Impressions from trip to Kiev and Kharkov, Ukraine  

By Rachel Cooper
  Special to The Jewish State
 I celebrated Passover this year in a part of the world that many of our families came from. For 11 days, I spent my Passover holiday becoming acquainted with the Jewish communities of Kiev and Kharkov, Ukraine.

Before my trip, I was apprehensive about celebrating Passover in the former Soviet Union, which is often notorious for its dismissal of its Jewish population. I don't speak Russian, I enjoy maintaining Jewish traditions on holidays, and I didn't really know anything about the Ukrainian people. For three months, I, along with eight other fellows met weekly to discuss what we would be doing in Ukraine, the history of the Jewish people in the Soviet Union, political and economic factors in the region, as well as the importance and meaning of the holiday of Passover. The knowledge I gained from those sessions was certainly valuable, and was helpful when I arrived in Ukraine; however nothing could have prepared me for what I was going to experience.

My week in Ukraine opened my eyes to a part of the Jewish world that I thought had died off. I was able to realize aspects of my own Jewish identity by learning about my Ukrainian friends.

My Ukrainian friends were passionate. They may not have kept kosher or followed all of the Passover traditions, but they possessed a strong desire to be Jewish and to maintain a thriving Jewish community. I had had it so easy growing up in New Jersey. I was Jewish because my family was Jewish. My friends were Jewish. I was never treated as a second-class citizen for conveying my Judaism. I took my identity for granted. In Ukraine, one is either Jewish or Ukrainian; you can't be both. Despite every imposition on religious freedom, the Ukrainian community has thrived. My friends were proud of being Jewish. Just a few years ago, the Jewish world was ready to give up on the former Soviet Union and allow Judaism to dwindle down to nothing in the region, yet it has persevered.

When we disembarked from the airplane in Kiev, we were met with cold faces. I remembered learning that people do not smile like Americans do in Ukraine. People don't walk down the streets singing -- and neither should we. I handed my passport form to the desk before getting to my luggage. I attempted friendliness with the woman behind the desk stamping my passport, and have never received a colder response in my life. I was glared at until my Passport finally said 'Ukraine' on it. Then, the baggage claim. After all the bags had come through, the man unloading the plane stepped into the airport through the opening for the suitcases. While we waited for our bags, we watched the Ukrainian version of MTV and encountered a music video for a song we discovered half way through was in English, called "Delicate." This soon became the theme song for our group.

After arriving at our hotel, we met an Israeli man who was a shaliach at an Orthodox Synagogue, and walked with him to Shabbat services. While sitting on the women's balcony, an old woman approached me. She asked if we spoke Russian or English, to which I responded English. She then asked if we were Israeli. I said we had come from Washington. She told us about her life, how she had lived in New Jersey, in Bridgewater. I told her I lived near there, in Highland Park, and she said she felt like we were her family.

She told us that her heart was torn. Whenever she was in Kiev, she missed America, but when she was in America, she longed for Kiev. At that point I still did not understand why she would choose to live in Ukraine over America. After services, we had dinner in the synagogue with the congregation. As would become apparent about all Ukrainian meals, we were overloaded with cholesterol. Hard boiled eggs, cut in half, with as much mayonnaise spread on as there was egg. Cole slaw. Shredded carrots. Pieces of chicken. A slice of orange. Tap water -- which we were vehemently warned not to drink. And challah -- the most edible part of the meal. After dinner we sang the Birkat HaMazon and our shaliach gave a devar torah on the importance of this Shabbos and how it was the Shabbat HaGadol.

We were in Kiev for two days, where we toured the city, went to a few synagogues, and learned a little bit about the Jewish history there. On Saturday morning, we walked to a reform congregation for services. We got confused on the way walking over there and paused on a street corner for a few minutes to figure out where we were. While standing there, a lot of protesters against the government marched by on their way to a huge rally in Kiev. You may have heard about that in the news. It was quite the scene, and our Rabbi pretended to march with them -- she really just stood out as an obvious American. At the service, we were welcomed and made to feel a big part of it, since our group of 10 made up about half the people who showed up.

The rabbi told us about their tradition of doing a communal aliyah with the congregation reciting the words together and holding hands. This tradition came from a story from the Holocaust -- that one Synagogue was burned down and all the Jews in it died except for one. The survivor said that at the time of the attack all the members of the congregation were holding hands around the Torah sharing an aliyah. True or not, the tradition was beautiful and showed just how welcoming the community was. He also told us about the history of the congregation and how Jewish life was completely suppressed until the end of the Soviet Union. Since then, it has been flourishing and the community has become much more involved. While in Kiev, we saw where Golda Meir lived, a statue to Shalom Aleichem, and various other sites. We also went to Babiyar, which is in Kiev's city limits and where 33,000 Jews were marched during WWII and massacred within two days. And 100,000 people died there from 1941-1943. It was haunting.

Sunday night we took an overnight train to Kharkov, where we spent the remainder of the time. We got in at 6:30 in the morning and were warmly welcomed by the Hillel students. That day we had a brief tour of the center of the city and then prepared for our first of many seders. Each day after that, our days were filled with home visits to elderly and children at risk, as well as families who were very poor, warm homes - where a group of elderly people would get together to celebrate Passover, and seders which we conducted in the Kharkov Hillel house. During the home visits, we split up into groups of two Amerikanskiys and two Ukrainians so that they could translate for us since the people we visited didn't speak English. Judaism was new to a lot of these people, and learning about the traditions and religion was only made possible by organizations like Hesed, Hillel, the Orthodox Union, and Chabad.

My program allowed me to gain a glimpse into the history of Jewish life in Ukraine and the impact of major events. The elderly had so many stories to tell.

I first visited Yitzhak, a WWII veteran living alone with his yellow parrot in a small apartment in the outskirts of Kharkov. I showed him pictures of my home and family in the U.S., and then he pulled out pictures of his family, and showed off the medals he earned as a fighter against the Nazis. He spoke no English, and did not know much about Judaism, but he wanted to learn more and to speak about his experiences in the Soviet Union.

Next, I visited Sophia, an elderly woman who told me I looked like a Russian Jewess and insisted I wear her slippers around her apartment. She bubbled with energy and prodded me to eat her delicious non-kosher l'Pesach cookies that she had baked just for us. How could I refuse? I wanted to learn about her life in Ukraine and she wanted me to teach her about Passover. As I explained the significance of the parts of the seder plate and about matzah and the story of the Exodus from Egypt, she compared it to her own life.

As a younger girl, she grew up knowing she was Jewish, but too scared to practice. Matzah was forbidden in the Soviet Union. She had gone to university, but was only allowed in because she did not look Jewish. She told me that they would not have allowed me to attend. World War II was an especially scary time, as millions of Jews were murdered throughout Europe, and most of the Ukrainian Jewish population perished. She had served in the war as a nurse, and felt as though she had gone through her own exodus story, free with the end of Nazism, and emancipated as a Jew with the end of the Soviet Union. She could now have matzah on her table and could speak freely about Jewish values and history.

On another home visit, I met a family of six. As I conversed with the mother, through the translators, I learned that she had lived in Israel. I began speaking Hebrew with her. It was an incredible experience to be thousands of miles from home, and thousands of miles from Israel, and to be able to communicate with another Jew through our common heritage and because we had both spent time living in Israel. She and her husband had lived in Israel for many years, but found that it was too expensive to raise a big family there. Her mother had a home outside of Kharkov that would be free for them to live in and had more space for her kids. While many Jews in the region had escaped Eastern Europe to live in Israel, she had escaped Israel to live in Ukraine. Before my trip I would have been shocked at this, but I understood.

One of the themes of my trip was understanding Judaism in a different context and environment. Not only were the Kharkov Hillel students proud of their Judaism, they were proud to be Ukrainian. They love their country, and have no intention of leaving. And it is a beautiful country, despite my anticipations of a desolate, completely industrialized, barren land.

I thought that we would have to teach the Hillel students so many basics, but the fact is that they taught us so much. They taught us about how welcoming their community is, how important it is to their identity that they are Jewish and that they can practice freely. I realized that though we may live on opposites sides of the world, we are all Jewish, we share that bond and connection. Even if we cannot speak the same language, we could form a friendship. They had so much pride for their religion and for being Ukrainian, and I could not have understood this before. I could not understand why they would stay in Kharkov, a meager Eastern European industrial city instead of moving to America or Israel. Why did they love their country so much? And I saw why, I saw the community that they built and the connections between them, and I saw the beauty of the city, and the way they embraced each other.

Throughout this past year I have learned a lot about Jewish history, and Jewish ideas. One of the things that has impacted me the most is the realization of how miraculous it is that Judaism has survived against all odds. My visit to Ukraine was proof of this.

Rachel Cooper, 21, is a student at George Washington University, Washington D.C., majoring in Political Science with a minor in Judaic Studies. Her home is Highland Park, but she is working as an intern at Hadassah in Washington this summer. In September she enters her senior year, spending the fall semester in Prague, Czech Republic. This article was delivered as remarks at her synagogue, Congregation Beth El, Edison, on June 9, and at a fund-raising brunch on June 10 organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County. Both organizations helped fund her trip.