In retrospect, a short side trip to Bratislava, Slovakia, was the perfect starting point for a journey to the Jewish communities of the former Soviet Union, although at the time it was only a matter of convenience.
We were traveling under the auspices of the Vaad l’Hatzolas Nidchei Yisroel, whose founder and chairman, Rabbi Mordechai Neustadt, had made all the arrangements. Our flight from New York via Amsterdam connected at Vienna with the flight to Tbilisi, Georgia. Apparently, flights to Tbilisi are not in great demand, and in order to make the connection, we had to spend six hours in Vienna. Avraham Rieder, one of our group, arranged for a bus to come from Budapest and take us to Bratislava, otherwise known as Pressburg, where the Chasam Sofer is buried. Bratislava is only thirty miles from Vienna, but narrow roads and two border crossings extend the trip to about an hour and a half.
A gentle rain was falling when our bus pulled up near the Chasam Sofer’s gravesite in the fading afternoon light. There was no cemetery in sight, only a small glass-enclosed booth alongside a set of railroad tracks. A stocky old man wearing a yarmulke with sharp creases was waiting for us at the door. He had the key.
The Chasam Sofer’s grave, he explained, was underground. After the War, the government built a railroad over the small cemetery in which the Chasam Sofer and about fifteen other people were interred. After much persuasion, they agreed to accommodate an underground cemetery with enough head clearance for a person of average height to stand without
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taking off his hat.
We followed him down a long flight of stairs to the dank cavern below. A trench had been dug around the graves, which were now at waist level under a very low ceiling. The graves were identified by flat stones and a numbered chart on a stand. The headstones had been removed and placed at the back of the trench. There was no room for them atop the graves.
We stood in the trench between the headstones and the graves, and we paid our respects to this great gaon and tzaddik who established the world’s largest yeshivah in this city nearly two centuries ago, whose teshuvos, chidushim and drashos are as vital today as ever, whose thousands of illustrious talmidim illuminated the Jewish world, who lies buried in ignominious obscurity under the railroad tracks in Bratislava.
Harav Mattisyahu Salomon shlita, Mashgiach of the Lakewood Yeshivah and the leader of our group, led us in saying a few kappitlach Tehillim, passuk by passuk. There was not a dry eye in the place.
As we were leaving, the caretaker told us interesting news. Government officials had agreed to divert the railroad tracks, allowing the cemetery to be restored. It doesn’t really matter that their motivation is to bring more tourist dollars to Slovakia rather than to honor the memory of the Chasam Sofer. What does matter is that this sacred place, buried for decades by Communist decree, will finally be seeing the light of day once again.
Five days later, when we were returning to the United States, I thought about all we had seen in Tbilisi, Baku and Petersburg, and it struck me that the fate of the Chasam Sofer’s gravesite was a fitting metaphor for the story of the Jewish people under Soviet rule.
Communist oppression had buried Jewish life in the Soviet Union for seventy years. Torah study was outlawed. Torah life was outlawed. Belief in the Almighty was ridiculed. Children grew up ignorant of the hallowed traditions, values and ideals of the Jewish people. Jewishness disappeared from the Soviet landscape, but it did not perish. In some deep figurative grotto, the indomitable Jewish spirit endured, and today, it is once again
seeing the light of day. Today, it is flourishing. We saw it with our very own eyes.
e arrived at the hotel in Tbilisi at four o’clock in the morning local time, but there was really no time to sleep for more than an hour or two at the most. We had only one day to spend in Georgia; by evening we would be on our way to Baku in Azerbaijan.
The Jewish communities of Georgia and Azerbaijan, in the temperate southern Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas, are mostly Sephardic in origin; Baku is forty miles from the Iranian border. There have been Jews in Tbilisi for over twenty-six hundred years, in Azerbaijan for not much less.
Before the Russian Revolution, Moscow and Petersburg were hotbeds of Jewish secularism and Zionism, but Tbilisi and Baku were steadfast in their loyalty to the Torah. There was no spiritual deterioration in these lands, no compromises with modernity, no supposedly progressive revisions of the religion, no socialist agitation. Communism was spawned in the heart of the Russian Empire, not in these outlying satellites. But when the Bolsheviks wrested power from the czar in 1917, these lands also came under their control. Russian commissars took over and imposed the Communist system on an unwilling people. Judaism was buried alive.
But for many people, something remained to keep the spirit from perishing⎯a family custom, a cherished religious article, a memory or perhaps just that ardent attachment to the Almighty that is so deeply ingrained in virtually all Sephardic Jews. The decades wreaked their havoc. The Torah was forgotten. Shabbos, kosher food, family purity and all the other facets of Jewish life disappeared. Intermarriage reached alarming percentages. Still, people viewed their Jewish origins with a vague pride; they knew they were special but were not quite sure why.
In 1986, the Vaad l’Hatzolas Nidchei Yisroel began to send shlichim to Tbilisi where there was a slight stirring of interest in the Torah. Three years
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later, a Vaad shliach was sought out by a brilliant young college student named Ariel Levine. He belonged to the minority of Ashkenazic Jews in Tbilisi, most of whom are descended from refugees who fled there during the Second World War. One thing led to another, and Ariel Levine blossomed into a tzaddik and a talmid chacham who is today the Chief Rabbi of Georgia.
Rabbi Levine was our host in Tbilisi. He is an extremely likeable man with a dry, self-deprecating wit and a passionate dedication to his work. He runs a yeshivah high school and a Bais Yaakov high school, as well as a full elementary school, a mikveh and numerous community services. He also has a part-time kollel, which he wryly calls “the only kollel in the world established for mechalelei Shabbos.” Over time, of course, the kollel runs out of mechalelei Shabbos and must seek new recruits. Some of these former mechalelei Shabbos have gone on to yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael and have returned to teach in Tbilisi.
The anomaly of a kollel for mechalelei Shabbos aptly illustrates the situation in Tbilisi as well as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. A young man can spend a good part of the day studying Gemara intensively yet go home to a non-Jewish wife and children. A child can spend the day learning Chumash, Siddur and holiday songs yet come home to a non-kosher dinner. A teenaged girl can enumerate all the conditions of meleches machsheves, as we ourselves witnessed in utter amazement, yet there is no way of knowing if Shabbos is observed in her home. These are the vicissitudes of the rebirth of Torah in all these lands. The tender shoots are pushing tentatively through the avalanche that buried them. It is a disjointed, paradoxical, yet incredibly beautiful phenomenon, and it never ceases to move visitors from abroad.
e spent the day with these people, an intense fourteen hours that began at Shacharis in the yeshivah with the bar-mitzvah of a boy named Yitzchak Meir Banikashvili, the son of a chacham from
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Kutaisi, the second largest city in Georgia. The Mashgiach helped the boy put on his tefillin for the first time as his father looked on. I could not discern exactly what defines the boy’s father as a chacham nor the level of observance in his home, but I could discern the intense joy and pride of the parents on that momentous occasion.
Afterwards, there was a bris. On the plane, Rabbi Neustadt had told me there would be a bris in Tbilisi and three more in Baku. Somewhat naively, I asked him, “How did they manage to schedule them so perfectly?” It did not immediately occur to me that the ages of the baalei simchah were fifteen, sixteen, nineteen and forty. In Tbilisi, the boy, whose father is an Armenian, was a cousin of Rabbi Levine.
Most of us were not present at the actual bris, which was performed in private because of the boy’s age. We all danced and celebrated with him afterward. The first time I experienced what had transpired in that room was at a preview showing of the video at a special Vaad conference held in conjunction with the last Agudah Convention. The camera captures the expressive face of the boy as we hear the mohel make the berachah in the background. There is not even a wince on his face, just a look of intense determination. The Mashgiach, who was his sandek, bends over and kisses him. The images are extremely powerful; I, for one, was very moved.
“Why did you want to do this?” the Mashgiach asked him later.
The boy clenched his fists. “Because I want to be a Jew!”
Before we left, we were served a meal in the yeshivah, and the Mashgiach spoke words of inspiration to the assembled crowd, as he did wonderfully and often throughout the journey. Rabbi Levine then told us his life story in his own inimitable fashion. He told us about his challenges, his wife’s gallantry, his dream of expanding the school if he could only acquire a building. After him, the irrepressible Raphael Zucker of Lakewood took
 The video, produced by Shmuel Borger who accompanied the group on the journey, will be screened in its entirety at the Annual Dinner of the Vaad l’Hatzolas Nidchei Yisroel on March 12 in Ateres Chayah Hall in Boro Park.
the floor and made a spontaneous appeal to the members of the group. We cannot allow the inspiration to fade, he insisted. We must do something right away. Within minutes, members of the group pledged to contribute or raise all the money needed to pay for the building.
The next day, we had a similar experience in Baku, where we were hosted by the Vaad shliach, Rabbi Moshe Kishone. No mountain is too high for this extraordinary man to climb. He is a man of great intellect and charisma, resourceful, dynamic and supremely dedicated; he has a wife and eight children in Eretz Yisrael but spends at least two weeks out of every month in Azerbaijan. He has established an elementary school in Baku whose enrollment has grown to over 200 children, and he has galvanized all aspects of Jewish life throughout Azerbaijan. The success of the Vaad, I thought to myself, is clearly due in large part to the quality of its shlichim. Two days later, when we visited the new Yeshivas Pri Yitzchak in Petersburg and met Rabbi Eliezer Nezdatny, the rosh yeshivah, this impression was reinforced.
In Azerbaijan, we were once again moved and inspired by all we saw, the eagerness of the young children, the immense pride of parents and teachers. That night, over a late supper in the hotel, the Mashgiach spoke to us about commitment, and he proposed that we all reconvene at midnight and sign a paper pledging to work for the Vaad together as a group to the best of our abilities. We all signed gladly, and the paper came to be known as the Baku Document.
hat had we seen that so inspired us, that so inspires everyone who travels to these lands? Had we really seen anything different from a Jewish community being transformed somewhere in middle America, a not uncommon phenomenon in our times? Why were we so ready to sign on the dotted line?
I think it is because the Torah renaissance we are witnessing in the former Soviet Union is so incongruous with the American model. People
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are instinctively inclined to strive more for material goals than for spiritual goals. The quest for spirituality, for most people, requires intellectual conditioning, but the quest for material rewards is reflexive. After a while, however, people discover that material goals are illusory, that they do not provide satisfaction for our inner yearnings. “Whoever has one hundred,” our Sages tell us, “wants two hundred.” Only when material acquisitions leave them unsatisfied do they seek out the enduring rewards of spirituality.
The early immigrants to the United States faced the material challenges of the new world without the moral support of the families and communities they left behind overseas, and all too many of them neglected the spiritual in favor of the material. And even as they encountered success, they still found satisfaction in their material pursuits. Why? Because putting a roof over the heads of their families and food on the table, sending the children to good schools and all the other accoutrements of a decent standard of living are a spiritual endeavor called chessed. And so millions of American Jews drifted further and further away from the Torah. But for the new generations, the material goals have been ratcheted up to a second or third luxury car, a vacation home in the Caribbean, a world cruise. There is nothing spiritual about any of these things, and their acquisition is not fundamentally rewarding. Therefore, more and more people are returning to the spiritual rewards of the Torah.
But this is not the case in the former Soviet Union. Communism has collapsed, and with it the straitjacket of institutionalized poverty. The economic opportunities are boundless, and numerous Jews are amassing tremendous wealth. And yet, large numbers of ordinary people with no religious background, who live in cramped apartments and ride on public transportation, are seeking out the Torah.
Why are they so interested in the Torah when there is so much economic opportunity out there? Why are they drawn to the spiritual when they have not yet been disillusioned by the material?
There is only one answer, even if they do not recognize it themselves.
Neither they nor their forbears turned their backs on the Torah. Rather, it was taken away from them. And now that the barriers are gone, the impulse for reunion is strong. There is no need to reconstruct a relationship, as with American Jews. The relationship has never been deconstructed, only buried deep underground. Today, we are seeing its revival. This is the wonder of what we are seeing in the former Soviet Union. This is what touches each of us who has been there and seen what is happening.
efore this journey, I had never been to Tbilisi, Baku or Petersburg, but I did visit Moscow and Kishinev in 1987 and Moscow again in 1989. On my first night in Moscow, I went to the home of Aryeh Levitan, a twenty-two-year-old young man who had become a baal teshuvah three years earlier and had started learning Gemara only two years earlier. We learned Mesechte Gittin together in secret, and he had a list of questions prepared for me. We argued over a Rashba and a Rav Akiva Eiger, and I was amazed by the level of sophistication he had acquired in such a short time. Today, this young man is still learning in kollel in Eretz Yisrael, well on his way to becoming a gadol b’Yisrael. Back then, there was no real chinuch for young Jewish children, but there were young, intellectually mature adults like Aryeh Levitan studying Torah on a high level.
That night, I walked back myself at two o’clock in the morning to the Hotel Rossiya on Red Square, a distance of about two miles. For a good part of the way, I had the Moskva River on my right and the endless brick wall of the Kremlin on my left. I was all alone. A fine mist hung in the air, and my footsteps echoed in the silence. I remember being struck by a sense of foreboding in my alien surroundings, and I asked myself, Where am I? What am I doing here? But in truth, I was in no danger. There was no street crime under the Communists.
Things have changed over the last ten years. Today, if I would walk that same route I would be lucky to reach the hotel with my life; forget about the wallet. Today, there are not many Aryeh Levitans in these lands, but there is
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a great blossoming of chinuch for young Jewish children. Back then, the Aryeh Levitans would discover the Torah and emigrate to Eretz Yisrael at the first opportunity; the cream was continually skimmed off. Educate the adult, and he leaves. Educate the child, and you transform the community. Today, we are seeing the development of a Torah infrastructure that bodes well for the future.
The political future in these lands, as indeed anywhere else, is uncertain. In the last decade, the map of Eurasia has been redrawn, and it will most likely be redrawn once or twice more in the decades to come. But the Torah future of the former Soviet Union seems to be on a strong and stable upward curve, assuming there will be continued financial and instructive support from abroad.
eople in the United States often ask, Why should we support the former Soviet Union when there is so much to be done right here in our own backyard? Why should we feel a particular sense of obligation to the Jews in these lands?
The Mashgiach addressed this question on that fateful night in Baku. In every generation of this long galus, he explained, there is one segment of Klal Yisrael that suffers the brunt of the oppression for all the rest. During the Crusades, it was the Jews of Germany. During the Inquisition, it was the Jews of Iberia. During these last seventy years, it was the Jews of the Soviet Union. They bore the full intensity of the exile for all of us, and now that they are free, we are obliged to help them recover.
Traveling back home, I could not help but compare the world I had just visited with the world in which I live, and a thought occurred to me. We say in Mussaf of Shalosh Regalim, “Unefutzoseinu kaneis miyarkesei haaretz. Gather in our scattered people from the ends of the earth.” Where are the ends of this round earth? These ends are clearly at the extremities of the spirit rather than of space. The ends of the earth are not in New York or London or even Melbourne. The ends of the earth are where the light of
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Torah has been obscured for nearly a century, where millions of Jewish people have forgotten the meaning of being Jewish, where the mentalities and the perspectives are still skewed by the aftereffects of ideological distortion. The ends of the earth are in places like Tbilisi and Baku, and the people who live there are the ones for whose redemption we pray.