From Soviet to Spiritual

The setting was a barbeque on a cool evening in early June on an outdoor patio near the heart of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the center of New York's large Russian-Jewish community.

The young, largely Russian-speaking crowd enjoyed succulent skewers of shashlik (shish kabob), quaffed bottles of Baltika beer, an ale-like beverage produced in Russia that has a considerably higher alcohol content than American brands, and smoked countless cigarettes. As almost invariably happens at Russian gatherings, someone took out a guitar, and there was a group singing of Russian songs; ranging from the latest rock offerings from Moscow to beloved classics from 1970's-era singer-songwriter Vladimir Visotsky.

Overall, the scene appeared as secular a get-together as one could imagine--except that, on closer examination, many of the male attendees wore yarmulkes and the guy on the guitar turned out to be a bearded Orthodox rabbi. The barbeque itself turned out to be a social gathering sponsored by the Sha'arei Emunah Center for Jewish Life, an "outreach" organization founded five years ago by a group of Russian-born rabbis to give Russian-speaking college students and young professionals opportunities to explore Judaism.

Just over a year ago,

merged with the Jewish Center of Brighton Beach (JCBB), a sprawling 77-year-old Orthodox synagogue that had dwindled as its mainly elderly American-Jewish membership died off or moved to retirement communities in Florida. Yet thanks to the merger between the two institutions, the survival of JCBB has been assured, and Sha'arei Emunah now has a permanent space-one large enough to accommodate its growth for many years to come.

How JCBB-Shaarei Emunah fares as a predominantly Russian-Jewish synagogue may have important ramifications, not only for the Russian-speaking Jews, but for the larger American-Jewish community as well. Russian Jews began emigrating to the United States in significant numbers during the late 1970's and sent a huge wave of emigrants to our shores after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990's.

By conservative estimates, Jews who have arrived from the Former Soviet Union during the past 35 years today compose at least 12 percent of the total American Jewish community, including 20-25 percent of the Jewish population of New York City. If American Jewry, which for years has been beset by an intermarriage rate of about 50 percent, is to hold its own demographically in the years ahead, it clearly needs to find ways to bring larger numbers of Russian-speaking Jews into more active involvement in community life.

Yet despite a strongly held sense of Jewish identity and passionate identification with the cause of Israel, the "Russians," as they are almost universally called by American Jews, have so far largely shunned affiliation with synagogues in America. Rabbi Mordecai Tokarsky, the spiritual leader of JCBB--Shaarei Tefila, believes that only synagogues and outreach programs headed by Russian-Jewish rabbis and educators, as opposed to American-born ones-can change that equation. "A lot of Russian Jews who want to connect with Judaism feel ostracized from the larger Jewish community," said Tokarsky, an engaging 35-year-old who emigrated with his family from Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, at the age of 11.

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