Soviet Jewish Emigres Learn Anew About Holiday

Lighting her first Hanukkah candle, newly arrived Soviet immigrant Yevgenya Vinaver was touched with feelings she found difficult to describe.

“But it touches the heart,” she said. “It’s a warm thing, spiritually, I mean.”

“We knew about this holiday in Leningrad,” added her husband, Michael, “but there was a feeling of being a little island in a sea of hostility. Here, we feel that we’re part of the mainland.”

The newcomers, who first applied to leave eight years ago, are part of a recent surge in Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, which had dropped to less than a thousand a year in the mid-1980s.

In a move linked by many to the recent thaw in relations with the United States, the Soviet Union allowed 892 Jews to emigrate last month alone, the highest monthly figure in six years. So far this year, 7,143 Jews have been permitted to leave the country, according to the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration in Geneva.

Among them were the Vinavers. Their faces bathed with the light of eight tiny candles, they gathered with 40 other recent immigrants Monday night in West Hollywood for a coaching session on how to celebrate a holiday that is as familiar to most American Jews as Christmas is to the population at large.

But for many of the new arrivals, Hanukkah meant no more than the dim memory of a grandfather who slipped them some coins to mark the holiday in the distant days before World War II.

Others knew even less.

“I first heard of Hanukkah just today,” said Ella Ivshin, 28, newly arrived from Gomel, a town in the western part of the Soviet Union.

A morning lesson and the evening practice session on the day before Hanukkah were part of an effort by Chabad, an organization of Orthodox Jews, to acquaint immigrants from the atheist Soviet Union with the rudiments of their faith and Jewish history.

“In the Soviet Union, information about Judaism was absolutely zero,” said Ivshin, an economist. “There was no synagogue in our town, but we went to the synagogue when we went to Moscow. We didn’t know why, but it attracted us. It was our own, and a person should know his roots, who and what he is.”

Straining to recall the brief lesson from earlier that day, she spoke of the miracle story of a one-day supply of holy oil that lasted for eight days, and a victory of ancient Jews over invaders who wanted to squelch their faith.

“These people are not guilty that they do not know these things,” said Rabbi Naftoli Estulin, director of the Chabad Russian Synagogue. “Soviet Jews have lived for more than 60 years with no way to know.”

Hanukkah, which means “dedication” in Hebrew, is also known as “the Feast of Lights.” It marks an insurrection of Palestinian Jews in the year 168 B.C. against the rule of Antiochus IV, one of the heirs of Alexander the Great.

According to tradition, Roman historians and an account in the apocryphal first and second books of Maccabees, the Jewish rebels fought three years of guerrilla warfare and ended by ousting the Greeks from the capital city of Jerusalem, where the invaders had profaned the Jewish temple.

Finding enough oil to light the ritual lamps for just one day, Jewish leader Judah Maccabee rededicated the temple, lit the lamps and was stunned to observe that the oil burned for eight days.

Recalling a Triumph

Jews remember the triumph to this day by lighting a menorah, or candelabrum, which holds eight candles and a ninth, the so-called shamash, or servant, which is used to light the others.

“We celebrated our freedom at the holiday of Passover,” said Larissa Moshensky, 29, formerly of Kiev, who left the Soviet Union in the spring. “Now we’ll be able to celebrate this holiday like normal Jews in a normal country.”

Like many of the emigres, she and her husband said they were happy to be in America but daunted at the difficulties of adjusting to a new way of life.

“We need a real perestroika of our entire lives,” said Anatoly Moshensky, 37, with a rueful laugh, using the popular new term for “reconstruction.”

One Each Night

At the Monday night session, Rabbi Berl Zaltsman explained that one candle should be lit tonight, in addition to the shamash, and that one more candle should be lit every night until, by the end of the eight-day holiday, all eight candles would be lit.

Tradition calls for the candles to be added from right to left and lit from left to right.

Then he led the group in reciting the three blessings required and in singing Maoz Tzur (Rock of Ages), a Hanukkah hymn.

“Sing it loud, so Gorbachev can hear you,” urged Chabad Rabbi Yossi Reichik.