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The Hungarian version appeared in Szombat (2002:9)
A magyar változat megjelent a Szombat 2002. novemberi számában

In the last two hundred years, as a result of the secularization of European society, Jews have confronted two challenges: 1) do emancipation and modernization demand a renovation of Judaism, and, if so, what it should be; 2) can Judaism, renovated or not, be divorced from "Jewishness" and thus preserve Jewish people and culture, if not Judaism, in secular contexts? For about a decade Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) have been free to address these questions and decide for themselves what being Jewish means and whether they want to "be Jewish."

Two hundred thirteen years ago, when Jews in France were emancipated so they could leave the ghetto and be equal citizens with other inhabitants of France, Jews began to be forced to decide whether Judaism was adaptable to modern European society, and whether they could be somehow Jewish and somehow French (later, German, English, Hungarian) at the same time. The problem was that being Jewish from ancient times until that point had meant both a religious and an ethnic or national identity. Now Jews were told that they could opt for a different national identity-French, German, Hungarian, etc. There were several general Jewish responses to this challenge of choice. Chronologically the first was the move by several thousands, particularly in Germany, to embrace not only Germanness and Europeanness but also Christianity, on the assumption that to be a real German or European meant one had to be Christian. Even those who did not think so at first soon realized that the grant of legal, civic equality did not give them social acceptance, so they converted. As Heinrich Heine famously said, "Baptism was my entry ticket to European civilization.

In response, the Reform movement in Judaism arose, saying basically that one can be European and Jewish at the same time, one need not become a Christian, because Judaism itself could be changed to conform to European norms. Reform contended that  Jews are not a nation but a religion only and therefore they could be Jews by religion and Germans by nationality, "Deutsche burger Mosaischen glaubens."  In order to drive the point home, all references to Zion and the return to Jerusalem were expunged from Reform prayer books. The language of the synagogue, now called a Temple, was changed to German and the dress of the clergy, the music and the outer trappings were all borrowed from Christianity. Moreover, rituals were abandoned as archaic and emphasis was laid on ethics and morals, those values that Jews supposedly shared with Christians. Later on, especially after the rise of Fascism, Reform abandoned its anti-Zionism and in recent years, at least in America, has restored many rituals and observances.

In reaction to Reform's embrace of European ways, the Hatam Sofer declared that "hadash asur min ha-Torah," namely that these innovations were heretical and that the offer of European civilization should be rejected because it led to religious deviance and national assimilation. This has remained the posture of ultra-Orthodox and almost all Hasidic sects until today. On the other hand, Shimshon Refael Hirsch in Frankfurt, argued that Orthodox Judaism could be compatible with European culture and articulated the idea of "Torah im derekh eretz" the central value of what became known as neo-Orthodoxy, later Modern Orthodoxy. These movements addressed the issue of religion. Secular movements focused on the question of Jewish ethnicity. Assimilationists argued that whatever Jews might have been in the past, their future was to merge into the larger peoples among whom they lived. Zionists maintained the opposite and claimed that the Jews were a modern as well as ancient nation and hence deserved a state. Others developed a secular diaspora nationalism that upheld the existence of a people but not the need for a state (Bundism, Dubnovian autonomism, territorialism).

In the Russian Empire, whose five million Jews constitute by far the largest Jewish population in the world, Reform Judaism hardly penetrated, and assimilation was much less of an option than in Western Europe. I suspect the reason is that, unlike in Western and Central Europe, Jews did not look up to Gentiles as models, people to be emulated and envied. The Central/West European Jew could look at the European upper and middle classes and intelligentsia and want to be like them; the East European Jew had no realistic chance of penetrating the upper class and a very difficult time becoming an entrepreneur or a professional because of the numerus clausus and other official restrictions. In an empire where as late as 1914, four out of five people were illiterate and the same proportion were peasants, when Jews looked around they saw people whom they considered their cultural inferiors, not people to be emulated. Lack of access to European education also meant that for most people Hirsch's "Torah im derekh eretz" was irrelevant. What were left were the universal ideology of socialism, that promised salvation to the Jews because it would make ALL religions and ethnicities irrelevant since class was the operative organizing principle in society, and, by contrast, Zionism, which said the diaspora was a hopeless place and that only a Jewish state could rescue the Jews from assimilation or annihilation. Some movements tried to combine socialism with Jewish ethnicity (the Bund) or with Zionism and others advocated Jewish cultural or even political autonomy in the diaspora.

The Russian Revolution and the Jews

 These ideologies competed openly only briefly in the short interval between the fall of tsarism in 1917 and the imposition of Bolshevik control in 1921. Bundism, autonomism, Zionism, religion, and even Hebrew, were declared reactionary bourgeois ideas and Bolshevism, which denied that the Jews were a nation (natsiia) but categorized them as a nationality (natsional'nost', not citizenship) got a monopoly "on the Jewish street." Some have said that Bolshevism itself was a Jewish conspiracy, and the myth of Zydokomuna still has credibility and evocative power in certain circles. Was it a Jewish conspiracy? Many of the prominent leaders of the Bolsheviks were of Jewish origin: not only Trotsky, widely perceived as being second only to Lenin, but the first head of the Soviet state, Yakov Sverdlov, and party leaders Kamenev and Zinoviev, among others. Jews even quipped that the real meaning of VTsIK (Vserosiiskii Tsentral'nyi Ispolnitel'nyi Komitet, or "All-Russian Central Executive Committee) was "vu tsen idn komandeven" (where ten Jews give the orders). But these were "non-Jewish Jews," to use Isaac Deutscher's term. Every one of them had either grown up outside the Pale of Settlement (cherta osedlosti, thum hamoshav) where 97% of the Jewish population had been confined, or were half-Jews or had converted to Christianity (Semen Dimanshtain was the only exception). They knew no Yiddish and opposed the creation of a Jewish Section (Evsektsiia) of the Communist Party. Why had they become Bolsheviks? My hypothesis is that they were "doubly alienated." For whatever reason they were alienated from Jewish society, and they were not accepted into Russian society. The attraction of socialism was that it promised a world without nations, where ethnicity and religion would not matter. As Lev Davidovich Bronshtain, aka Trotsky, told Vladimir Medem, leader of the Bund who asked Trotsky whether he was a Russian or a Jew, "I am neither, I am a social democrat, an internationalist."

As a matter of fact, the 1922 census of the party revealed that there were only 958 Jewish members who had joined before 1917, about 4 percent of the party membership on the eve of the collapse of tsarism, and only 1,175 joined in 1917. (The Bund had 35,000 members in 1917 and the Zionists had won several nationwide elections in that year).
But two things drove Jews to sympathize with the Bolsheviks and support the Soviet regime: 1) the terrible pogroms in which at least 50,000 Jews were killed between 1918 and 1921 were carried out almost exclusively by the opponents of the Bolsheviks (Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists). Many Jews, including Zionists and yeshiva bachurim, joined the Red Army to defend themselves; 2) the dropping of all limitations on Jews allowed them entry to higher education-by 1927, 13 % of all students were Jews-and to elite positions in the economic, Party, state, military, police, academic and artistic hierarchies. Their greater literacy, urbanity and the fact that they could not be suspected of sympathy with the old regime gave them significant advantages.

Meanwhile, the Evsektsiia, composed largely of former Bundists and other Jewish socialists, launched a campaign to destroy traditional Jewish culture and substitute for it a secular, socialist, Soviet culture based on the Yiddish language. By 1930, when the Evsektsiia was disbanded, hundreds of synagogues and all Jewish religious or Zionist schools had been closed, Hebrew could not be studied, and all Jewish political parties and movements had been suppressed. On the other hand, there were 1,100 Yiddish elementary and secondary schools, several dozen Yiddish newspapers, a few dozen Jewish agricultural colonies, scores of Yiddish journals and magazines, 500 Yiddish books published every year and several Yiddish research institutes-every one of these funded by the Soviet state.

But these failed for three reasons: 1) by the late 1930s the state had withdrawn its support in line with its general turn away from korenizatsiia to a focus on Russian culture; 2) many Jews saw the anti-religious, anti-Zionist Soviet Yiddish culture as ersatz or even anti-Jewish and rejected it; 3) the majority of Jews were much more interested in acculturating into the Russian culture which, unlike Yiddish, gave them access to the highest echelons of Soviet society. Resistance to Yiddish and insistence on Russian stemmed from the conviction that Russian was a "higher" culture and that it was the key to opening the doors to advancement. "A meeting of the transport workers. One comrade, a porter, takes the floor and comes out categorically against any work in Yiddish. When challenged, he answered: The matter is quite simple.... For many years I have carried hundreds of pounds on my back day in and day out. Now I want to learn some Russian and become an office worker."8

Thus, on the eve of WWII Soviet Jews were well on the way to acculturation and even assimilation. Whereas 76% of all Jews had given Yiddish as their mother tongue in the census of 1926, only about half did so in 1939. Mixed marriages rose precipitously; whereas fewer than 10% of the Jews married non-Jews at the time of the revolution, a third were doing so by 1939. It was only the introduction of internal passports in 1931, in which one's nationality was registered, that prevented perhaps millions of Jews from becoming Russians or Ukrainians or Belorussians, and the like. In an ironic way, Stalin saved Soviet Jews for the Jewish people by instituting the passport system, though many Jews saw this, especially later, as making them "invalids of the fifth category."

The rush to assimilation was slowed by WWII in which about 1.5 million Soviet Jews were killed and by post-war Stalinist anti-Semitism. During the "black years," 1948-52, the remnants of Soviet Yiddish culture-and its leaders-were destroyed. The "anti-cosmopolitan campaign" of the 1940s and the "Doctors Plot" of 1952 clearly signaled that Jews were, at best, second class citizens who might be tolerated but might be collectively punished for their supposed disloyalty. Tens of thousands of Jews were fired from their jobs, demoted, purged from military academies, the Party and state hierarchies, denied admission to higher education or even imprisoned and exiled.
Khrushchev's destalinization, which did not include a repudiation of Stalin's anti-Jewish policies, did away with the more irrational anti-Semitic policies but did not restore any Jewish institutions or significantly alter Jews' status. Through the Brezhnev years of stagnation (vremiia zastoi) they continued to be excluded from the elites. They faced a psychological dilemma: they were almost entirely acculturated, but not at all assimilated. That is, they were Russians culturally (even in non-Russian areas) but Jews officially and socially, and they could not change either even had they wanted to.

After 1968, some tried to resolve this dilemma by leaving for Israel where their nationality and a new culture would both be Jewish; a smaller number joined the political dissident movement, trying to democratize the USSR and thereby solve the "Jewish problem" along with many others. The invasion of Czechoslovakia disillusioned many of the political dissidents, some of whom went over to the Jewish national movement. Some 150,000 Jews managed to leave the Soviet Union, mainly for Israel, from March 1971 through the late 1980s, at great risk and at great cost-there were some 11,000 "refuseniks." In the 1980s, when emigration was severely restricted because of a downturn in Soviet-American relations following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, some Jews "turned inward" toward religion and attempts to construct Jewish culture in the USSR. This became much more feasible when Gorbachev introduced the policies of glasnost' and perestroika. Glasnost' allowed Jews to express themselves as Jews, and perestroika allowed them to organize themselves as Jews. Very quickly, nearly 500 local Jewish organizations sprang up, schools were established, publications began to appear and a national umbrella organization, the Va'ad, was created. However, with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Va'ad began to weaken and in each post-Soviet state Jewish life began to develop somewhat differently.
Post-Soviet Jewry

"Ayn ba'al haness mekir be'niso." We are witnessing a very positive turn in the history of Russian Jewry. There have been three enormous and positive changes for Jews from the Soviet period to the present: the disappearance of state-sponsored antisemitism, free emigration, and the revival of public Jewish life.
Not a single post-Soviet state pursues antisemitic policies, though some discriminate against non-autocthonous peoples, Russophones for the most part (Estonia, Latvia, Central Asian republics). Most provide moral and a minimal of financial support to Jewish activities and culture. Amazingly, in the Russian government before the crash of August 1998, there was a disproportionate number of high-ranking Jews: Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, Economics Minister Alexander Livshits, Deputy Finance Minister Yakov Urinson, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States Boris Berezovsky, etc. A former prime minister, Sergei Kirienko, spoke openly about his Jewish father (he took his mother's Ukrainian name and considers himself Russian by culture). Whether by accident or not, there are few if any visible Jews in Putin's government or entourage. In fact, his main critics have been not other political leaders but the two Jewish magnates, or "oligarchs" in Russian political parlance, Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky, both of whom are now broken politically and economically.

Of course, anti-Semitism has not disappeared and occasionally and sometimes dramatically even appears in the political arena.

From 1990 until about 1999 or so there were some very prominent Jews in business, especially banking: Berezovsky (Logovaz); Frydman, Gusinsky, Smolensky, Khodorkovsky (banking); Satanovsky (export), etc. As Putin declared war on the "oligarchs," ostensibly in order to reduce corruption and make the market more fair, the star of many of these faded. The sudden rise to prominence of so many Jews requires some explanation. In the centrally planned Soviet economy, where the consumer sector was starved, all kinds of middlemen and "fixers" were needed to make the cumbersome economy actually work. When private business in the Soviet Union was legalized, the fartsovshchiki moved quickly from the rear ranks of the dregs of society to the front ranks of merchant princes, captains of commerce or as the Russians would come to described them, the oligarchs. Since Russians with talent usually had host of other opportunities open to them, and Jews did not, Jews disproportionately had gone into activities that were considered socially unacceptable. When the Soviet Union began to open doors to the market and private business, much of what had been disreputable in the Soviet era suddenly became admirable. But the oligarchs went too far and were too heavily dependent on President Boris Yeltsin. When he departed, they had to go as well.

Free emigration: From 1989 to 2000, about 1,220,000 Jews and their non-Jewish first-degree relatives emigrated from the FSU to Israel and the US (others to Canada, FRG, etc.). Assuming that about 30 percent of the emigres are non-Jews attached to Jewish families, we see that 850,000 Jews have emigrated in the past decade. The dimensions of the current emigration from the FSU become even more vivid when we realize that this represents more than half the Jews enumerated in the l989 census.i Of the emigres, nearly 900,000 have gone to Israel just since 1989, where they joined about 170,000 who had come since 1971. Thus, there are more Jews from the USSR and its successor states in Israel than there are Arabs, and ex-Soviet Jews are nearly one-quarter of the Jewish population. Over 70 percent of those who left the USSR immigrated to Israel where they constitute the single largest "ethnic group" in the Jewish population. There are now about 337,000 ex-Soviet Jews in the United States, more than all the Jews in Great Britain. About 137,000 have gone to Germany and their numbers are rising.

Jewish Revival: Ironically, this massive emigration vitiates the third great and positive change, the reconstruction of unrestricted Jewish life. The young and perhaps the ambitious and talented, and the most Jewishly committed are precisely the ones who emigrate disproportionately.  There are now over 30 full day Jewish schools, many operating with Israeli curricula and even teachers, and over 120 Sunday and supplementary schools. Most of the day schools are prep schools for aliyah. There are about 40 local newspapers, a few regional, and one national newspaper.

All towns, even with only a few hundred Jews, have a Jewish cultural association.

There is a network of welfare organizations, initiated usually by the JDC but increasingly maintained by local volunteers and even professionals. The network of Hasadim is growing rapidly and is becoming the focus of Jewish life in some places, especially for the older and middle generations. Over 100 Hasadim minister to a population that is estimated to include 400-500,000 elderly, some 200,000 of whom live alone and about 50,000 of whom are homebound, and about 9,000 are bedridden. Almost 7,000 volunteers work at the Hasadim, visiting the elderly, delivering hot meals, distributing food packages and medical equipment, and thus creating social networks which are crucial in linking Jews and creating a sense of community. The Russian Jewish Congress is taking more responsibility in this area which is a "growth" sector, as an increasing proportion of those left are elderly and poor.

In contrast to the Soviet period, there is complete freedom of religion. But there is relatively little interest, especially in Russia. The religious revival, to exaggerate greatly, does not come from within but is funded and promoted from without, largely by right-wing Orthodox, especially Lubavitch and Karlin-Stolin Hassidim, and the Progressive movement. Modern Orthodox and Conservative/Masorti are strangely absent. While there are said to be 75 Reform congregations in the FSU, most are small and they have few rabbis. A few natives of the FSU are returning after some rabbinical training in London, but in contrast to the Hasidim, "We don't have people that are prepared to go to some god-forsaken place like Siberia" (Rabbi Arnold Hirsch of the UAHC in Moment magazine, DJN, 10/20/00). There are some very large religious schools but the majority of children and parents are not observant. Those who become observant tend overwhelmingly to emigrate.

Alongside the positive developments is a very critical negative development that grows out of the positive. Demography: Russia and Ukraine constitute the third largest Jewish community in the world (USA, Israel, FSU) but it is shrinking rapidly through emigration and natural decline which is dizzyingly rapid. 1897=5 million as there were in 1939; 1970=2.4 million, 1989=1,445,000. Today I estimate that there are only 600,000 left in Russia and Ukraine (arrived at by taking 1989 census, deducting emigration to Israel and US, subtracting 30% from that to set aside non-Jews, and assume a 7-10% rate of natural decrease). In addition to the 800,000 who have emigrated since 1989, the population has been reduced by high intermarriage, low fertility and high mortality. In 1988, 48% of Jewish women and 58% of Jewish men marrying that year in entire USSR, married non-Jews. In RSFSR the proportions were in the 70s and 60s. In 1996 in Russia, Jewish mothers gave birth to 930 children, only 289 of whom had Jewish fathers.ii The ratio of Jewish deaths to Jewish births is 10:1 (in 1996, 9,953 Jewish deaths were recorded, more than 10 times the number of births to a Jewish mother)iii-and climbing. Without Jews, all the Jewish revival efforts become irrelevant, and the emigration potential declines, unless one is willing to accept a small minority of Jews who bring with them a majority of non-Jews who are part of their extended families.

 Another distressing development is divisiveness among Jews and its exploitation by President Putin. Vladimir Gusinsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, was also the owner of Media-Most, the last remaining independent media conglomerate-it owned major newspapers, a TV channel and a popular radio station. These were the only media critical of Putin and in 2000 Gusinsky was arrested on charges of fraud. Putin and the Prosecutor-General were conveniently out of town, allowing them to plead ignorance of the affair. The day before Gusinsky's arrest Putin received in the Kremlin members of the Federation of Jewish Communities, a purely Chabad-Lubavitch organization, and the next day, as Gusinsky was arrested, the Federation announced that it had elected Berl Lazar, the chief Chabad emissary in Russia, to the post of Chief Rabbi. However, Adolf Shaevich was already Chief Rabbi of Russia and Pinchas Goldschmidt Chief Rabbi of Moscow. But they, along with Zinovy Kogan, head of the Reform movement, and many secular leaders, were on the governing board of the Russian Jewish Congress, presided over by Gusinsky. In short, Putin was using a willing Chabad to show that though he was after Gusinsky, he was not antisemitic, and he had his own "court Jews." Putin delivered a speech at the opening of a seven-story, 50 room Chabad community center said to cost ten million dollars, most of it contributed by Chabad supporter and diamond merchant Levi Levayev, a Bukharan Jew. The grateful hasidim gave Putin a shofar. In October, armed police spent ten hours searching Moscow's choral synagogue, presided over by Rabbis Shaevich and Goldschmidt, claiming they were looking for Gusinsky's financial records. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Gusinsky who fled abroad. When American President George W. Bush visited Russia in May 2002, he "compressed a scheduled half-hour of Kremlin sight-seeing into a seven-minute blur," but extended a 20 minute tour of St. Petersburg's Choral Synagogue, presided over by a Chabad rabbi, by more than half an hour. Earlier, before Pesah, Putin had spent an hour and a half with Lubavitch rabbis from 15 Russian cities when he thanked them "for their energetic participation in the process of integrating Russia into the international economic space. He particularly singled out Berel Lazar's recent appeal to the US president to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment." So there is a marriage of convenience here but it is highly doubtful whether the weakening of the Russian Jewish Congress and other non-Chabad organizations will benefit Russian Jewry as a whole.

How Russian and Ukrainian Jews See their Jewishness

 Having surveyed the demographic, political and institutional situations, let us go to the grass roots level and see what Russian and Ukrainian Jews think of their Jewishness. Fortunately, I and two colleagues in Moscow, Dr. Valery Chervyakov and Professor Vladimir Shapiro, were able to conduct a survey of 3,300 Jews in three Russian and five Ukrainian cities in 1992/93,iv followed by a survey of the same number of people, but not the same people, in 1997/98 in the same cities-Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg; Kiev, Kharkiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Odessa.  What do they think being Jewish means? This is very important to know because it will directly affect how they think and behave as Jews and how they interact with the rest of the Jewish world.

The dominant conception of Jewishness held by people in Russia and Ukraine who consider themselves Jews or were registered as such by the Soviet authorities is that it is, in Soviet terms, a nationality. It is secular and ethnic, having little to do with Judaism, and is based on biological descent and an ineffable feeling of belonging. Jewishness is not based on language, territory, customs, or behaviors. For most Russian and Ukrainian Jews, sentiment and biology have largely replaced faith, Jewish law and lore and Jewish customs as the foundations of their Jewish self-conceptions.

Table 1: "What is the Most Important Thing Required of a Person in Order to be Considered a Genuine Jew?" (percentages)

                                                        Russia '92 Russia '97 Ukraine '92 Ukraine '97

Be proud of one's nationality          33.3         22.9              29.4              31.4
Defend Jewish honor and dignity   27.1         17.3              21.4              19.7
Not hide one's Jewishness             0.5           20.8              0.7                13.6
Remember the Holocaust               7.3           15.1              15.5              21.5
Know Jewish history                      5.0           2.8                3.0                2.1
Marry a Jew                                    1.8            1.1                1.1                0.8
Know Jewish traditions                 3.2            1.4                0.2                1.4
Help other Jews                              7.1            4.3               6.6                6.4
Feel a tie to Israel                           4.2            4.3               5.7               2.8
Believe in God                                 2.7            4.2               3.9               5.4
Know the basics of Judaism          1.0            0.7               0.2                0.3
Circumcise one's son                     0.2            0.1                0.2              0.1
Observe kashrut                             0.0             0.0                0.0              0.1
Observe the Sabbath                     0.0             0.3                0.3               0.4
Attend synagogue                         0.0              0.1                0.2               0.1
Know a Jewish language              2.2              1.2                1.6               0.4
Share Zionist ideals                      0.2              0.2               0.3                0.2
Give children Jewish education   1.2               0.8              2.0                1.3
Don't know, no answer                 3.1               2.4               0.7                0.4

Let us look more closely at the components of Jewishness as understood in Russia and Ukraine.

It is secular. Judaism has little to do with it, though there is uncertainty as to whether one can practice another religion and still be a Jew. Few of our respondents claim to know much about Judaism, and a quarter to a third say they know nothing at all about it. This is not surprising, given the status of Judaism under the Soviets, but what may be significant is that there is no increase from 1992/93 to 1997/98 in the proportion claiming to know about the basics of Judaism, despite the activity of religious organizations during that time. This does not mean that they are without faith. But they are without religion. In other words, substantial proportions believe in God (check how belief relates to age of respondent as well as gender), but even those who believe do not draw a connection to behavior or even beliefs prescribed by Judaism. A young Ukrainian Jew explains: "Believing is something spiritual, something completely not understandable?It doesn't obligate you to anything?but religiosity is simply a religious person?who is obligated to carry out certain things."v

Even those who believe in God do not draw a connection to behavior or even beliefs prescribed by Judaism. The table below shows the answers to our straightforward question.

Table 2: "Do You Believe in God?" (in percent)
 

                                                    Russia '92    Russia '97    Ukraine '92    Ukraine '97
Yes, I believe in God                18.3                22.8               24.2                31.0
I am inclined to such belief       23.9                25.3               29.7                24.4
I am not inclined to such belief   19.1             17.2               18.3                 17.1
I do not believe in God               31.1               28.3               23.2                22.1
Don't know, no answer              6.4                 7.6                4.8                  5.5

In Russia nearly half and in Ukraine slightly more than half the respondents either believe in God are inclined to such belief. Fewer than a third in Russia and fewer than a quarter in Ukraine definitely do not believe in God. Both among the general population of Russia (and some areas of Ukraine) as well as among Jews, it is the oldest and youngest who are most inclined to theistic belief.

 Belief in God does not necessarily imply practice of Judaism. We asked which religion people preferred and the results are summarized in the table below.

Table 3: "Which Religious Doctrine Do You Find Most Attractive?

                 Russia '92    Russia '97    Ukraine '93    Ukraine '97

None            36.3             44.1                38.5                36.6
Christianity  13.2             13.7                10.7                15.5
Islam               0               0                       0.1                  0.1
Judaism        33.2            26.7                37.6                32.4
Other              4.4              5.4                  0.0                  2.9
Don't know/No answ.13.0    10.2             9.6                12.6
 

So about a third as many Jewish respondents find Christianity most attractive as find Judaism so. Of course, the modal response in each year and country is that none of the religious is attractive.

 Second, Jewishness is an ethnic matter (cf. Hungarian Jews). Russian and Ukrainian Jews accept without question the Soviet conception of Jews as a nationality. However, they are uncertain about the Zionist conception of Jews as a nation. (Stalin and Lenin were certain that Jews are not a nation). Thus, they have a narrow, parochial conception of Jewish nationality. They feel much closer to Russian non-Jews in their own city than to Georgian or Mountain Jews. There is considerable uncertainty as to whether even Belorussian and Ukrainian Jews, from whence most Russian Jews derive, are part of the same group. Jews in Ukraine have a more powerful sense of Jewish kinship and affinity than Jews in Russia.

 Third, Jewishness is biological. It is an inherited trait, and for most it is sufficient to inherit it from one parent, and it does not matter which one (cf. halacha). Conversion to Judaism is not necessarily entry into the Jewish collectivity, contrary to Jewish norms where conversion confers membership both in the religion and the people ("amaich ami ve-elohayich elohay," says Ruth). This makes sense since if Judaism is not an essential ingredient of Jewishness, why should acquisition of the former confer the latter? One respondent defines ethnicity so independently of religion, that for her practicing Judaism does not make one a Jew (contrary to Jewish tradition which admits any practitioner of Judaism to the Jewish people).vi "I can be a French person and practice Judaism, but that does not make me a Jew," she maintains.

Fourth, Jewishness is based on feeling. A woman in Kiev, in her eighties, says she is not particularly proud to be Jewish and years ago might have preferred to be registered in her passport as something else, observes no Jewish holidays and is not at all active in Jewish public activities. But she says, "There must be something hidden deep inside which is very hard to characterize. For example, when I hear Jewish songs, they touch something deep inside of me, even though I grew up in a Russian environment. We didn't observe any special traditions or anything. And even so something touches me." As many respondents say, "to feel yourself part of the Jewish people [narod]" or "to feel an inner kinship with Jews, to feel we're one family" is the basis of Jewishness. Even starker is the statement by an elderly lady in Ukraine: "Kto Evrei, to znaet chto on Evrei, i vsyo."

 In many western countries, Jewishness is expressed publicly, and by affiliation with organizations and institutions and by philanthropy. In the FSU, by contrast, "public declarations of Jewishness are not made?.Jewish holidays are celebrated within the confines of one's home, in private, with family?." vii Organizational affiliation, Jewish philanthropy and the public observance of Jewish rites and holidays were impossible in Soviet circumstances. So to be a good Jew one need not march in a parade, attend a rally, go to synagogue, participate in a festive meal, have a Jewish name, hang a mezuzah on one's door or wear a kippah, "chai" or "Magen David." To sum it up, a St. Petersburg respondent says pithily: "One should not demonstrate one's Jewishness. What for? Just feel that you are a Jew. But to show it off is unnecessary."

 For some, Jewishness means possessing certain traits-though they are not essential components of Jewishness. Urbanity, education, a penchant for intellectuality, "decency," tight knit families are among these. An oft-repeated theme is that Jews have been socialized to study and work harder so that they can overcome the barriers placed in their paths. Another is that Jewish families are tighter knit, more caring, and that women are better treated in them. A Kievan feels that "Jewish mothers are more caring. They care more about their children, they watch over them more carefully?.Some people say that Jewish husbands are more devoted, more caring, more sympathetic, but I think that's all in the past. Nowadays everyone is the same-that's been my experience."

 An important way that post-Soviet notions of Jewishness differ from Jewishness elsewhere is willingness to cross two major boundary lines long essential to the definition of Jewishness and which still hold for Israeli and diaspora Jews. These are practicing a faith other than Judaism and marrying non-Jews. Today there is considerable uncertainty among Jews in the FSU about whether one can be Jewish and yet a believing Christian. In Russia and Ukraine, in both years of the survey, only 30-39 per cent are prepared to condemn Jews who "convert to Christianity." Sixty per cent say they would neither condone nor condemn Jews who become Christians. As one St. Petersburg member of Betar, nominally a Zionist organization, put it in another context, "A Jew who practices a religion other than Judaism is not a bad Jew-it's his choice?If you want to believe in Jesus Christ, believe, please, who forbids you to do so?" Another view is expressed by Zhanna who says: "A Jew who is an atheist-this is normal. But to convert to another religion-this is betrayal of your people."

Today the second taboo, that of intermarriage, is weakening in most diaspora countries. As we have seen, intermarriage rates in Russia are high and getting higher. Among our respondents in the FSU only 37-43 per cent agreed in 1997 that a Jew should choose a spouse of the same nationality, a decline from 1992.viii Even a third of those advocating marriage only to Jews claim they would not be upset were their children to marry non-Jews. Thus, the historic boundary setting Jews off from others is rapidly blurring. Rare is the person who says, as a 23 year old from Chernivtsi did, that Jews should marry other Jews in order to preserve Jewish culture through the generations. A woman of exactly his age and from the same city disagrees. Love, she says, "is a great feeling and it doesn't check one's passport before it comes." Besides, she argues, mixed marriages produce genetically stronger children. Only some elderly people, especially in Chernivtsi, unambiguously condemn intermarriage as leading to assimilation or because, as a 79 year old woman put it, God did not mean for Jews to mix with other nations, just as "he didn't mean for, say, ducks to mix with cranes?God wanted each species to preserve itself."  But even in the oldest cohort, those over 60, only 57-58 percent in 1992 and only 42-49 percent in 1997 believe that Jews should marry other Jews.ix One older woman observes, "If you love someone you cannot start thinking about the fate of the Jewish people."

Finally, post-Soviet Jews would not easily subscribe to the slogan of the American United Jewish Appeal of a few years ago, "We are one." As we have seen, Russian and Ukrainian Jews feel quite distant from Georgian and Mountain Jews and feel closer to Russian non-Jews in their home towns than they do to Jews in Belarus. Russian Jews feel closer to local Russians than to Ukrainian Jews, though Ukrainian Jews feel closer to Russian Jews than to either Russians or Ukrainians living where they do. FSU Jews do have a disproportionate number of Jewish friends but they do not extrapolate their preference for Jewish friends to a sense of kinship with Jews the world over. Fewer than half our interviewees in Russia and Ukraine agree with the statement, "Jews all over the world constitute a single people." Anna from Kiev, born in 1922, does not think even FSU Jews constitute a single people. "Georgian Jews are more Georgians, Jews from Bukhara are more Uzbeks, it's difficult to tell them apart." Particularly telling is the remark by a man from Kiev: Are Jews a single people? "Yes! I don't know about Moroccan Jews, but we are one people with the American Jews."

 Conclusion

 The Jewish identity of Russian and Ukrainian Jews is stronger than many would suppose but it is problematic in several ways. First, it may be uniquely the product of a Soviet environment that no longer exists. Soviet circumstances were unique, not replicated even in allied socialist countries where nationality was not registered in one's identity document and, in some countries, like Hungary, Jewishness was defined as a religious, rather than ethnic, category. In the USSR, state-imposed identity and governmental antisemitism combined with grass roots antisemitism to maintain boundaries between Jews and others long after Jewish content had largely disappeared from Jewish ethnicity. Russia and Ukraine no longer impose official ethnic identity and none of the successor states to the USSR pursues an antisemitic policy. Popular antisemitism, which may wax and wane, may be the last barrier to assimilation. So some of the ingredients of Soviet Jewish identity have been changed, though, of course, descent and feelings of kinship remain.

Second, the conceptions of being Jewish held by the great majority of Russian and Ukrainian Jews are so different from those prevailing in the most of the rest of the diaspora and in Israel that sensitive questions of mutual recognition inevitably arise. The criteria for admission to the Jewish club that are set in the Jewish world, though by no means uniform, are not shared by a significant portion of post-Soviet Jewry.

Third, and most generally, the challenge of developing a viable Jewish identity in Russia and Ukraine is formidable because it involves constructing a secular Jewish identity. Secular Jews have long struggled with the problem of maintaining ethnicity divorced from religion and its symbols. Some secular Jews substituted ethics for religion, others the Yiddish language and culture, and still others a modern Jewish state. All found themselves reverting to symbolism emanating from religious sources, though they tried to infuse the symbols with new emphases. A Hungarian Jew explains the dilemma this way: "We want to belong without taking on the belief. We do not want to practice religion itself but we want to belong?.A Catholic religious person goes to church, if he is not religious he doesn't belong there?.He does not have any problems with that?.[In our case] it is incredibly difficult, we are Negroes without the color."x Almost from the establishment of the State of Israel there have been ongoing discussions there about "toda'a Yehudit" (Jewish consciousness) and the Jewish identity of the non-religious population. Israeli educators continue to wrestle with the problem of how to convey Jewish history, literatures, values and traditions to non-religious students.

Secular Jewish identity in the Soviet Union was powerful because it was maintained by a combination of official designation, antisemitism-whether state-generated or grass roots-and a feeling of apartness, especially after the 1930s. Today, as we have seen, some of these elements of identity are gone. Is popular antisemitism, which waxes and wanes, the last basis of Jewish identity? Aside from its being a completely negative cause of such identity, is it sufficient to maintain it, or can one now escape since the boundaries of ethnicity have become permeable and blurred as a result of intermarriage? What FSU Jews were left with in 1991 was what I call a "thin culture," a Jewishness based on feeling, memory, shared experiences-mostly negative-but without much of the "thick culture" of language, religion, customs, foods, dress, music and ethnic neighborhoods. Is "thin culture" or "symbolic ethnicity" transferable across generations? How far can something which is already thin be stretched across generations before it breaks entirely? In other words, can Jewishness survive without Judaism or a secular culture that is based on something more than memory and an inward, ineffable  feeling? This is not an academic question, though it has academic interest, but the crucial issue for FSU Jewry-and for many other Jews around the world.