greater investment in “saving” those Jews who were cast as merely left behind.

This example of a mission further illustrates how international agencies sculpt images of local Jewish life to further program goals in the region—images that reveal part of the reality but not the reality. The encounters created depend on local Jews playing the role of those in need of rescue and revival from alienation and poverty. This role may have some basis in the lived experiences of Soviet Jews who fought to stay connected to Jewish practices, but such families were among the first to leave the Soviet Union. While some Jews and others in Ukraine are certainly living in difficult material conditions, the suggestion of some typical Jewish poverty omits the stratification of the population across the whole of Odesa. In fact, many middle- and upper-class Jewish families certainly do not feel their lives need improving or saving, in any economic, social, or spiritual sense. Indeed, most Jews feel their lives are flourishing, and they are free to be Jewish in any way they choose.

The role of Jewish missions in Odesa and elsewhere should expand our understanding of how faith-based philanthropy works in independent Ukraine.⁸⁷ Scholars of Russian-speaking Jewry Valery Chervyakov, Zvi Gitelman, and Vladimir Shapiro label the process of Jewish revival in Russia and Ukraine a form of “cultural imperialism . . . the imposition of external agendas on people whose value hierarchy is different” from their own.⁸⁸ Indeed, the contributions of local Jews to the mission’s discourse were minimal and even, in some instances, censored by the translators and mission leaders. If empowering the local population is a goal of development, then Jewish philanthropic organizations should approach ex-Soviet Jewry not as deprived subjects, but as Jews whose complex range of experiences and relation to Judaism can be instructive. They should approach them as equals.

Instead, the lives of younger generations are being shaped within an economy of aid. Beyond the critical analysis of cultural imperialism that is made vivid in religious revival, new models of fostering Jewishness have appeared through educational programs generated by local and international Jewish organizations. Jews in Odesa have internalized many of the transplanted models of Jewish identification introduced by the international agencies’ educational programs and accepted them as their own. This is especially true among the young. What then of their path forward?

With foreign philanthropists funding most of the institutions serving Odesa’s Jewish population, questions of sustainability come to dominate programs and agendas—the donations must continue.⁸⁹ For those who receive these donations, “underprivileged Jew” becomes an imposed position.