IRVINE : Walk Raises Funds for Soviet Jews

When Moscow-born Boris Gurevich takes a shower, he still remembers that in the Soviet Union, there was no hot water.

But it has been easier to adjust to having hot water, says the former refusenik who emigrated to the United States in 1980, than to having the freedom to live a Jewish life style.

Like many Soviet Jews participating Sunday in a walkathon to raise money for resettling incoming Jewish people from the Soviet Union, Gurevich says that after decades of religious and cultural oppression in his homeland, he finds the sudden freedoms in America overwhelming.

“All my life there, I wasn’t even allowed to go to synagogue,” said Gurevich, 47, while walking the 10K Route around the Mason Park area in Irvine. An environmental manager and resident of Turtle Rock, Gurevich considers himself a Reform Jew. “All of the sudden I could be anything I wanted.”

More than 500 people helped raise Orange County’s share of funds for the Passage to Freedom Special Campaign for Soviet Jewry--a national project hoping to raise $75 million by the end of the year for resettlement of Soviet Jews. Organizers estimate that Sunday’s “Walk for Freedom” raised $35,000 of the county’s expected total contribution of $175,000 to the fund by the year’s end.

Such fund-raisers have become necessary since the United States changed the immigration status of incoming Soviet Jews at the beginning of last month, said Liz Parker, a spokeswoman for the American Jewish Committee in Orange County. In an attempt to curb the rising tide of immigrants resulting from looser Soviet travel policies, the United States no longer gives Soviet Jews automatic political refugee status.

Although some Soviet Jews are still granted political refugee status, the vast majority of the 70,000 expected to emigrate within the next year will be required to have a sponsoring family or organization to provide transportation and a place to live and work upon arrival in the United States, Parker said.

So far this year, about 60 Soviet Jews have immigrated to the county, where an estimated 100,000 Jews currently live, said Lew Janowsky, vice president of the AJC in Orange County. About 60 more Soviet Jews are expected to settle in the county within the next month.

It appeared that most people on the walk Sunday find the new U.S. immigration policy fair. But one woman who fled the Soviet Union with her family as a child nearly 15 years ago said the change makes an already difficult situation even more trying--and events such as the walkathon more important.

“I know that when we got here there were people here to help us, and if they didn’t (help), I don’t know what we would have done,” said Veronika Galperin, 22, originally from the Odessa region and now a resident of Stanton. “Now that other people are in that situation, I feel this is the least I can do to help.”

Igor Rabin, 35, of Costa Mesa, agreed that he is one of the fortunate ones.

“I didn’t have it as difficult as many of my friends” said Rabin, a computer programmer, who left Kiev about a year ago. But he says the fear he felt when he would try to attend the one small synagogue in Kiev still haunts him.

“It’s very difficult to change the mind after 35 years,” Rabin said.