3

Jewish Revival

Opportunities and Tensions

Without the old Soviet restrictions on public display of religiosity, Jewish activity became an increasingly visible part of Odesa’s urban landscape since Ukraine’s independence. Soon, it pervaded the city’s culture. On my first visit to Odesa, I encountered not only the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews but also kosher restaurants, traditionally dressed religious families in the streets, Jewish newspapers for sale, street signs directing drivers to the two Orthodox synagogues, and public Jewish festivals and life-cycle ceremonies. During important Jewish holidays, I saw religious objects such as the sukkah and chanukiah along with advertisements for Jewish cuisine.¹ Less obvious was the work of Jewish activists who promoted Odesa as a city with a long and textured history of Jewish habitation. Their work was devoted to “uncovering and popularizing the cultural history of Odessa” through publications, organized talks, tours of the city’s Jewish landmarks, and contributions to Jewish cultural organizations.²

Since Ukraine’s independence, the city council has turned over public buildings that historically belonged to the city’s Jewry for use by Jewish organizations. What was once called the butchers’ synagogue now houses the Jewish community center Migdal. In another location, Migdal’s staff also run Mazl Tov, a Jewish early development center. The Glavnaya (Main) Synagogue belongs to the Litvak Orthodox congregation Tikva Or Sameach, and the former tailors’ synagogue is occupied by the Chabad Lubavitch congregation. The famous Brody Synagogue was officially handed over to Chabad in 2016, but the building still serves as the state archives.³ Students received a stipend to take synagogue-sponsored classes, a practice that has attracted an increasing number of young Jews.⁴

According to Migdal, almost 80 percent of the city’s Jewish population prior to the onset of the 2022 war was affiliated in some way with at least one of Odesa’s Jewish organizations. A number of these organizations are devoted to caring for the elderly, who are often seen as the “lost generation”—exhausted by their age and secularized by their Soviet upbringing. Other organizations serve the “middle generation,” whose members are valued for their contribution in raising their children as Jews. But most programs focus on the youngest generation, seeing them as future decision-makers on such questions as observance and migration and as the cultural transmitters of all that is taught to them in the various environments of Jewish education. While the cultural emphasis is distinct from the spiritual orientation of the city’s religious congregations and their supporting organizations, as well as separate from the Zionist ideology of Israeli-sponsored programs, the initiatives of these various organizations tend to intersect. For example, Odesa’s Jewish historians and journalists often write for newspapers published by the city’s two Orthodox Jewish congregations and for the Migdal Times, a magazine produced by the Jewish community center.

Figure 3.1. A sukkah outside the Chabad synagogue. Photo by author.

Figure 3.2. An advertisement for Jewish food week posted at an Odesa café. Photo by author.

Figure 3.3. Jewish men from the Chabad congregation in procession from Rosemarin kosher restaurant after the completion of a Torah scroll. Photo by author.

This range of organizational activity reveals a vast project of Jewish revival, taken on independently by many separate actors since the end of the Soviet era, to cultivate the Jewish religious and cultural presence in Odesa. The impetus for these distinct groups to pursue this common goal was the assertion that Jews in Soviet times were prevented from connecting to Jewish life by antisemitism, Soviet repression, and state secularization policies—hence the mission to restore a “lost” Jewishness. However, the varying ideas of “Jewishness” that have entered the rhetoric and cultural representation of Odesa have come through the work of international institutions and private donors, most from the United States, western Europe, and Israel but also, in more recent years, from Ukraine, rather than from the city’s Jewish population itself.

The processes of ethnic, religious, and cultural makeover such as those occurring in Odesa are often referred to in popular and academic literature and by activists as revivals. The term presumes that what is being “revived” was once part of the cultural milieu; in other words, it’s a bringing back to life of a previous culture and set of traditions. The notion of revival implies the existence of historical roots to be recovered and cultivated; it implies the rejuvenation and restoration of forgotten or abandoned elements of a past life. But in Odesa and elsewhere, ethnic, national, and religious revival involves significant innovation, invention, and investment rather than a return to the past. As writer Ruth Ellen Gruber notes in her discussion on monuments to the Jewish experience in eastern Europe, the process of actual physical restoration and reconstruction of Jewish heritage exists in parallel “to the way we reconstruct (or construct) things, in our minds and on the ground, to create new realities rather than ‘re-create’ past models.”⁵

The city’s Jewish population has long been exposed to competing ideologies and external points of reference. Describing the history of Jewish Odesa, John Klier writes, “Odessa was a town without ‘native’ Jewish traditions, where new Jewish traditions had to be created.”⁶ Vladimir Jabotinsky also notes in his journal, “Odessa did not have any tradition, but it was therefore not afraid of new forms of living and activity.”⁷ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, newly arrived Jews, mostly from Germany and Austrian Galicia, as well as other areas of the Pale, were instrumental in setting up Odesa’s most influential religious congregations (as described in chapter 1). Likewise, Odesa’s Jewish affairs from 1860 to 1888 were largely controlled by the city’s chief rabbi, Aryeh Schwabacher, a German Jew who spoke neither Russian nor Yiddish.⁸ One could say that the one main tradition being replicated by the current wave of revival is that of external interventions shaping Odesa’s Jewry.

It is in this light that we can better understand the tensions created by what the diasporic community understood as Ukraine’s post-Soviet “rabbinic revolution,” a stage of development that called on, reanimated, and recast many of the older institutions of Jewish life in Ukraine.⁹ Together, these institutions, established throughout the country in places with sizable Jewish communities, created a “full-fledged communal infrastructure consisting of burial societies (khevra kadisha), which renewed traditional burial rites at specially allocated cemeteries; rabbinic courts to resolve divorce and conversion issues; kosher kitchens and canteens for the elderly and poor; and matso bakeries and butcheries to prepare kosher products.”¹⁰ What is being revived in Odesa, therefore, is the possibilities created by outside influences. Even if those influences may be, in part, shaping deeply rooted Jewish institutions and building up Odesa’s Jewish life according to existing models of Jewish identification, they should be understood as not merely unearthing and illuminating suppressed relics of the past but rather introducing new dynamics and expectations about the meaning of Jewish life.

This is to say, outside ideologies, representatives, institutions, and practices have long been internalized, negotiated, and disputed in the everyday life of Odesa’s Jewish population. Jewish belonging in Odesa hasn’t been definitively demarcated by the new voices that are claiming authority and structuring aspects of the revival. Rather, different meanings of Jewishness—both those deeply embedded in the Jewish forms of living in the city and those envisioned as new—have been recognized and contested in the various forums of Jewish life. Jews in Odesa may have accepted foreign offers of aid and assistance, but they are still adopting, adapting, questioning, and contesting the discourses and practices that have arisen in the wake of Ukrainian independence.

Historian Mark Bassin and literary scholar Catriona Kelly point out that ideologies (and traditions) don’t just “exist”; they are constantly reinterpreted and debated.¹¹ And as the contributors to their edited volume, Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, emphasize, the relationship of Soviet and later post-Soviet subjects “was not one of unquestioning replication or helpless ‘cultural inertia,’ but a dynamic process” in which people “constantly reassessed their heritage and its significance as a model for the present, and a guide to everyday behavior.”¹²

In this way, what Jews in Odesa experienced after independence reflects the kind of cultural transformations that played out across states of the former Soviet Union. Suppressed ethnic, religious, and national identities did not simply emerge—they were generated and now serve as vectors of ideological contestation. In the words of Bassin and Kelly, “the former Soviet Union can be treated as a variable laboratory of identity construction and manipulation, within which identity operates in different ways and at various levels.”¹³ Identity narratives in the former Soviet states are, of course, defined by a number of factors outside of national identity, including gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, and geographical region.¹⁴ Religious, ethnic, and national groups in the region are also shaped by various processes of revival. Active arenas for local and international initiatives exist throughout the former Soviet Union among Jewish populations who were thought to have lost, forgotten, never learned, or abandoned their Jewish traditions under the Soviet modernization project.

Investments in a Jewish Revival

Following the immediate breakup of the Soviet Union, newly independent states saw the influx of transnational influences and a greater allowance of religious expression.¹⁵ In particular, they became active arenas for foreign aid and philanthropic initiatives to save, rejuvenate, or relocate Jewish life. As anthropologist Rebecca Golbert observed of Jewish youth in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, such interventions helped remake “identities and allegiances from a wide range of old and new cultural models emanating both from within and outside the geo-historical borders of Ukraine.”¹⁶

Those international interventions had roots in the 1970s efforts to save Soviet Jewry from the oppression of living under the Soviet regime. In that Cold War context, pressure from American Jewry and others lobbying to “Let Our People Go” eventually forced Soviet leaders to allow some Jewish families to emigrate.¹⁷ After the fall of the USSR, the efforts to restore what was imagined as long forgotten, forbidden, or abandoned—including Jewish education, religious institutions, and cultural activities—were tied with efforts to create paths for emigration.

In 1991, foreign organizations saw that Odesa’s Jewish population of some sixty-five thousand had no overarching community structure.¹⁸ A handful of short-lived underground organizations had operated under the Soviet Union, and a small number of elderly Jews occasionally attended the city’s sole functioning synagogue, although there was no rabbi, just a starasta (eldest member of the community). Most of the Jews I met in Odesa in 2005–7 had only faint recollections of the synagogue’s limited activities during that time. Their strongest memories were of visiting its bakery to drop off flour for making matzo for Pesach. Anna, who worked at the Odesa Literature Museum, said she was never told why her father would wait outside while she ran into the small wooden house to give the baker a sack of flour. Only after he died did she realize that her father’s membership in the Communist Party kept him from showing an affiliation with anything Jewish.¹⁹

The contemporary religious authority in the city can be traced to the time just before independence, when Ishaya Gisser, a native of Odesa who had immigrated to Israel several years before, returned to rekindle Jewish life. Shaya (as most people called him) hadn’t received his semikha (rabbinic ordination), but Odesa’s Jewry consider him the city’s first contemporary rabbi.²⁰ Filling the long-standing void in religious leadership, he founded a congregation called Shomrei Shabbos, and in 1992, he persuaded the city council to grant it the old tailors’ synagogue, which at that point had long been used as a mere warehouse. Though the congregation was limited to some two hundred people, it was said to have felt like a full synagogue.

I met a few of Shaya’s first students, some of whom still observe the Jewish commandments. To them, the early 1990s was a time ripe for heightened Jewish self-identification (nastoiashchego pod’ema evreiskogo samosoznanie). Describing their first encounters with Judaism in Odesa, they used such phrases as “true enthusiasm,” “true interest,” and even “true fanaticism.” Their affiliation was driven by an intense interest in learning what had previously been forbidden or unspoken. Of course, at the time of independence most state-organized youth movements had ceased to exist, which meant that reasons for affiliation also included “lack of another collective,” desire for an “escape from the deep-felt instability,” “something new,” and a “chance to meet interesting people.”

Among my interlocutors, those who either had been affiliated with Shaya’s activities or knew him through other social networks felt strongly that he understood and represented the authentic Odesan Jew. Unlike later rabbis in Odesa, he was a native Odesit. Evgeniy, a journalist and art collector in his late sixties, praised Shaya for “helping people, not just Jews,” and admired the open, humanitarian dimensions of Shaya’s “Odessan character.” As Evgeniy’s friends from the “old days” recall, Shaya never wanted to work under foreign authority and avoided all official affiliations. Although he identified himself as a Lubavitch Hasid, Shaya refused to follow the agenda of the Ohr Avner Foundation, which was funded by the famous billionaire Lev Leviev—who, among others, sponsored the work of Chabad Lubavitch, a branch of Hasidism in the former Soviet Union.²¹

In 1993, Rabbi Shlomo Baksht came from Israel and established the Litvak Orthodox congregation, Or Sameach, later renamed Tikva Or Sameach. He recruited religious families from Israel to teach in a private Jewish religious school, the first to operate in this period of revival.²² Rabbi Baksht’s community eventually reclaimed the original Glavnaya (Main) Synagogue, which had been used during Soviet rule as a gymnasium for Odesa University.²³

Aided by foreign donations, Baksht went on to establish an extended network of Jewish schools, including the first Jewish university in Odesa, as well as a home for needy and homeless Jewish children called Tikva.²⁴ According to an employee of the congregation, Tikva Or Sameach had close to one thousand members by 2006.²⁵ Leaders of Tikva thus make a powerful claim for its role in a religious revival: “Tikva has . . . been a pioneer in the revitalization of Jewish life in Odessa, reaching into the heart of the Jewish community, rebuilding Jewish identity destroyed by decades of persecution and communist rule.”²⁶

Figure 3.4. The main prayer hall of the Tikva Or Sameach Litvak synagogue. Photo by author.

Figure 3.5. The Litvak synagogue. Photo by and courtesy of Igor Oks.

Rabbi Baksht’s community pursued this revival primarily through Jewish education in the teachings of the Torah and the Talmud. This has historically been the case for Litvaks, Jews who followed the litvish (Lithuanian) tradition (which also expanded into Belarus), “favoring the analytical and rationalist approach to Jewish lore over the mystical one endorsed by Hasidic rebbes.”²⁷ One interlocutor explained that some Jews regarded Baksht’s congregation as “the strictest and most closed and conservative” of the two Orthodox communities that emerged. Though many followers admired Baksht for his dedicated teaching of the traditions, some Odesan Jews saw him as “distant” from the local Jewish population, partly because he commuted between Odesa and Jerusalem, where his family remained.

By 1998, Shaya Gisser could no longer sustain his independence against the pressures from outside Odesa, so he left the city. When I asked observant Jews associated with Shaya why and how he had left, many told me he had no choice. One woman said, “He couldn’t compete financially with the money and influence of foreign donors or with the Israeli rabbis who had the resources and personnel to build up the infrastructure for Odesa’s observant Jews.” In my interview with Shaya in June 2020, he explained that he could not agree to align his programs with the demands of investors: “I made everything with my own hands, and I wanted the investors to support the programs we built. I didn’t want to follow their agenda. I acted on my ideals, but I was not a manager.” Shaya was succeeded by a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, Avraham Wolf, who transformed the Shomrei Shabbos congregation by aligning it with the Chabad Lubavitch movement.²⁸

Rabbi Wolf, aided by his donors and some ten religious Israeli families, echoed Rabbi Baksht’s initiatives by setting up educational facilities and programs to raise religious awareness among local Jews. According to figures provided by the secretary of the Chabad synagogue, the congregation had as many as six thousand members in 2006, based on the number of subscribers to the Shomrei Shabbos newspaper, though only 10 percent of them might have attended services on high holidays. I saw around seventy or eighty men and an average of thirty to forty women at the service on my own Friday visits to the Chabad synagogue and two hundred to three hundred people in the gender-separated halls during the holidays.

Wolf’s community was usually regarded as “more relaxed” than the Tikva Or Sameach community, though no less Orthodox, and Wolf himself was widely admired for being “more open” and “more involved” with the greater Jewish population than Rabbi Baksht.²⁹ The Chabad congregation also runs an orphanage for children who are homeless or otherwise at risk. In a similar tone to Tikva, Chabad’s message links its revival to the efforts and hard work of its current rabbi. The announcement on its website reads, “With great toil and effort, Chabad Shlichim [emissaries] established a vast communal infrastructure and today, Jewish life in Odesa has been reborn. Under the leadership of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the past decade has seen the reawakening of Judaism in Odesa from total spiritual hibernation. The Rebbe’s emissaries, headed by Rabbi Avraham Wolf, the Chief Rabbi of Odesa and southern Ukraine, have spearheaded a wave of activities dedicated to saving the lives and souls of tens of thousands of people.”³⁰

Figure 3.6. The main prayer hall of the Chabad Shomrei Shabbos synagogue. Photo by author.

At the same time, Wolf and his wife, Chaya, were sometimes criticized for being too socially active with the city elite, such as potential donors and supporters, and overlooking the “problematic social pasts” of congregants who had served time in prison. When interviewed by the journalist and writer Vladislav Davidzon in 2015, a Chabad congregant, Yoel, explained that accepting people with troubled pasts was a “prerequisite for establishing a functioning community when the majority of Odessan Jewry is to be found in New York, Haifa, Montreal, and Berlin.” Such acceptance was seen as a way to “integrate the community’s base of potential donors.”³¹

The fact that the congregants included men with prison tattoos startled one of my friends from abroad on his visit to the Chabad synagogue. But some local congregants have come to see it as normal, even presenting Odesa’s history of Jewish “gangsters” to explain that this too is Jewish Odesa. Many Chabad congregants admired Rabbi Wolf for welcoming Jews whatever their background. Others, however, felt the Jewish leadership was crossing a moral line in their affiliation with what some called “Jewish bandits.” Gossip spread during the years of my initial research as both rabbis, each claiming the status of chief rabbi of the city, acquired properties, bought cars, and expanded their programs.³² While some appreciated the fact that Rabbi Wolf was “business-oriented” and thus helpful in connecting people, others condemned this materialistic behavior in moral terms.

In the mid-2000s, Odesa also had a small and much less visible Reform (also called Progressive) congregation, led by Yulia Grishenko (widely known as Julia Gris). Originally from Bryansk, a city close to the Ukrainian-Russian border, she started serving as a religious leader in 2001, when her congregation was founded with the backing of the US-based World Union for Progressive Judaism. Her Temple Emanu-El (renamed Shirat Ha Yam in 2016) congregation was housed in a basement space in a building where faded letters on the façade still spelled out the word “store” (magazin). Whereas the Chabad and Litvak communities had managed to reclaim Odesa’s historic synagogue buildings, Yulia’s efforts to take over the building of the Brody Synagogue—the first synagogue designed along modern lines in Odesa and one of the first in the Russian Empire—faltered due to a shortage of funds for renovation and a lack of support among city authorities. In the mid-1800s, the Brody Synagogue was “the model for Jewish prayer in the city,” but Yulia’s community in 2007 was a mere hundred or so.³³ By 2021, the Progressive congregation was said to have two hundred permanent congregants. While the Progressive congregation operating in Odesa at that time had no tangible relationship with the Brody congregation in prerevolutionary Odesa, Yulia, like other religious leaders in the city, felt her congregation was “rooted” in Odesa’s Jewish history and the important historical imprint of modern Jewish ideology of the place. On numerous occasions she shared with me her disappointment in the city council for not supporting her congregation’s claim to the Brody Synagogue, which was, at the time it was built, considered modern and thus, she argued, “progressive.”

Overall, Reform or Progressive Judaism has not been as successful as Orthodox Judaism in building up Jewish communities in the FSU. In his 2007 article “Why Chabad Excels in Russia, and Why Reform Judaism Doesn’t,” historian and Jewish studies scholar David Shneer writes, “While most American Jews were chanting ‘Let My People Go’ in order to ‘save’ Soviet Jewry, Chabad was already building an underground infrastructure for Jewish life in the Soviet Union. When Communism fell apart, Chabad was ready to inherit a post-Communist Russia.”³⁴ Beyond their organization and leadership, Shneer explains, Chabad rabbis rarely leave their posts and see their kiruv work—bringing other Jews closer to true Judaism—as a mission. Furthermore, their vision of a unitary, authentic Judaism is understandable to many Russian Jews who might have been seeking a clear system of belief after the fall of communism.³⁵

Some religious Jews I spoke to did not take the Reform movement seriously; they called it “easy” or “simplified” Judaism. One man in his thirties told me a joke on the topic as he explained the differences between the congregations: “In an Orthodox wedding, the mother of the bride is pregnant; in a Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant; and in a Reform wedding the rabbi is pregnant.” Knowing of these rumors, Yulia blamed the propaganda on Orthodox Jews who regarded the Reform movement as a foreign and recent American invention. Commenting on the same phenomenon in Russia, Galina Zelenina notes that “historically Reform Judaism is not an American but a European invention, and in big cities of imperial Russia, the Jewish public was more used to reformed German-style practices (such as having a choir and organ music during religious services) than to Hasidic rituals, so it would be more accurate to speak of the expansion of the shtetl-born, provincial Hasidism into metropolitan spaces that from prerevolutionary times had been occupied by modern Judaism, and not of planting an American invention on Russian-Jewish soil.”³⁶

There were even rumors that Yulia wasn’t really Jewish at all and that she wasn’t officially trained as a rabbi.³⁷ It was not uncommon among religious Jews to discredit someone’s authenticity on the basis of kinship or education. Sadly, Yulia suffered on both fronts.

I suspect that some challenged her Jewishness as a way of saying that she was not Jewish in the traditional sense. When I asked my friend Lina why she thought Yulia was not Jewish, she quipped, “Because she is Reform.” Yulia dismissed all the rumors and talk of her legitimacy (as a Jew and rabbi) as hearsay. She saw these comments as an effort to undermine her place in Odesa’s religious landscape. At the same time, she understood that the traditional image of a Jewish rabbi in the former Soviet states was, historically, a bearded man. Indeed, Odesa was not unique in its tension between the traditional and the Reform. Similar disputes and attempts to prevent rabbis from Progressive Judaism took place in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and other cities in Ukraine.³⁸

Figure 3.7. Receiving a new Torah scroll from an American delegation at Temple Emanu-El. Photo by author.

The Role of Religious Organizations

Given the firm divisions between synagogues in Odesa, this popular joke will come as no surprise: “How many synagogues does one Jew need? Three. One that is his, one that is not his, and one that he will never go to.” Indeed, at the time of my initial research in 2005–2007, there were very few “floaters” (people who attend services and programs at both Orthodox congregations).³⁹ In fact, relations were strained among the three religious leaders: they interacted on few occasions and agreed on little, apart from the Orthodox refusal to recognize the Reform community. But in only a generation, the three synagogues, their communities, and the organizations behind them had established a firm network of new Jewish institutions throughout Odesa. In addition to holding Shabbat services and celebrating Jewish holidays and life-cycle rituals, each synagogue took over former Soviet-built retreat centers for extended Shabbatons (communal Shabbat ceremonies). The programs of the Reform community were admittedly far less developed. It had a youth club, classes on Judaism at the synagogue, annual camps, and communal Shabbat celebrations as well as a Facebook page. In 2006, the kindergarten the Reform community opened on the city outskirts was its first attempt to organize formal education.

The Orthodox communities each established its own mikvah (purifying bath), syndicate of (girls’ and boys’) schools, children’s home, kheder for junior rabbinic study, yeshiva for senior rabbinic study, and kolel offering postgraduate rabbinic study for married men. They also created youth clubs and organized a range of social activities. Both Orthodox communities were publishing weekly newspapers in Russian, distributed free at the synagogue or by subscription, and sponsoring hour-long weekly television programs dedicated to Jewish lessons. Eventually they both published websites dedicated to their activities in the city.⁴⁰

The religious organizations also offered crucial material benefits for their congregants. As my interlocutors explained, you are “provided for” if you’re accepted and if you accept the values attached to being Jewish.⁴¹ This recalls anthropologist Melissa Caldwell’s focus on the pragmatic factors that contribute to religious revival in Russia, where missionaries and other foreigners find lucrative opportunities both for themselves and their congregants in a new religious landscape.⁴² On numerous occasions, I heard Rabbi Wolf point out to donors that there were no homeless people begging outside the synagogue. That had been the case in the 1990s, he recalled, and it’s still true outside many churches. Here in the synagogue, Wolf declared, “All those in need are taken care of.”

In Odesa, affordable, even free travel abroad was available for Jewish young people—usually to Israel but sometimes to the United States. The synagogues’ low-cost, high-quality summer camps taught youngsters Jewish history and traditions and exposed them to Israeli culture. Jewish youth could attend programs sponsored by the Student Union of Torah for Russian Speakers, which often took place on the synagogue premises or sometimes in the private homes of Israeli emissaries; those students received a monthly stipend of seventy-five US dollars. Odesa’s Jewish schools had become known for their strong academic curricula, but they also offered students nutritious meals and other forms of care.

In addressing the daily needs of their communities, these new organizations were working to fill the void left by the loss of Soviet state welfare programs. Faith-based organizations, especially those linked to the West, turned the prosperity of their donors, and their philanthropic efforts across the globe, into specific benefits and security for their congregants.⁴³ Subsidized food, medicine, and home care were given to those in need, if they were members of the religious organization. Unfortunately, seeing these resources provided to Jews by international Jewish organizations prompted a new wave of anti-Jewish sentiment. This appears to be part of a wider phenomenon in which ethnic differences and social hierarchies are used to explain economic and social imbalances. I occasionally heard non-Jewish Odesans complaining about their Jewish neighbors receiving packages from Jewish centers when no such benefits were available to them and expressing their envy of Jews’ travel and emigration opportunities, including the possibility of European or Israeli citizenship.⁴⁴

Here we see how a sense of exclusivity created by benefits and resources reserved for members of an exclusive community runs up against older concepts of rightful social distribution. An important legacy of the Soviet era is the socialist assumption that the welfare system provides for all on equal terms.⁴⁵ But in contemporary Odesa, being a Jew is no longer an undesirable identity—instead, it gives one privileged status.

New Challenges to Jewish Identification

With the aforementioned privileged status came a much stricter application of the laws of the halakha, which determine membership in the Orthodox community. Again, in the Soviet Union, the state defined Jewish identity as a secular nationality. As historian and Jewish activist Mikhail Chlenov points out: “The new awareness of halakha that developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, as a result of migration, led to the creation of new terminology: ‘halakhic Jew,’ for those born of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father; ‘nonhalakhic Jew,’ for those born of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother; and a ‘full Jew,’ for people born of two Jewish parents.”⁴⁶ Due to the high rate of intermarriage between Soviet Jews and non-Jews, the proportion of “full” Jews in the overall Jewish population is, by this definition, relatively small.⁴⁷ One of the chief rabbis of Odesa told me, “If you meet a Jew whose parents are both Jewish, it’s probably an accident.”⁴⁸

Halakhic status is usually affirmed by one’s passport and birth certificate or by documents showing the Jewish “nationality” of one’s mother or maternal grandmother. Soviet-era passports were therefore reviewed carefully by synagogue personnel to eliminate forgeries, and paperwork was sometimes sent to Israel for a final consultation on those who lacked official documentation, usually as a result of World War II and evacuation. Many elderly informants told me of their distaste at having to present documents to prove themselves Jewish. Raisa, a woman in her eighties, described how angry it made her: “I feel like we have to prove our Jewishness to them. Do they think they’re more Jewish than we are?” Indignantly, she added, “We never ask them for documentation.” Raisa wasn’t alone in finding the identity check a “degrading” process. For those with only Jewish fathers, the result was exclusion from the Orthodox community when they had previously identified and been recognized by the state as Jewish.⁴⁹

Religious leaders insisted that such checks were essential. I heard of cases where documents had been forged in applications to Jewish schools and universities. Such stories are even presented in a positive light, as “the best advertisements for Jewish congregations.” As one member of the Tikva Or Sameach synagogue put it, “Back in the old days, people forged documents to hide their Jewish identity. Now they forge them to create one.” Documents showing Jewish descent were essential for inclusion in the network of services previously described: emigration; children’s admission to Jewish religious schools; religious life-cycle ceremonies such as marriage, circumcision, and burial; membership in many Jewish clubs; social and economic benefits; and subsidized travel to Israel.

A number of my friends in Odesa recalled that people had submitted forged documents to get into the Jewish summer camps they’d attended in their teens—though none of them claimed to have done this themselves. As twenty-three year old Karina said, “It used to be that you didn’t have to submit your actual passport for proof of identity. A photocopy was enough, until they realized that many people were writing ‘Jewish’ under the heading ‘nationality,’ having masked their Russian, Ukrainian, or other legal status.” When I questioned this, Karina explained: “At that time [the early 1990s], there wasn’t much to do in Odessa. Jewish children came back raving about their experiences at camp, [so] of course others wanted to go too.”

The case of Sasha, an entrepreneur who was twenty-eight when we met in 2006 at the Chabad synagogue, offers a different example. He told me he had always considered himself Jewish, having been raised as a Jew by his father and other relatives. The fact that his mother isn’t Jewish was never an issue. But even though he was an active participant in his synagogue, others saw him as an outsider, and he became more isolated as the Chabad community expanded its activities. Comments I heard among Sasha’s peers confirmed his suspicion that he was seen as a non-Jew. Sasha told me the following story to describe his relationship with the rabbi:

I am very close to Wolf and I really respect him, but certain things aren’t right. I know the synagogue recently formed a youth club. They don’t say it’s only for halakhic Jews, but that’s exactly the point of it: to separate them from the nonhalakhic Jews so they’ll have pure Jewish marriages. Believe me, I know how it works. I know some of my friends asked if I could join the club and the rabbi didn’t respond positively. It hurts me. The rabbi sees me [at the synagogue] almost every Friday for Shabbat and the holidays, and he knows everything I do for him. I know he’s happy I’m there, but I now know the boundaries. I thought about giur [conversion], but I don’t want to live a religious life . . . I sin too much.

Similar issues are raised by anthropologist Alanna Cooper in her research on Bukharan Jews.⁵⁰ She documents a number of such “fragmented identities” in Uzbekistan, where in cases of intermarriage it was common to register the child according to the father’s nationality.⁵¹ These people aren’t accepted as Jews by the Orthodox Jewish organizations now in charge.⁵² “You can no longer respond to the question ‘Are you Jewish?’ with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Now the answer is, ‘It depends on who you ask.’”⁵³ The same is true in Odesa.⁵⁴ Amid the transformations in Samarkand that Cooper describes in the late 1990s, Chabad Lubavitch plays a major role in teaching practical halakha to local Jewry, which includes the brakhot (blessings) on their food, benching (blessings after meals), davening (praying), and wearing a yarmulke and tzitzit (undergarment with fringes). The vision of Chabad, as voiced by Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the Rebbe), is that “Torah and the Mitzvoth [religious commandments], the Jewish way of life which has remained the same throughout the ages and in all places, is what binds Jews and defines them as ‘one people.’”⁵⁵ Strict boundaries of who is a Jew based on halakha left many outside the border of this community.

In some cases, acts of rejection turned Jews away from Jewish life altogether. In other cases, disappointment led them to withhold loyalty and trust and to decide that formal conversion was too difficult, unrealistic, or impractical in their present family and life settings—as was the case with Sasha.⁵⁶ I met only a few Jews who had completed an Orthodox conversion and thus had been welcomed by the Orthodox congregations.

While the use of the halakha to define Jewish identity excluded some children of mixed marriages, for others it presented opportunities. Among my interlocutors who’d recently learned of their Jewish roots, the initial inquiry was most often prompted by possible migration, membership in a Jewish organization, or applying for a job at a Jewish institution, where one was directly questioned about one’s Jewish connection.⁵⁷ Vika, a sixteen-year-old student at the Chabad girls’ school at the time of our meeting in 2006, told me her family’s story: “My aunt married a Jewish man and they decided to immigrate to Israel. During the visa application process, she needed to present her documents, so she went to the archives to try to find something. As it turns out, we’re Jewish—from Polish Jewish roots! My ancestors were from a family of rabbis, and they were religious. Around that time, my mother was looking for a job and saw a posting for one at the Jewish kindergarten. There she saw the care provided to Jewish children, and she transferred me to the Jewish school.” For Vika, this discovery and her mother’s choice to enroll her in a Jewish school led her to further pursue Jewish religious education and then to become partially observant.

Other Jewish youth who discovered their heritage later in their lives had similar reactions as Vika and were keen to explore their Jewishness and enroll in Jewish programs. Like those described by writer Barbara Kessel in her book, Suddenly Jewish, newly discovered Odesan Jews professed to have always felt a connection to Jews. As one woman Kessel interviewed reported, “My identification with the Jewish world is so strong that I often forget what a long path I had to take to come here.”⁵⁸ For the youth I met in the context of religious schools, their newfound Jewish identity opened doors, but there were others for whom the discovery of Jewish ancestry didn’t spur a call for identity searching. And conversely, as Sasha’s case demonstrates, Jewish heritage on the “wrong” side, as deemed by halakic standards, caused some Jews who had always identified as such to have to engage in identity proving.

Israeli Organizations and the Law of Return

Those who are denied Jewish identification by the religious rules of the halakha may still seek recognition of their Jewish status through other Jewish organizations in the city that extend their programs to those who fall under the Israeli Law of Return. Such organizations include the Sokhnut, the agency of the Israeli government that helps Jewish immigrants, and the Israeli Cultural Center; the Migdal Jewish community center and programs funded by the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC or simply the Joint); and the World Association for the Promotion of Skilled Trades, originally founded in Saint Petersburg and now headquartered in the UK.⁵⁹ These groups draw their boundaries in accordance with the criteria for Israeli citizenship, which begins with simply having one Jewish grandparent. Individuals who meet those criteria, as well as their spouses, are regarded by Zionist organizations as potential repatriates to Israel.⁶⁰

While the religious organizations mentioned here tried to facilitate the revival of a religious life and communities in Odesa, as they did throughout the FSU, the Sokhnut and the Israeli Cultural Center (established and operated by the Israeli embassy) “worked toward dissemination of information about Israeli national culture and encouraged repatriation to Israel.” The Joint, which was also interested in the revival of local communities and encouraged their establishment, worked to build Jewish programs according to American standards of voluntary, social, nongovernmental, and not necessarily religious lines of organization.⁶¹

In the political Zionist movement, a person’s connection to Jewishness is first and foremost built on the idea of a Jewish nation in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it is expressed most vividly in the act of making aliyah. In Odesa, immigration rights have mostly been publicized through the immense outreach program of the Sokhnut, whose primary mission is to connect (or “reconnect,” as its leadership states) local Jews to Israel. Naturally, this meant drawing on the large pool of Odesans who, whatever their relationship to Jewishness, were able to participate in the city’s Jewish life and were regarded as potential Israeli citizens.

The Sokhnut thus further reconstitutes the identity of Jews in Odesa, stressing their place in the diaspora and underscoring the implicit assumption about the bond between a people and a territory, where Israel is assumed to be the home of the Jews—a “proper place for a people.”⁶² Israel is not alone in offering such “ancestral” rights: other nonnative groups in Russia—Greeks, Germans, Poles—are legally entitled to return to their ancestral homelands and to gain an alternative citizenship, a much sought-after privilege.⁶³ In my time in Odesa, I did not come across any non-Jews seeking to marry a Jew in order to leave Ukraine, but many of my friends told me this was common in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Greece, Germany, and Poland welcome back their former people and their descendants, no other country’s efforts to regroup its “native” population can compare in scope to those of Israel. Maintaining or increasing Israel’s Jewish population is crucial in the realm of politics, economics, and state security and to preserve the Jewish majority over a fast-growing Arab population.⁶⁴

Since the mid-2000s, the number of people moving from Odesa to Israel has dwindled.⁶⁵ But the Sokhnut centers continue to operate around Ukraine, mainly as informational organizations publicizing various study-abroad, travel, and internship programs. The centers also run summer camps in and around Odesa, where Jewish youth learn about Israel through its music, food, traditions, and history. The retreat centers are decorated with Israeli flags and other symbols of Israeli material culture, and Israeli teachers trained by the Sokhnut seek to create a sense of belonging among those who have the right to belong. Active participants in the Sokhnut who have recently made aliyah often return to teach at the summer camps. There is also a number of staff members long affiliated with the center who work as local teachers or leaders of small collectives. Some said they experienced some guilt about telling others to go to Israel while not moving there themselves. Diana, a leader of one of the Sokhnut’s sponsored programs, told me, “It just looks bad to work for a Zionist organization for so long and not move to Israel.” While Diana had considered relocating, her father’s poor health and her career as a translator for the European Commission kept her in Odesa. Her choice to remain reflected her effort to balance the Zionist narrative with her loyalty to family and work.

Those who had spent time in Israel were aware that life there presented hardships that the Sokhnut presentations fail to mention. Some of them expressed guilt and discomfort at taking part in what they called the Sokhnut’s “brainwashing.” When I spoke with Ira, a Russian-speaking Israeli who’d worked at the Kyiv branch of the Sokhnut and had made aliyah five years earlier, I asked her what she meant by “brainwashing.” She replied: “They would tell you that everyone’s waiting for you in Israel, that life is great, and you’ll have a beautiful future there. They didn’t tell you about the problems and the issues you could have. . . . Most of them have never been to Israel or anywhere abroad. After years of sending off students, I felt that I simply couldn’t stay any longer.” Like many others who had left their families to pursue Zionist ideals, Ira was quite cynical about the Sokhnut’s activities. The vaunted “gold mountains” were nowhere to be seen; the beautiful life described by the Sokhnut was never to be experienced.⁶⁶ While some worked through a difficult period of adaptation, it was not uncommon for disenchanted young people to choose return migration (see chapter 6).

Community Building: The American Dream

Each of the religious and Zionist organizations influencing Odesa had its own agenda and mode of Jewish expression. US philanthropic organizations were broader community-building projects that followed a more flexible (Reform) structure of religiosity and Zionism and were modeled on the Jewish community center (JCC) projects across the United States.⁶⁷ In the summer of 2006, I accepted an invitation to participate in a focus group organized by the Joint to discuss the future of Odesa’s new $4 million JCC, now officially named the Jewish Community Campus, or Beit Grand. Program leaders hadn’t yet reached a consensus about the center’s function, and the Joint sought to understand what local Jews wanted from it. The interviewer posed this opening question to me and the five other focus group members: “What reaction would you have to a place called the Jewish Cultural Center?”

Katya, a twenty-six-year-old architect, thought the title sounded rather “exclusive,” and too close to the names of other Jewish organizations in the city. The fact that you had to present documents proving Jewish descent to become a member, she said, underscored the sense of exclusivity—a feeling that was already widespread in the city and would be further inflated given the scale of this new campus in the city center.

When someone pointed out that there are non-Jews who participate in Jewish organizations, Katya asked, “Yes, but how many?” Dasha, Katya’s roommate, of Russian descent, said that although she wasn’t Jewish, she was glad to participate in Jewish activities. But while the few events she’d attended with Katya were “interesting” and “cool,” she did feel left out of certain ceremonies and discussions, such as those related to free travel to Israel under the Law of Return. Katya asserted that some non-Jewish Odesans are familiar with Jewish activities in the city and welcome them, but they’re in the minority. Most of the participants agreed that although Odesa always had a Jewish presence, it never stressed any sort of ethnic “purity.”

Figure 3.8. The Jewish Community Campus, Beit Grand. Photo by author.

Alex, a twenty-three-year-old IT specialist, said that he didn’t even know which of his friends were Jewish—and though he himself was Jewish, he didn’t feel the need to declare it to everyone. “But if I said to my friends, ‘Let’s go to the Jewish Cultural Center,’” Alex continued, “we’d all be wondering which of us was Jewish, and what that meant.” According to Alex, such centers create divisions among people and pose questions about “who you are and who you’re with, based on just your nationality rather than your interests.” In his eyes, Odesa was a city where people of different backgrounds mixed with one another and weren’t separated on the basis of nationality.

After some more discussion, the focus group leader asked, “How would you feel about the integration of non-Jews in such an organization?” Everyone agreed that the center should be open to non-Jews, but no one had clear ideas on how to regulate membership or what non-Jews would find attractive in the programs. Katya and Alex again brought up the issue of separating activities and people into the bracket of “Jewish,” saying that this would increase social divisions. All the participants agreed that although the city has Romanian, Greek, German, French, and English cultural centers that are open to all, a Jewish cultural center would mean something different—but no one could really explain why. Since the institution’s official name was still undecided, some participants suggested it be called the Israeli Cultural Center.

David, a twenty-six-year-old observant Jew who at the time lived in Jerusalem and was visiting his family in Odesa, responded, “There’s already an Israeli Center in the city. This project will be a Jewish center, not an Israeli one.” When the focus group ended, David left with some disdain, clearly feeling at odds with the group. I caught up with him to talk, and he explained that he wasn’t used to hearing Jews be so critical of their own culture: “I’m a religious person, and for me a Jewish organization is a natural part of life. It’s where you meet other Jews and maybe find a Jewish wife.”

Beyond the focus group, I heard much dissent among Odesa’s Jewry about this new home of Jewish life. Some believed that many Joint employees had enriched themselves by pocketing investors’ money. Others said the building was redundant since the city already had a Jewish center, Migdal, and that it was too big—“twice as large as the Jewish population itself.” Leaders of local programs complained about having to share space with the commercial businesses that would be renting part of the building to help cover its costs. Some potential participants were affronted by the high prices of the programs to be offered. One visitor expressed shock at learning that employees of the new organization didn’t even know that the Museum of the History of Odesa Jews is located on the same street, directly opposite the new center. But the fundamental question among the Jewish population was what would another Jewish center say to Jews in Odesa about the commonalities and differences among themselves and with others? In this way, Beit Grand brought to light a general apprehension that funds from foreign donors to promote Jewish activities and events didn’t necessarily help Jews in their daily lives. Some felt the project lacked a connection with Odesa as a place, with its values of diversity in Jewish practice and close interethnic relations. Because so many of the city’s families are of mixed origin, some felt that such projects should be sensitive to the role of non-Jews in Jewish institutions.

These conversations reminded me of what Viacheslav, a middle-aged man who ran a math club in the early 1990s, said about the potential fall of Odesa’s cosmopolitan ethos. He used the example of the rise of Jewish schools: “It used to be that everyone in Odessa had at least one Jew in their class. They knew what Jews looked like and who they were, either through close or even distant interaction with them. In my own classroom, when I was a student, I had Ukrainian, Albanian, and Greek friends. Children in Jewish schools are surrounded only by other Jews. This limits their sociality with others.” According to Viacheslav, both Jews and non-Jews would suffer from this lack of everyday interaction: each group would see the other as fundamentally different, which would erode the city’s multinational character. Viacheslav said that in his math club, “No one asked each other, and no one cared if the others were Jewish. We were all interested in math and problem solving. We came together because of our interests, not because of a superficial tie based on our nationality.” He also stressed that the Jewish schools fail to teach Odesika (Odesan history and culture). Although Jewish subjects are taught, along with a secular curriculum, the religious values adopted by the children in Orthodox Jewish settings do privilege a transnational and transhistorical bond to the Jewish people.

Viacheslav’s account of the cohesiveness among students of mixed backgrounds in his classroom was similar to stories told by older Jews in the city. But like many recollections, these may be somewhat romanticized. Certainly, people revealed more about painful episodes of being called zhid or zhidovka in the schools they’d attended previously. But besides the conflict-related reasons for attending Jewish schools, many students I met described their experience at a Jewish school as “interesting” and “exciting.” Karina, a seventeen-year-old student at the Chabad girls’ school, spoke of the thrill of learning a new language (Hebrew), being in a milieu that often included foreign teachers, and interacting with foreign students visiting Odesa. She welcomed the chance to learn about her religion and heritage and spoke proudly of herself as a Jew.

While Viacheslav didn’t mention the new transnational relations being forged in the classrooms of religious Jewish schools, this aspect of the schools was especially valued by Karina and a number of other students I met. Many students in Odesa’s Jewish religious schools were indeed gaining access to the large network of Jews overseas. Like the Ukrainian Jewish youth in Kyiv described by Golbert, they were experiencing “transnational orientations from home” and being linked into cross-border networks, relationships, institutions, experiences, and lifestyles—without even having to travel.⁶⁸

Anna Misuk, a local historian and employee of the Odesa Literature Museum who’d been involved in various Jewish projects since the early days of perestroika, frequently mentioned that contemporary Jewish life in Odesa was increasingly isolated from the city’s wider social environments. She made an interesting analogy between learning a new language and learning new ways to be Jewish:

When people are fluent in a language, they can make up words and speak incorrectly, but they know when it becomes nonsense. When you’re learning a new language, you don’t have the same comfort and security in your understanding of what you can and cannot say. This type of “disloyalty” [to the rules] is unknown to many people today. A nonfluent speaker or a novice, similar to the newly observant Jews, isn’t as secure in his or her language skills and thus often relies on other authorities, such as books and the advice of assumed-to-be experts, to make their judgment. Before, when Jews were exposed to various ways of being Jewish, they understood that their transgressions didn’t take away their Jewishness. In other words, they were no less Jewish for having stepped outside Jewish Orthodox law—especially in Odessa, where Jews lived in a relatively liberal manner. Today, when Jewish education is mostly directed at bringing assimilated Jews into the religious Jewish world—thus stripping them of all that’s condemned as non-Jewish—a stricter trend of observance follows.

During her years of working for various Jewish initiatives, Anna had met young people who now judged and valued their Jewishness on the basis of religious or traditional principles. These newly “literate,” rule-bound young Jews were sometimes prone to ostentatious displays, such as refusing to ever set foot in a church. Anna questioned this: to her, it was obvious that Jews don’t lose their Jewishness by entering a church, any more than they could easily gain it by entering a synagogue. Newly observant Jews, like new language learners, felt less comfortable making such judgments. In Anna’s view, since they’d only recently taken on an identity filled with new terminology, symbols, and laws in which they weren’t yet fluent, they lacked the inner authority of “just knowing.”

Anna both endorsed Jewish education and worried about it. She welcomed the openness of learning in the post-Soviet environment and the opportunity to explore explicitly Jewish topics. She was also concerned that such teaching would adversely affect how Jews related to other Jews and to non-Jews. The current narrowing of interethnic contact in Odesa was, for her and others, a departure from the historical achievements of the city’s uniquely cosmopolitan way of life. With the boundaries between ethnoreligious groups becoming more clearly delineated, Anna believed there was a perceptible increase in intolerance—such as the spray-painted swastikas that sometimes appeared in the city.

Conclusion

Anthropologists have long investigated tradition and “related notions of authenticity as symbolic, interpretive constructions in and of the present through the invocation of links to a meaningful past.”⁶⁹ In a postsocialist reality, writes anthropologist Ludek Broz, revival “entails utilizing the past to advocate a particular vision of the future.”⁷⁰ Under conditions of marked social and cultural change, the ideology and rhetoric of tradition are understandably more apparent.⁷¹ We have seen in this chapter how the processes of building up Jewish life in Odesa meant calling on destroyed or abandoned practices and institutions along with new values, practices, and orientations that weren’t always easily absorbed. If there was revival, there was also negotiation and resistance. Moreover, the Jewish organizations harbored competing notions of what it was that needed reviving, which resulted in a lack of cooperation and even in rivalry.

Some local and newly arrived Jews believed that Odesa’s rich Jewish history made it particularly open to such a project of revival. I interviewed many Jewish leaders and activists involved in organized Jewish life who earnestly saw themselves as rebuilding a lost and forgotten world of pre-Soviet Odesan Jewry and continuing the legacy of Jewish life in Ukraine. After all, nineteenth-century Odesa was home to a number of vibrant traditional communities, including the Glavnaya (Main) Synagogue, with its large congregation, and more than seventy smaller prayer houses, including followers of Hasidism. Observant followers of Chabad felt strongly that living as religious Jews in Ukraine connected them to the long history of Hasidim and righteous tzaddikim who once lived in the shtetls and cities of the Pale of Settlement, located in what is today the independent Ukraine.

Likewise, Odesa was also famous for the impressive modern congregation of the Brody Synagogue and for being one of the centers of Zionist activity, Jewish press, Jewish education, and Jewish philanthropy. Thus, a number of the city’s organizations had taken up prerevolutionary names, such as the Jewish publishing house Moriah (a reference to the biblical land of Moriah translated as “the place where God worshiped” but also “land of Torah”); the Jewish sports community Maccabi (named after the Maccabees, Jewish warriors who fought Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the Seleucid Empire in 175 BCE); and the Jewish literary club Beseda (which means “conversation”).⁷² But it’s arguable how much the new organizations can be considered historically Odesan. The Soviet system destroyed prerevolutionary Odesan Jewish institutions, so in this sense, there are few roots left to revive. Instead, the Soviet era produced secular markers of Jewish identity rather than religious ones; thus, as Tanya Richardson observed in Odesa in the early 2000s, the wave of religiosity seen at that time was regarded as alien “for some Odessan Jews who grew up in the Soviet era and who did not emigrate.” For them, “the deeply religious communal life that is becoming increasingly dominant is in fact foreign to the city and to their own idea of what it means to be Jewish.”⁷³

My observation is that religiosity in Odesa is less “alien” than what Richardson describes and more accepted as a way of “being Jewish.” However, recall that some secular Jews, especially the members of older generations that I interviewed in 2005–2007, were skeptical of the ardent observance they witnessed on Odesa’s streets among the younger generations. Still others claimed to have always lived Jewish lives or described coming to Jewish observance by their own idiosyncratic path (as I show in the next chapter).

Such a range of Jewish identification indeed challenged the idea that international Jewish organizations were reviving or rebuilding Jewish Odesa. Although Jews in Odesa were more assimilated than the communities of Bukharan Jews living in central Asia, who historian Zeev Levin describes as being treated like “lost children,” we can argue that the Jewish qualities of Odesa’s past and present were behind the arguments of some Odesans, who said that they lived and identified as Jews in what they believed to be a Jewish city always.⁷⁴ In other words, many Jewish Odesans of the older generation felt they needed not to be “rescued” but rather to be left to continue along paths that they had established while navigating Soviet Jewish ideology and the cultural context of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia—or by the sheer fact of having been born and raised in the milieu of Odesa’s Jewishness (food, language, literature, and myths).

At the same time, because most Jewish activists have emigrated from Odesa, and from the rest of Ukraine, outside Jewish organizations have taken a leading role in the city.⁷⁵ To see this, one need look no further than the relatively weak status of Odesa’s Reform Jews today and the dominant position of the two Orthodox congregations, especially the stronghold of Chabad Lubavitch.⁷⁶ This “is an ironic renewal of Hasidism in a city that was always better known as a center for liberal Jewish traditions.”⁷⁷ Although some scholars have linked the success of Hasidism in Ukraine to the historical importance of the area for the development of the Hasidic movement, Odesa was never regarded as the center of Hasidism. In fact Chabad, the most popular strand of Hasidism in present-day Ukraine, was born in the Russian village of Liubavichi and hence is far from endemic to the city.

Thus, it can also be argued that present-day missions of world Jewry are importing and imposing variants of Judaism that are new to Odesa. Indeed, I found the Jewish residents of Odesa divided in their views on any development said to represent them and in their understanding of what “Jewish” would mean. In the end, it’s questionable how far we can generalize about any continuing Soviet imprint on the thoughts and behavior of Odesa’s younger Jews. As Martin Horowitz, director of the Jewish Community Development Fund in Russia and Ukraine, points out, “the growth of at least two generations of Jewish youth who have experienced open celebrations of Jewish holidays, attendance at Jewish schools, and an environment of open, public Jewish activity has produced a Jewish youth quite different in attitudes and sensibilities from its [Soviet-era] parents.”⁷⁸ The imported Jewishness has become their own, and they associate their participation in Judaism with the participation of their ancestors.

Figure 3.9. Children at the Mazl Tov, the Jewish early development center, prepare for the Passover celebration. Photo by author.

Anthropologist Mathijs Pelkmans’s edited volume, Conversion after Socialism (which mainly focuses on Christian and Muslim conversions), highlights the “problematic notion that religious life after socialism can be characterized as a revival of repressed religious tradition.”⁷⁹ As he points out, in post-Soviet times “religion served new needs and was linked to new imaginaries.” In the next chapter, we see how in the aftermath of state socialism, Judaism was introduced to Odesa’s Jews as a religious system of beliefs, values, and practices and how these have been internalized in a variety of competing and conflicting ways.