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Talk continues 

Past images, present needs, future opportunities

Bruce Rogers' reflections before the
Nashville Jewish Federation, 1998 
 

Editor's note:  Bruce's talk is a snapshot of a period in time, before Israelis started leaving to get away from the violence, and before large numbers of non-observant Russian Jews were seen flouting tradition by selling pork and keeping their shops open on the Sabbath, creating havoc among those who see that as a threat to the Jewish character of the state. All these developments were chronicled in the Village Voice during the early months of 2002.  

I would like to take you on a journey this evening, a journey which could be called "Back to the Future."  It was shared by 12 members of our community who participated in the Zimmerman

Senior Leadership Program of late October and early November, 1997. We journeyed to Ukraine and Israel to observe firsthand the programs of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the American Joint Distribution Committee, programs that our Nashville Jewish Federation helps to fund with our overseas dollars.

Thirty years had passed since I visited Leningrad, Moscow and Warsaw, and I eagerly anticipated the trip to Ukraine, all areas of the world from which so many Jews journeyed to America.

When we think about our ancestors, each family has an individual story to tell about the origins of their coming to America.  Most often we recall a great grandparent or grandparent who traveled alone to America and left his family behind. 

A similar experience still occurs hundreds of times each month, for the Jews of the Former Soviet Union, and will continue to occur well into the twenty-first century. My memory is etched with images of the Ukrainian Jewish youth we met.

Bright and full of hope for their futures in Israel, they participate in Jewish programs in Kiev, Chernigov, Lvov and other cities in Ukraine.  To learn Hebrew, many undertake an intensive course of study of the language, which is called an ulpan. [Editor:  See endnote on ulpans.]  In Kiev, we saw a Jewish community center filled with high schoolers there for Shabbat evening activities.
 

Dancing in the dark: In Chernigov, we went to a social hall for Jewish youth, and we danced in the dark – the electricity was available for only a few hours a day. Their numbers and the types of their activities excited us. We were astonished to discover how they found out about Jewish Agency for Israel programs: it was through paid ads, which they heard on their radios.

Responding to the radio advertisements was the first Jewish action that many had ever taken.  We saw how the programs not only develop a sense of being Jewish and doing Jewish things, but also develop the sense of a Jewish Community. 


  

Leaving friends and families behind just as our ancestors often had to do, many of the youth we met will be immigrating to Israel by themselves.  One hundred years after the great eastern European Jewish migration to America, I had not expected to see repeated the same pattern of children leaving their families.  In Israel, we had the opportunity to observe how Ukrainian youth are settled: at 'absorption centers' where they live in dormitory-like housing, on a kibbutz with families, and with relatives if they have them in Israel.

Operation Exodus is formally no longer a program, but the work of Operation Exodus continues and will continue for many more years. 

Every day 166 people leave the Former Soviet Union, not on boats as our forebears did, but on the wings of an unmarked eagle, otherwise known as an El Al flight. We flew to Israel with a plane full of new immigrants and felt the excitement in the cabin.  

Doing more than 'a good job'  Because of the vast resettlement in Israel since 1948, I assumed that the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) did a good job.   But having observed their programs first hand, I can personally assure you that the work they do is extraordinary, and it is accomplished under very difficult conditions in the former Soviet Union.  Seven hundred thousand Jews from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) have already been resettled, and 5,000 more are still going monthly.  [Proportionally, this resettlement is roughly] equivalent to the United States absorbing [from 1989 through 1997] the entire population of France.  [Editor's note: By 2001, immigration to Israel from Russia had dropped to 33,522 from its peak in 1990 -- the year after the breakup of the FSU -- when 185,000 Russian Jews immigrated to Israel, according to statistics from JAFI published in the Village Voice of March 12, 2002.]

 
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