For Soviet Jews, What Is Jewishness? : Israel: As the emigres try to adjust to a bewildering new land, their faith is called into question.

Ina Sheincvit, a new immigrant from the Soviet Union, was approached by a man wearing black who offered her work, an apartment and an invitation to Passover dinner.

The offers were all welcome, although the man’s insistence on vaguely familiar religious customs--he suggested that Sheincvit wear long sleeves and cover her hair--were not to her liking.

“He reminded me of my grandfather. Always saying, ‘May God be blessed’ and things like that,” said Sheincvit, 16, who came to Israel three months ago from Baku in the Soviet Union’s turbulent south. “But I am not very religious and don’t believe in those practices.”

As thousands of new Soviet immigrants arrive in Israel to start a new life--7,300 in March alone--they are coming face-to-face with a wealth of new sensations. Freedom, well-stocked stores, wide-open politics. They are also confronting--and sometimes being asked to confront--the meaning of being Jewish.

Some may ponder the question tonight when the immigrants along with Jews worldwide will begin celebrating Passover, eating holiday meals and taking part in readings that center on the Jewish escape to freedom from slavery in Egypt. Thousands of Soviet newcomers will spend the first evening of Passover at the homes of volunteer families.

Jewishness is a source of much debate in Israel, which at once defines itself as a Jewish state but which is wrestling with the question of what precisely makes one a Jew.

Enter the Soviets, many of whom have had little contact with Jewish education and life. Sometimes their greatest sense of identification came from being called Jewish by someone else.

“Well, in the Soviet Union, everybody has a nationality--it is on your identification card--and mine is Jewish,” said Nicolai Ulidsky, who is also from Baku but had lived near Moscow for the past five years.

Added Suleiman Jabsarov, 42, from Samerkand: “In my town, there was a demonstration of Muslims. They came around and told all foreigners to leave. That meant Russians, Tatars and Jews. They came to me because I am a Jew. That’s why I am here.”

Under religious law, a Jew is anyone whose mother is Jewish. That is usually qualification enough, but not always.

There has been a running debate in newspapers over whether the newcomers are truly Jewish, whether there are intermarried families that are basically non-Jewish and whether many Soviets have been too far away from Judaism for too long. Underlying the debate is a rivalry between the majority secular population and the growing religious minority that is campaigning for strict adherence to religious law in everyday life.

At one point, a group of rabbis suggested thorough investigations of the Soviets to ensure they were Jewish under religious rules.

In criticizing the idea, physicist Harry J. Lipkin wrote in the Jerusalem Post: “We cannot allow Jews to be trapped in the Soviet Union because some Orthodox inquisition in Israel has checked them and decided they are not Jewish enough to be saved.”

In answer to Lipkin’s liberalism, a Haifa reader wrote: “The point is that prior testing . . . would be required of most professionals from most countries without it being called harassment or an inquisition. Why should it be any less legitimate to demand proper qualifications to inherit a well-defined inheritance--that of the Jewish people?”

The newcomers sometimes try shoring up their Jewishness on their own. Dozens of male immigrants have requested circumcisions, and at some hospitals, the procedures are being performed almost assembly-line fashion by ritual surgeons called mohels.

Others are seeking out rabbis and religious groups to firm up their knowledge of Judaism. “Maybe I will become religious here,” mused Ulidsky. “After all, in the Soviet Union it was not easy to openly be Jewish.”

Some religious institutions are opening Russian language departments to tend to the spiritual needs of the newcomers.

“It is not so simple to say what kind of Jews the Soviets will be,” said Joseph Begun, a Jewish activist who was persecuted for many years in the Soviet Union, emigrated two years ago and is now associated with the Shalom Hartman Institute, a school that promotes religious pluralism. “For me, they are all Jews. For 70 years, the Soviet Union spoiled Jewish tradition. You cannot now expect perfect Jews.”

Begun recalls some confusion of his own after he emigrated. “I was astonished because I thought that as a Jewish state, Israel would be monolithic. I was wrong. There are secular streams, religious, anti-religious. Lots of theories for determining who is a Jew.”

Most Soviet Jews are likely to be less than rigorously religious and to react adversely to efforts to define Judaism strictly, Begun predicted. “They will reject a new totalitarianism of religion,” he said.