Odessa, Ukraine – One of the first things I noticed about Irina Zborovskaya was the back of her cell phone protector.
It looks like a piece of a matzo.
The phone belonging to the head of the local office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee tells us something important about life in Ukraine’s third-largest city: Odessa’s Jews are not afraid to be Jewish.
I saw further evidence of this at the city’s main synagogue the next day. It was Shabbat. A trio of young guys stood outside after services yukking it up in their skullcaps and prayer shawls.
“You can freely be a Jew in Odessa,” said Pavel Kozlenko, director of Odessa’s Holocaust museum. “I am open and I tell everyone I am a Jew.”
The context is this: Odessa, like Thessaloniki, Greece, which I had visited the week before, and Lviv, Ukraine, where I spent several months in 2012, was for centuries a Jewish city. Early in the 20th century, almost half the population of Odessa was Jewish. Today, after a century of Holocaust, Soviet persecution, and now, Ukraine’s economic and political instability, Jews comprise 3 percent of the city’s population.
But in a city of more than a million people, that’s more than 35,000 souls. And in this part of the world, that has to be counted as a success story. Almost all of Lviv’s Jews died or were murdered at a work camp. Almost all of Thessaloniki’s Jews perished at Auschwitz. The Jewish communities in those cities today are tiny – no more than a couple thousand.
The difference in Odessa was that before the Romanians arrived to do the Nazis’ dirty work, many of the city’s Jews were permitted to evacuate to “the Stans” – Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
It was hard, just as it’s hard for today’s burgeoning refugee population to adjust to life in foreign cultures, but it was a way to survive. After the war, some of the Jews stayed in their new homes. Some emigrated to Israel, the United States and elsewhere. But some wanted to return to the city they loved and that had been home to their families for generations.
That wasn’t easy either. The director of Odessa’s Jewish museum, Mikhail Rashkovetsky, told me that when his father came home from serving in the Red Army, he found his parents sitting on the steps of their old apartment. Another family had moved in and refused to leave. Rashkovetsky’s grandparents were essentially camping in the courtyard of their building.
His father, who had been a war hero, marched over to the housing office, slammed his gun down on the desk and insisted that his parents be allowed to move back into their apartment. That did the trick, sort of: They were allowed to move back in, but they had to share the cramped quarters with the family that had displaced them – an awkward situation surely.
Other returnees simply had to find lodging elsewhere, usually crammed in with several other families. And though the Nazis had been vanquished, they still had the Soviets to contend with. Several of the Odessans I spoke to told me of their and their parents’ career paths being blocked by quotas. In some cases, no more than 3 percent of the students at a university could be Jews.
The obvious question for these people was why stay? Why not follow their fellow Odessans to Israel, or to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, where the concentration of emigrants is so great that the neighborhood has become known as Little Odessa?
Nusia Terk, 28, who showed me around Odessa’s Jewish museum, answered me with striking vehemence.
“It’s not easy to be Jewish anywhere,” she said. “There is no place to be Jewish in this world. We always have our luggage packed. But this is our city. This is our Odessa.”
Jenny Spektor, a year older than Terk, takes great pride in the revival of Jewish life in Odessa. Like many of Odessa’s younger Jews, she has made a conscious effort to reconnect with her Jewishness now that Soviet restrictions on religious freedom are no more.
“My mom learned about Jewish holidays not from her mom, but from me,” she said. “And I want my kids to live the life lived by my grandparents.”
But that life probably will not be in Odessa. Spektor is betrothed to a Ukrainian Jew who has gotten work in Israel.
Anatoliy Keselman, who runs a welfare organization for needy Jews in the Odessa region, is a sixth-generation Odessan. But his parents live in Israel and when he retires, he figures he’ll go there as well.
Still, he’s cautiously optimistic.
“The Jewish community will develop in Odessa,” he said. “The renascence will continue – we hope.”
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