Mission to Minsk … and more

PROVIDENCE – Eddie Bruckner, Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island’s vice president for financial resource development, and I experienced Minsk and Israel on a Jewish Federations of North America mission with 96 other lay and professional leaders from across the United States and Canada. Missions are peripatetic, transformational summer camps for grownups. There’s no sleep, only days and nights filled with inspiration, education, training, and bonding with our counterparts and instant new friends. The mid-July mission was no different.

In Minsk and Israel, we visited programs sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) and World ORT.  Each of these organizations, collaborating on a continuum of services with the dollars we (and other donor organizations) raise, ensures the renewal and vibrancy of Jewish life all over the world.

Today, about 25,000 Jews live in Minsk, the capital of Belarus (birthplace of Marc Chagall, Shimon Peres and Meyer Lansky), the first country invaded by the Nazis and the last liberated by the Allied Forces. The Nazis slaughtered 80-90 percent of the Jews in Belarus, and the Communists imposed official anti-Semitism for decades after the war, obliterating entire generations of Jewish knowledge, tradition and communal life. We began our visit to Minsk by exploring Yama (“pit”), a deep depression carved out of the earth where 5,000 Jews rounded up from the ghetto were shot to death in just one day. There we recited Kaddish and heard from several young leaders of the Jewish community as well as its head, Leonid Levin, an architect and sculptor.  Descending by the stairway into the pit is his statue of 27 soulful figures about to die.  In his remarks, Levin reminded us, “Each of us could have been in that line.”  Transporting us from those tragic moments in the pit, where “the ashes of our people” are buried, he summed up the successful rebirth of Jewish life in Minsk with his dramatic conclusion, “We are few, but we are Jews.”

Jewish life flourishes in Minsk today. There are synagogues, schools, summer camps, young leader and cultural enrichment programs, Shabbatons, family retreats, newspapers and kosher food, with a robust infrastructure of Jewish social service, cultural and philanthropic organizations.  The Minsk Jewish Campus, a thriving social, cultural and educational center, is the central address for Jewish communal activity.  JDC, JAFI and World ORT are partners in their efforts to promote and sustain Jewish identity and care for the community’s needy and vulnerable. Together, with support from the Alliance, they are saving a generation of young Jewish adults who would otherwise assimilate into obscurity.

JDC’s Hesed Rachamim Welfare Center provides medicine, food, home care, cultural life, companionship, winter relief and home repairs for the last generation of elderly victims of the Nazis and life under a Communist regime.

As Dov Ben-Shimon of the JDC explained, “Jews don’t need our help getting out of any country in the world today. They need our help in staying.”

Their needs arise from hunger and thirst – hunger for food and sustenance, thirst for Jewish community and belonging.  Eddie and I shopped for groceries for 86-year old Tatiana, who lives alone in a tiny room of a communal apartment. We had an allotment from the JDC of 100,000 rubles ($11) to spend. We bought chicken, oil, tea, kasha, bread and noodles.  We all contributed to add oatmeal, fruit, potatoes and eggs.

Astonishingly, many young people we met exploring and celebrating their Judaism did not learn they were Jewish until they were into their teens.  Sometimes a grandparent or aunt let them know, or they discovered old family papers or a siddur (prayer book) in a shoebox in the attic.  Yoni Leifer went to shul for the first time when he was 11.  After Jewish summer camps and Hebrew school, he made aliyah, and then after serving in the Israeli army and attending university, he returned home to Minsk to work for the JDC.

In Volozyhn, we visited the world-renowned Volozhyn Yeshiva, the site of the Second Zionist Congress and the “Harvard” of yeshivas, attracting the greatest Jewish intellectuals of the time (from 1803 until 1939).  There, we met Vladimir Levitskiy from Moscow and other Jewish young adults participating in an “Expedition” program where they do community service projects across the former Soviet Union and learn about their Jewish heritage.  Vladimir is 21 and first learned he was Jewish three years ago.  Since then, he has been to Israel on Taglit-Birthright, traveled all around the United States, participated in a number of cultural programs sponsored by JDC and JAFI, and hopes to return to Israel on a MASA program.  Together we spent several hours cleaning a Jewish cemetery next to a monument memorializing the mass grave of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis.

Recognizing that Jewish adolescents and young adults need multiple touch points in their lives to concretize their Jewish identity, these agencies sponsor summer camps, Birthright trips and Jewish schools, to create a long-term immersive experience in Jewish life.  JAFI runs summer camps where children learn local Jewish history, Jewish customs and practices. At one camp, I met Kseniye, 19 and a counselor, who did not learn she was Jewish until she was 9 and had an opportunity to attend the camp.  As they learn to engage young campers in the Jewish community, counselors develop their own Jewish identities.

In Israel, we traveled to Haifa, Afula, Jerusalem and other areas where programs rescue children at risk, provide services to those in need and inte       grate immigrants, including Ethiopians, into Israeli life.  At a World ORT science and math campus focused on “program-based learning,” we launched rockets and enjoyed other experiential learning opportunities with 14- and 15-year-old scientists.

One personal highlight was a visit to a JDC-run father/son sports program in Afula. Fathers and sons must commit to spend 90 minutes each week together with coaches, counselors, and other father-son pairs. Together they practice and play soccer, but what they really learn are social skills, teamwork, confidence, self-esteem and responsibility.  The program successfully strengthens the relationship between father and son, and their lessons spill over into all other areas of their lives, generating emotional wellbeing, family relationships and better school attendance and grades.

The Alliance has been ensuring a vibrant Jewish community for nearly 70 years both domestically and overseas. As the central address of Jewish philanthropy in greater Rhode Island, the Alliance provides care for people in need and support to Israel and collaborates to develop a strong Jewish community for the next generation.

As the great Lubbavitcher Rebbe Schneerson cautioned, “If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and how ugly it is, then it is yourself that needs repair.”

I invite all of you to join the Alliance and me this year to help repair the piece of the world left for us to complete.

Susan Leach DeBlasio (sdeblasio@apslaw.com) is vice chair for financial resource development of the Alliance.